Weather Whys; Sports and Weather

This is Weather-wise, a question that's been batted about by baseball buffs and thrown around by football fans for as long as there have been games in the great outdoors is how can the weather affect the outcome of a game? In the first place, it doesn't hurt to have the wind behind the ball and throwing or batting into the wind can make for a shorter flight, not to mention the ball's annoying tendency to swing away in a crosswind. All that's obvious even to the casual fan, but other things can affect the ball's trajectory too. For instance, high relative humidity can actually help the ball go farther. That's because, contrary to what your intuition might tell you on a muggy day, moist air is actually less dense than dry air at the same temperature and pressure. Now, the reason a ball slows down is that it encounters aerodynamic drag, and that eventually overcomes the ball's forward flight. The amount of drag the air places on the ball is directly related to the density of the air, so that's why moist air will allow a ball to go farther.

But if the air gets moist enough to form fog, it can hinder rather than help, since fog is even harder to go through than dry air, and that's the case for just about any substance floating in or falling through the air. Drops, snowflakes, pollution particles, and even dust will hinder the flight of a ball. Now, of course, there's the human factor to consider, too. The air may contain just the right amount of moisture to maximize the ball's flight. But what if your favorite player isn't at his best in muggy weather? For reasons like that, you can never be too sure if Mother Nature will ultimately help or hinder the cause. Weatherwise is produced with the assistance of the National Weather Service Forecast Office and the National Severe Storms Laboratory, both in Norman, Oklahoma, and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, the Oklahoma Climateological Survey, and the School of Meteorology, all at the University of Oklahoma. For Weatherwise, I'm Drew Barlow.