Weather Imagery

If you find that your BMW 650 CS/GS/Dakar tail light doesn’t work at all or flickers when riding, chances are the metal power terminals inside the bulb socket are no longer making a good connection with the metal bumps on the tail light bulb. This is a very common problem with the BMW 650 of all makes, models, and years. Fortunately, there is a very easy fix.

Due to excessive vibration, temperature changes, and replacing light bulbs, the two metal power terminal tabs inside the tail light socket deform and get pushed too far back inside the tail light chassis. This prevents the tail light bulb from making good contact with the power terminals and the smallest vibrations can cause the electric connection to break temporarily or indefinitely.

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Tornadoes don’t really hop, jump or skip. They can pull back up into the clouds and come back down sometime later, but this usually occurs over a fairly large distance. On a smaller scale, people tend to believe tornadoes can hop or jump over one house while totally destroying the one next to it. While this is true that a tornado can completely destroy one house and minimally damage another right next to it, the real reason has nothing to do with a tornado jumping or skipping. It has to do with the internal structure and varying intensity of a tornado.

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With today’s land starved metropolitan cities expanding further into their rural surroundings, a strange consequence occurs that directly affects the local weather, in particular temperatures and rainfall. No, this doesn’t have anything to do with global warming. Instead, the principal involved has to do with how much of the sun’s energy is absorbed as compared to how much is reflected on a much smaller scale.

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In February 1971, Dr. T. Theodore Fujita published a research paper entitled “Proposed Characterization of Tornadoes and Hurricanes by Area and Intensity”. In the paper, he discussed how tornadoes should be rated on a scale to better understand the damage associated with intensity and wind speed. Over the next few years and the super outbreak of 1974, Dr. Fujita’s scale for measuring tornadoes became invaluable and the F-Scale became widely adopted.

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