{"id":182,"date":"2007-12-20T00:38:57","date_gmt":"2007-12-20T05:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=182"},"modified":"2007-12-20T00:39:06","modified_gmt":"2007-12-20T05:39:06","slug":"tune-into-the-snowflake-channel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=182","title":{"rendered":"Tune into the snowflake channel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/snowflakes.jpg\" title=\"Snowflakes\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/snowflakes.thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"Snowflakes\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Snowflakes can emit radio signals as they form  and a better understanding of this process could provide a new way to monitor and study snow formation in the atmosphere. That&#8217;s the ice-cool conclusion of a group o&#8217; physicists from France and Israel who have begun to tease apart some of the more subtle processes at work when snowflakes freeze.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on. In normal circumstances, the ions in water provide a convenient route through which water molecules can divest themselves of energy if they need to. But in de-ionised water, the molecules are perfectly insulated dipoles. So when they freeze into a crystal and become oriented in a specific non-random way, the only way their latent heat can be emitted is as radio signals.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s actually possible to pick up these low frequency signals of about 1000 Hz.<\/p>\n<p>A new theoretical model built by Mark Perelman and pals from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem puts all this onto a sound footing for the first time and in a way that might mean that future weather forecasts will be based on data from radio transmitters tuning into the sound that snowflakes make as they form.<\/p>\n<p>Cool huh?<\/p>\n<p>Ref: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0712.2564\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0712.2564<\/a>: Freezing of Water and Crystals Formation: Double Electric Layer, Radio Emission, Dendrites, Snowflakes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Snowflakes can emit radio signals as they form and a better understanding of this process could provide a new way to monitor and study snow formation in the atmosphere. That&#8217;s the ice-cool conclusion of a group o&#8217; physicists from France and Israel who have begun to tease apart some of the more subtle processes at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cold-n-cool","category-secrets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}