December 7th is also exactly two weeks away from the official start of winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

But don't tell that to the folks in the US Northeast because they're already there.

A nor Easter, the first such storm of the season, arrived over the weekend.

Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire appeared to be hit the hardest.

Across those three states, more than 280,000 homes and businesses had lost electricity.

By Sunday morning, some areas in the region recorded more than a foot of snow.

It was described as heavy and wet snow and that can way down branches and make it more dangerous to drive.

Wind gusts reached up to 68 MPH, according to AccuWeather.

The forecasting company also said this storm met the definition for a bomb cyclone that's named for a process called bombo genesis.

When a weather system intensifies very quickly in a very short amount of time, so what were some of the effects of all this.

Power lines were knocked down, roads were in bad shape.

People were told to stay home, a CNN meteorologist says.

Things could have been even worse, though, if temperatures had been a few degrees colder when the storm began.

As utility crews were assessing the damage, the storm turned toward the eastern Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and his CNN's Jennifer Gray tells us the wind and snow aren't the only effects of A nor Easter.

What happens on the coast could change the look of a shoreline.

A nor Easter occurs within the most crowded coastline of the United States, the northeast, and they can occur any time of year but are most common between the months of September and April.

That's when weather conditions are prime.

For a nor Easter.

You start with a low.

It's going to travel from the southeast to the Northeast and intensify nor'easters, their strongest around New England as well as the Canadian maritime provinces.

Now we have very warm water in the Gulf of Mexico and all around the coast of Florida.

It's going toe, warn the air above it and that warm air is going to clash with very cold air coming in from the north.

Now, new research carry winds out of the Northeast at about 58 MPH.

Arm or in, keep in mind the wind direction out of the Northeast is what defines a nor Easter.

It's also going to cause beach erosion as well as coastal flooding and very, very rough ocean conditions.

Not all nor'easters have snow, but some of the most memorable ones have dumped lots of it.

12th trivia.

Which of these American ships was the only one not commissioned during World War One U.

S s Arizona USS California U.

S s Nevada or USS Oklahoma.

The U.

S s California was commissioned in 1921 5 years after the others, though they were all damaged in the World War Two attack on Pearl Harbor.

Mhm a date which will live in infamy.

Yeah, Okay.

The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan and the condition of the time.

Mm hmm.

Um, that situation is very fluid situation.

No.

Okay.

Okay.

Mhm.

Mm hmm.

2020 was historic for wildfires in California.

Never before this year did that state alone lose anywhere close to four million acres at least a Sfar.

As records go for the United States as a whole, wildfires did not set a record.

The National Interagency Fire Center says there have been two years since 1983 when America lost more than 10 million acres, toe wildfires and 2020 isn't one of them.

It's also possible that farm or land burned every year in the early 20th century.

But the agency says those figures shouldn't be compared because they're not as reliable, regardless of where the records are.

There are a number of organizations that replant areas that have been scorched.

This could be done manually by workers on the ground.

It can also be done by air using planes, helicopters and now drones, though experts say these methods are not as effective, is manually planting trees.

Still, it's cheaper, and one of the company's doing this believes it's a solution.

Over eight million acres of land in the U.

S.

Were scorched in 2020 about two million more than average.

We're losing more trees faster than nature can regenerate or humans could regenerate, So we've gotta have better tools to be able to reforest faster.

A Seattle based company called Drone Seed thinks that tool could be, as its name suggests, automated see dropping drones.

Swarms of them, to be exact.

This is something that's sci fi.

There's multiple drones operating perform a task simultaneously.

Typically, reintroducing tree growth is a slow manual process that could take up to three years.

It requires growing young trees in a nursery that tree planters plant by hand.

They're superheroes.

They're carrying £40 of one or two year old trees in these bags on their hips, and then they're using a shovel, and they burned the caloric equivalent of running two marathons every day.

But automated drones can cover a lot more ground and get the job done faster.

Grant Canary Drone Seed CEO says In groups of five, the drones can cover up to 50 acres in a day, compared to about to buy a human.

And he says the speed and automation can save landowners 30 to 50% of the reforestation costs.

Can you explain to us what goes in to the operations of one of these missions where we come in with heavy lift drone swarms, zip up and down those mountainsides, deploy sea vessels in very targeted, precise locations and make reforestation scalable.

Aerial seeding is not a new idea, but historically raw seeds air dropped with imprecision and can land in port terrain.

So Drone Seed uses advanced laser mapping to identify the best locations for their C drops, targeting healthy soil and other ideal conditions.

Those are the areas that are not gravel.

They don't have high competitive vegetation, and so the seeds themselves are going to grow better.

8 ft long drones take off on pre programmed routes carrying loads of nearly £60 but they don't drop raw seeds.

Instead, Drone Seat has developed seed vessels that include a proprietary blend of everything a seed needs to survive, like fertilizers, nutrients and natural pest deterrents.

And unlike seedlings, they don't need to be buried in the ground.

The vessel is a dry fiber, so it absorbs moisture of soaking up in expanding, so that helps it avoid drying out, which is one of the biggest causes of seed mortality.

What we've done is instead of taking three years to go, a seedling in a nursery.

We're doing it in 30 to 60 days by utilizing seeds in the seed vessel.

That's really what we see is the big difference between it.

Drone seed claims it can grow upwards of 140 trees per acre, based on trials in New Zealand.

In Washington state, they're promising results.

But from a small sample size.

This year alone in California, over four million acres were consumed by wildfires, and you can manage 50 acres in a day.

What's it gonna take for you guys to really be able to make a dent in this problem?

It's an automated process.

We can have two trucks, two trailers, six aircraft operated by a team of four do thousands of acres in a year.

We copy and paste.

That Theo Arecibo Observatory telescope in Puerto Rico was one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, I say was because this happened last week.

The radio telescope had been around since the 19 sixties, but it was not in good shape this summer.

One of the cables that supported its 900 ton platforms snapped, and then last month, another one broke and engineers say It was just a matter of time before the whole thing came tumbling down.

They had a pretty good handle on the scope of the damage.

But we'd rather observe what it was supposed to observe, rather than having a lens to see it go down the tube.

In such an aperture loss for a finder that helped finder such scientifically mounted discoveries, Middle College High School gets today's shoutout.

It's in San Pablo, California They did the one thing you can do to get a mention on our show.

They subscribed and left a comment on the most recent show at youtube dot com slash CNN.

10.

I'm Carla Zeus.

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