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Friday, April 17, 2015

BASEBALL WEATHER...its in the wind


It's only the second week of the baseball season and already radio and television announcers are bobbling what should be easy weather ground-balls. The most egregious errors are usually misstatements about the humidity and why the ball doesn't go as far.  NOT!

The difference in the distance a 375 foot homerun travels when the humidity is 20% and when it is 60% is less than a foot.  And the difference in the amount that a 90 mph curveball breaks is only a tenth of an inch. (There may be some absorption of moisture by a baseball on a particularly muggy day, but those amounts have been found to also be negligible).

The temperature (and thus the air density) has a slightly greater impact with the difference in the distance of a home run on a 50 degree day being about 16 feet less than on a 90 degree day.  The altitude above sea level and corresponding air lower density difference means a 375 foot homer at sea level would travel about 405 feet at Coors Field in Denver.

But the meteorological element with the greatest impact is the wind.  Just a 5 mph tailwind will carry that 375 foot home run to 415 feet and a 10 mph wind will translate to an epic 455 foot blast.

The bottom line is that if you want to see really long homeruns go to Denver on a hot dry day with the wind blowing out!

A more detailed treatment of the topic can be found in last year’s Jan/Feb issue of Weatherwise Magazine (http://www.weatherwise.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/2014/January-February%202014/rain-delays-full.html )

Play ball.
 
Jan Null, CCM
Golden Gate Weather Service
http://ggweather.com

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