I’m not sure that I quite understand what is at the heart of the sudden resurgence of interest in clouds, but it’s good news and Gavin Pretor-Pinney is surely part of the answer. Gavin set up the Cloud Appreciation Society and wrote his great book ‘The CloudSpotter’s Guide’ – and he seems really to have caught the public’s interest. I don’t often recommend things to people but out of all the recent books on clouds (and there are a few excellent ones for the coffee table) I very much enjoyed Gavin’s, and so did my wife (who never reads anything related to the weather as a matter of principle!). We are both looking forward to his new book coming out soon (http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/collectors-handbook/).
Clouds are truly fascinating things, whether you are a student of physics or just a casual admirer. To a trained eye they can tell you a lot about what’s happening in the atmosphere and to an untrained eye there is a lot to enjoy about the aesthetics of how something as simple as water can create such beauty. Clouds have deep cultural references in our society; they have inspired paintings, poetry, and yet we somehow seem to have lost touch with them.
If you are a sailor or a pilot you probably keep a close eye on what the clouds are doing, but most of us don’t pay, much attention at all. In times gone by when many of us spent more of our working day outside we would read the clouds as a way of knowing what to expect for the day and possibly the next. But over the generations we’ve become more detached from the environment around us. However there is no excuse; so come on teachers, take those children out of the classroom for half an hour and teach them to look up and record what they see – you can even send me a note about it here at the Society and we’ll put in on our website.
Over recent days there has been a lot of news coverage about the naming of a new cloud variety – something which hasn’t happened for over 50 years – and the name being proposed is ‘Aspiratus’, which I think is quite appropriate if you look at the images of these clouds (http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/gallery/index.php?x=browse&category=52&pagenum=1).
Clouds are one of the few things that are free for all of us to enjoy. When was the last time that you spent a spare 5 minutes and just looked skyward?
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Weather and Flu
I was talking on the radio this week about relationships between weather and flu and it occurred to me with all our advances in medical sciences there is still a lot we don’t know about things that are common to us, like the flu virus.
That’s not to do down the virologists as we know a lot of technical information about the virus and that it has different strains (this swine flu appears to be from the H1 N1 strain) and how viruses generally transmit across large populations thanks to some clever epidemiological studies - that by the way use the same mathematics that model the spread of new technologies, like the iPod, across populations. However we don’t really know how viruses interact with the environment in detail.
Take the weather for example. We know flu peaks in the winter months in Europe (between December and March in the northern hemisphere to be a bit more precise), but what we don’t know is whether that is due to changes in things like temperature and the UV in sunlight directly, or simply that it’s how people respond to these changing weather conditions that help transmission. For example, people tend to congregate indoors more in the winter months, where a greater number of people are in closer proximity and often humidity is higher (which perhaps helps the virus survive).
Almost certainly humidity is a factor in virus lifetime and transmission. We can see that in the tropics the flu cycle is much extended beyond the winter months, in large part because of the humidity.
After all that technical detail, the best defence we have is to wash our hands. How often does solving a difficult problem come back to basics!
That’s not to do down the virologists as we know a lot of technical information about the virus and that it has different strains (this swine flu appears to be from the H1 N1 strain) and how viruses generally transmit across large populations thanks to some clever epidemiological studies - that by the way use the same mathematics that model the spread of new technologies, like the iPod, across populations. However we don’t really know how viruses interact with the environment in detail.
Take the weather for example. We know flu peaks in the winter months in Europe (between December and March in the northern hemisphere to be a bit more precise), but what we don’t know is whether that is due to changes in things like temperature and the UV in sunlight directly, or simply that it’s how people respond to these changing weather conditions that help transmission. For example, people tend to congregate indoors more in the winter months, where a greater number of people are in closer proximity and often humidity is higher (which perhaps helps the virus survive).
Almost certainly humidity is a factor in virus lifetime and transmission. We can see that in the tropics the flu cycle is much extended beyond the winter months, in large part because of the humidity.
After all that technical detail, the best defence we have is to wash our hands. How often does solving a difficult problem come back to basics!
Friday, 24 April 2009
Living in Different Climates
I’m recently back from Miami and a tour of some of the Caribbean islands on holiday. Great holiday and my first time to the Caribbean. Travelling south in the Caribbean Sea it occurred to me that I wouldn’t want to live in a tropical climate. I would miss the seasons. They do have changes in the weather – very hot, or very wet and very hot! It’s nice for a holiday, but it wouldn’t be for me as a way of life. I like the variability that our seasons bring - even, like this week, when I get wet through walking into the office.
We adapt to our weather pretty well in the UK, except for the occasional snow flurry, but it doesn’t really impact on our way of life in a big way! I’ve seen written that weather has a £2 – 3 billion impact on our economy each year on average, and individual events can have equally large and comparable financial and social impacts.
Businesses can now buy a wide range of services to lessen the impacts of weather on their performance (it’s no longer a feasible excuse for a business to use to their shareholders for poor performance). The Public Weather Service provides the variety of weather warnings we see on the web, TV and hear on radio that helps us manage our own lives. But that’s certainly not as simple in some countries who suffer the impacts of significant and severe weather on a regular basis. It does genuinely affect the way people live their lives and I think, interestingly, the way in which those countries will choose to move forward in their own growth and development that will certainly be founded in very different cultural (weather-driven) roots.
Now I need to balance out my reflections with something a little less philosophical so here is the temperature profiles for my flights as my regular blog readers have come to expect of me. These show my descents out of Amsterdam at 1237 UTC on 11 April (as I flew via here) and then into Miami at 2300 GMT on the same day.
You can see from the plot that although much later in the day, the atmosphere is quite a bit warmer all the way through the troposphere. The zero degrees C isotherm was almost 2 km higher in Miami in the late evening than it was in Amsterdam around midday. You can probably also tell from the profiles that it was a pretty smooth take-off and landing.
My hope is that you’ll be encouraged to collect the same information when you next take a flight and send it to the blog.
We adapt to our weather pretty well in the UK, except for the occasional snow flurry, but it doesn’t really impact on our way of life in a big way! I’ve seen written that weather has a £2 – 3 billion impact on our economy each year on average, and individual events can have equally large and comparable financial and social impacts.
Businesses can now buy a wide range of services to lessen the impacts of weather on their performance (it’s no longer a feasible excuse for a business to use to their shareholders for poor performance). The Public Weather Service provides the variety of weather warnings we see on the web, TV and hear on radio that helps us manage our own lives. But that’s certainly not as simple in some countries who suffer the impacts of significant and severe weather on a regular basis. It does genuinely affect the way people live their lives and I think, interestingly, the way in which those countries will choose to move forward in their own growth and development that will certainly be founded in very different cultural (weather-driven) roots.
Now I need to balance out my reflections with something a little less philosophical so here is the temperature profiles for my flights as my regular blog readers have come to expect of me. These show my descents out of Amsterdam at 1237 UTC on 11 April (as I flew via here) and then into Miami at 2300 GMT on the same day.
You can see from the plot that although much later in the day, the atmosphere is quite a bit warmer all the way through the troposphere. The zero degrees C isotherm was almost 2 km higher in Miami in the late evening than it was in Amsterdam around midday. You can probably also tell from the profiles that it was a pretty smooth take-off and landing.
My hope is that you’ll be encouraged to collect the same information when you next take a flight and send it to the blog.
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
The Winter of 2008/09 and Spring 2009
The official statistics on the winter were produced by the Met Office's national climate information centre last week and confirmed that it was indeed a 'cold winter' - well at least colder that we have been used to since 1995/96 in England and Wales and 1996/97 in the UK, with temperatures 0.5 deg C below the 30-year average. The rainfall was more marked with some areas of the UK recording less than 70% of the average rainfall for the period.
But perhaps the thing that will stick in the minds of most of us was the significant snowfall in the first week of February which brought depths of snow greater than 15 cm across many parts of the UK. The last time we had a winter snowfall of that size was in February 1991.
Enough of weather-past. We had the Vernal Equinox at the weekend signalling Spring is with us now - so what should we expect? Well the latest Met Office seasonal forecast is suggesting that it will be a near or slightly below average Spring for temperatures and rainfall. But what is an average Spring I hear you say. For temperature that's an average of 7.4 deg C and for rainfall that's about 232 mm (or around 9 inches) in total across the three months from March to May.
If you had to guess the wettest Spring month what would it be - you might say April because of the old adage April showers bring forth May flowers, but actually its March. March accounts for 96 mm of our rainfall on average, April some 70 mm and around 66 mm in May - so you can see March is wetter by quite a bit. May as it happens is our driest and sunniest month of the year on average. That's probably enough weather statistics for one entry.
But perhaps the thing that will stick in the minds of most of us was the significant snowfall in the first week of February which brought depths of snow greater than 15 cm across many parts of the UK. The last time we had a winter snowfall of that size was in February 1991.
Enough of weather-past. We had the Vernal Equinox at the weekend signalling Spring is with us now - so what should we expect? Well the latest Met Office seasonal forecast is suggesting that it will be a near or slightly below average Spring for temperatures and rainfall. But what is an average Spring I hear you say. For temperature that's an average of 7.4 deg C and for rainfall that's about 232 mm (or around 9 inches) in total across the three months from March to May.
If you had to guess the wettest Spring month what would it be - you might say April because of the old adage April showers bring forth May flowers, but actually its March. March accounts for 96 mm of our rainfall on average, April some 70 mm and around 66 mm in May - so you can see March is wetter by quite a bit. May as it happens is our driest and sunniest month of the year on average. That's probably enough weather statistics for one entry.
Friday, 13 March 2009
Who said meteorology isn't a laugh a minute? Weather and Meteorological Jokes
So here are some of the best jokes we had in for our Comic Relief challenge - 'best' meaning arbitrarily selected by me but probably gives you an indication of how bad the others were!
Why was the cloud late for work - because he mist the bus
What do you call a sheep with no legs - a cloud
Two weather satellite antennas got married, the wedding was good but the reception was fantastic
and my personal favourite (which is cheating because its really a glaciologists joke):
A guy walks into the doctors with a piece of lettuce sticking out of the top of his shirt. The doctor says that looks nasty and the guy says that's just the tip of the iceberg!
Why was the cloud late for work - because he mist the bus
What do you call a sheep with no legs - a cloud
Two weather satellite antennas got married, the wedding was good but the reception was fantastic
and my personal favourite (which is cheating because its really a glaciologists joke):
A guy walks into the doctors with a piece of lettuce sticking out of the top of his shirt. The doctor says that looks nasty and the guy says that's just the tip of the iceberg!
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
Weather and Climate Jokes
In aid of Comic Relief on Friday 13th March we are publishing a list of our favourite weather and climate jokes. So if you’d like to send any in to us you can do so at chief.exec@rmets.org – I’m sure we are going to have an entertaining time deciding on our best ones, which we will also be including on our BBC Radio Berkshire broadcast on Wednesday 11th March, so make sure to listen in.
Monday, 2 March 2009
Spring is here - at least in the meteorological sense
No we haven’t redefined the astronomical calendar! Spring officially is still 21 March (the equinox – 12 hours of equal day and night), but in meteorology we think of the seasons in whole months. For us Spring is March to May, Summer is June to August, Autumn is September to November and Winter is December to February.
Two things to look out for: see the latest Met Office Spring 2009 forecasts (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/monthsahead/seasonal/2009/spring.html) and also if you haven’t seen it, it is interesting to look at the KEW 100 (http://data.kew.org/wild/phenology/). The KEW 100 is an index that follows the flowering of different plant species and how that responds to changes in the weather (and of course over longer periods climate).
The KEW 100 is a more recent index taken from a much longer record going back over a hundred years at least. The Royal Met Society used to publish the UK-wide phenological (species flowering) records as early as the 1870s.
Two things to look out for: see the latest Met Office Spring 2009 forecasts (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/monthsahead/seasonal/2009/spring.html) and also if you haven’t seen it, it is interesting to look at the KEW 100 (http://data.kew.org/wild/phenology/). The KEW 100 is an index that follows the flowering of different plant species and how that responds to changes in the weather (and of course over longer periods climate).
The KEW 100 is a more recent index taken from a much longer record going back over a hundred years at least. The Royal Met Society used to publish the UK-wide phenological (species flowering) records as early as the 1870s.
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