The Most Recent Ship Report Podcast:

As our spring weather forecast evolves, a look ahead at La Nina and El Nino in the Pacific

According to UW meteorologist Cliff Mass, we have some rain coming our way this week and later in the month. It's a sign of a switch from La Nina to El Nino conditions in the Pacific. Today we'll take a look at what these two climate terms mean.

Archive Podcasts:

Cruise ship heads to Portland drydock

Mar 27, 2023

Today we’ll see a cruise ship in the river, but she’s not carrying passengers. This time this ship is headed for the shipyard. We’ll talk about what shipyards do, and why Portland’s Swan Island yard is specially equipped to handle big ships like this one.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

The odd and sometimes humorous history of the Beaufort Wind Scale

Mar 22, 2023

The Beaufort Wind Scale is that table of wind speeds which gives us assessments of wind intensity based on a scale from 0-12, according to what we see happening around us on land and sea. It was created in the early 1800s, and is still used today. It evolved from earlier, vaguer scales that weren’t defined clearly. Today we take a look at the evolution of the Beaufort Scale. Some of its iterations were really helpful to mariners, and some were just, well, charmingly silly.

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