Paul H's Weather Blog

Our Next Generation of Well-qualified Meteorologists

2010-08-02T04:43:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have been busy with travelling around the UK, but interesting. A few weeks ago we held our Student Conference at the Met Office so our student community could join with the Met Office’s early career scientists. Having a fair proportion of our next generation of meteorologists in one room together was very enjoyable and I was extremely impressed by the work that they were presenting. They are certainly a talented bunch. The conference held a lively debate on the pros and cons of geo-engineering and it’s clear that they are not only talented but passionate about the future of meteorology and how it is applied to some of our more serious problems. I very much came away with the sense that our subject is in safe hands.

Last week I also chaired a meeting of the UK’s sector committee for meteorology – that’s the group who represent the practitioner community in the UK, and specifically the development of qualification standards for the profession. In includes the Society, the Royal Navy, the Met Office and the private sector. We spent our time focusing on the development of new vocational qualifications for meteorology. There is something called the Qualifications and Curriculum Framework in the UK which defines various levels of vocational qualifications and we spent our day mapping our standards into this new framework. It was very enjoyable to come together as a community to ensure all our forecasters in the UK have the opportunity to develop their skills and competencies through high-quality, independently-recognised vocational qualifications. What I am always impress by is that the members of the group, who have very busy workloads, give up their time freely and voluntarily to undertake this work for the good of the profession and its future development.

A Week of Extremes

2010-07-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

After another week of sunshine and showers I was reflecting on the fact that it’s not only our UK weather that changes from day-to-day, but that our weather the world over is so diverse. And last week was certainly a week of extremes. In South Dakota the record was broken for the largest recorded hailstone at a diameter of 8 inches, and weighing in at a massive 900 grams; that’s not far short of a bag of sugar – imagine that falling out of the sky. In Japan and Russian they have been suffering a severe heat wave with temperatures in excess of 35 deg C. On the other hand in southern Peru they have had very extreme cold weather, with temperatures as low as -24 deg C.

Meteorologists vs the Eggheads

2010-07-21T04:45:00.000-07:00

What is it about meteorologists and quiz programmes. We have a meteorologist who made the final of 15-to-1 (remember that programme) and the Society’s team were runners up in the final of University Challenge – the Professionals. We lost out to the Journalists of all people! But not deterred by this a team from the HQ staff pitted our wits against the Eggheads on Monday.

If you haven’t seen the Eggheads then you can find them on BBC2’s tea-time schedule. I’ll build up the suspense by keeping the outcome to myself, but you can imagine that there were plenty of people in our team who fancied their chances at the Science round. They tell us it will be screened in 6-9 months, but no need to look out for it as I’m sure we will be posting a link to iPlayer in due course.

The weather's too warm for me.

2010-07-07T03:01:00.000-07:00

The line in blue in the image above is my descent into Heathrow, compared with the temperature from the standard atmospheric model, in yellow.

I read in one of my gardening magazines that our Spring flowers were 3 weeks later than usual this year because of the cold winter and snowy start to the year. In fact for some species it’s more like a delay of 5 days per degree of temperature below the average. It didn’t seem to do my spring bulbs any harm and it seems that my garden has now caught up on itself and is very much enjoying the warm weather – unlike me. But like many parts of England and Wales it will soon be too dry for the gardens and we will be very short of water resources – if not to re-inforce our sensitivity to relatively small changes in our weather.

I didn’t worry much about my spring garden and I missed two weeks of it to be at a good friends wedding in Botswana – two meteorologists becoming one meteorological family! I’m not a big fan of hot weather so I’m not enjoying the current conditions in the south-east but in Botswana I knew what to expect. What I didn’t expect was quite how beautiful a country it is and I would definitely recommend a visit.

While I was there I had the opportunity to have an excellent visit to the Botswana Met Service and to meet the dedicated people there who do a fantastic job – thanks everyone for making me feel so welcome.

I also had the chance to see the Savute River channel in the Kalahari dessert in Northern Botswana, which was in full flow – the first time in almost 30 years – a really spectacular sight. The Savute Channel has only ever flowed intermittently. It last flowed from 1967 to 1981, but since then the channel and the Savute Marsh have been dry, a phenomenon that has occurred on and off over centuries. It does bring home that the stresses of a few weeks of warm weather in the UK, whilst important for us, doesn’t compare much with the water resource issues that exist in some countries.

On the way back I flew into Heathrow airport and as is my usual practice I have the temperature profile from the in-flight display, compared with the standard atmosphere profile. And it does compare well as you can see below. Notice, though, that even at 0650 in the morning temperatures in the UK were quite warm on that day, 9 April, at nearly 10 deg C.

The Society now has a South-East Local Centre which meets in Reading (currently Reading Town Hall) each month between September and July and I’m enjoying the meetings very much – good talks and good company.

At the June meeting Stephen Burt presented some observations from his weather station in Berkshire, with some interesting stats for June, and many thanks for Stephen for letting me reproduce some of these here. He recorded only 28% of the 1971-2000 average rainfall and 34% more sunshine. In terms of the mean maximum temperature, only 2006 has been warmer since the infamous 1976 summer.

Here are Stephen’s rainfall stats for the past 12 months. The figures in pale green are the % of the 1971-2000 climatological average and in blue the rainfall amounts recorded in mm.

This is Stephen’s record of daily sunshine in hours. June’s daily sunshine average was over 2 hours greater than that for the 1971-2000 daily average.

Snow, but not quite a white Christmas (less common than a white Easter)

2010-03-16T01:39:00.000-07:00

I know, I know it’s been a long time since my last entry – and I have no good excuse other than it’s been very busy over the last few months and each time I came to the point of putting down a few words something seemed to get in the way. And thank you to all those who dropped me a note saying where is my next Blog entry – I didn’t realise that so many actual read it!

A lot has happened since last I wrote. First off the country was under snow for what seemed like several months. We broke a 30-year record for snowfall but despite the disruption I rather enjoyed having a good old fashioned winter again, digging us out of the front door and finding my boots out of the garage for walking into work. It wasn’t quite a white Christmas by true definition (snow falling on the day) which I was quite pleased about as I had done a few radio broadcasts saying that it wasn’t going to happen – but it was a close run thing.

One of my favourite facts, not known by many, is that a white Easter is more likely than a white Christmas – that’s a cheery thought for the next few weeks! It isn’t very common that we have heavy snowfalls so early on in the winter. The other interesting thing about snow is that, by a very rough approximation, snow melts to 1/10th of its depth. That is 1cm of snow (10 mm) melts to approximately 1mm of rain – not a very useful piece of knowledge for everyday life I know, but interesting never the less for those who have to think about flooding from snowmelt.

Other things that have happened – I went to join in with comedian Lloyd Woolf’s “buy a weatherman a drink” evening in London and had a very entertaining night, I upset the Mayor of Moscow by saying that weather modification is not a good way to spend public money. Also in December, we of course had a disappointing Conference of the Parties (COP) in Copenhagen, but at least we have some countries signing up to commitments to reduce emissions in their January Accord and a pledge to meet again in the summer before the next COP at the end of this year. We should make the best of our winter snow event as these are less likely going forward in our warmer climate.

I had an interesting January at the first meeting of the International Forum of Meteorological Societies, with over 20 Societies coming together to talk about areas of common interest, and in particular in areas such as resources for schools and in professional development. It was a very productive meeting, but I enjoyed it as much for meeting up with old colleagues as for what we achieved. It was nice to see so many of those old colleagues who, like me, were now doing more with their professional society. It reminded me in part why I enjoy working in meteorology and what makes it a special kind of career.

As is usual from my trips abroad, here is the temperature profile from the flight that I took from the in-flight temperature and height figures you get on your video screen. You can see it was about 6 degrees colder in Heathrow pretty consistently through the atmosphere – and both follow a nice standard lapse rate curve of 6oC per kilometre.

On Saturday just gone I was at a very different type of event – at the other end of the spectrum you might say. Rather than meeting old colleagues I was meeting lots of young potential meteorologists at the Big Bang event in Manchester. This is the UK’s Science and Engineering festival, and this year they had over 20,000 people visit. I was there to talk on a careers panel, was able to take the opportunity to promote a career in meteorology. But I also joined the Society team in the main exhibition hall to meet young people who had stopped by our exhibition to find out more about what life is really like as a meteorologist.

Finally speaking of Saturday events, this coming Saturday sees the opening of a new exhibition on Luke Howard (the father of clouds) at the Bruce Castle museum in Tottenham. I hope some of you have a chance to stop by and visit the exhibition. You can find out more about the exhibition at ‘http://www.haringey.gov.uk/brucecastleevents.htm#exhibitions’.

Noctiluscent Clouds

2009-08-01T02:32:00.000-07:00

I recently did a radio interview about a rare type of cloud known as noctiluscent - rare in the sense that they are rarely seen by us because of the special nature of how they occur.

The clouds are very high up, some 75 to 85 km (50 miles) high, in our mesosphere. Because they are so high they are usually too faint to see with the naked eye, but when the sun shines up from below the horizon (on nights when there is no low cloud) it can reflect light from the bottom of these clouds and they become visible.

These clouds are, to give them their proper name, polar mesospheric clouds. They are called noctiluscent because they ‘shine at night’. As far as I know they were first photographed by a German observer in 1887 and the clouds are thought to prevalent around that time as a result of the cooling of the mesosphere caused by the Krakatoa eruption in Indonesia in 1883.

You can see a fine example on the Cloud Appreciation Society’s website at: http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/noctilucent-may’06/

If you have ever been lucky enough to see these clouds you will know that it can be an eerie but quite stunning sight. They often have a purple-blue colour in large part caused by the absorption of the light due to atmospheric ozone.

These clouds do only occur under fairly restrictive conditions. They need water vapour to form which is very unusual in the mesosphere as the water molecules are often broken down by the UV light. Therefore they are more prevalent in weaker solar cycles when the UV is weakest. Also they tend to occur when the mesosphere is at its coldest, that is close to the poles and during summer.

Interestingly the increase in greenhouse gases leads to a warming of the troposphere and a cooling of the mesosphere. Some have suggested that the increase in the frequency of sightings of these clouds in recent years might be a visible impact of global warming. So perhaps it’s true that every cloud does indeed have a silver lining of sorts.

BBQ Summer

2009-07-29T02:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve been a gas BBQer over recent years and I have been thinking of late that I need to return to more traditional methods – to be honest it’s probably because I have always wanted one of those oil-drum BBQs. Well I am kind of glad that I didn’t in the end do something about it this year as the cover has stayed on the BBQ so far this summer.

The seasonal forecast was half right (if a probability forecast can ever be deemed right or wrong) in that it has been a warm summer, but it’s also been a wet summer so far and by all accounts it doesn’t look a great deal different for August (you can see the Met Office’s seasonal forecast at www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/uk_forecast_weather.html. So what did this year’s summer forecast not pick up on? It would seem that we have the Polar Jet Stream to blame yet again.

The Jet has once again been further south than we would expect for this time of year. This has helped to transport the weather systems across the Atlantic to the UK and stopped the development of one of those welcome ‘blocking high pressure systems’ from the south that brought our few weeks of warm sunny weather at the end of May.

So what’s caused this you could rightly ask? And the truth is that we don’t really know. We do know that there is a link with the ocean temperature patterns, and the natural cycles in El Nino and the North Atlantic Oscillation, but I don’t believe as yet that we have a good enough understanding of how these systems effect the wider global circulation. That being said it is remarkable what information the seasonal predications can provide and what an advance in our capabilities it has been to be able to produce this type of information which, despite the wet weather so far this summer, I would argue strongly holds real value.

I might not have had occasion to BBQ this summer but recently I did have the chance to visit my great Aunt who is a very remarkable 101 years old. We were talking about the vagaries of another wet summer and she recited a poem to me that I had long since forgotten. It’s a poem called ‘Rain in Summer’ by Henry Longfellow. It’s too long to reproduce here, but to give you a taster here is the first couple of verses:

How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!

How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoofs
How it gushes and struggles out
From the throat of the overflowing spout!

Odd that it takes an American to so eloquently describe to us the British obsession. It’s a beautiful poem that I would definitely recommend having a look at in a quiet moment, perhaps best left until it’s too wet to go outside and you can read it whilst staring out of your window at the wet and rusting BBQ sitting in the corner of the patio.

Word Bingo at the Conference Dinner

2009-07-09T08:30:00.000-07:00

Our conference dinner is always a fun event for several reasons. I enjoy it because it’s one of the few opportunities to see our many academic members come together as a UK community. The other reason is that we present our awards at the dinner, and it’s nice to celebrate success.

A good night was had by all, but it did make me feel as though I’m well and truly in middle-age. Looking out to the dinner audience when it came to my bit to speak, it was great to see lots of young scientists there. And some of them confessed t playing the games that I used to play when I came to those kinds of events at their age, like word bingo.

If you’ve never played it, you basically put together a bingo sheet but instead of numbers you have words that you expect people to say. The first to fill the sheet wins. Their slight variation was to count how many times I said certain words. Amongst the highest ranked were ‘weather’ with 16 mentions, and 11 for ‘climate’ and ‘thank you’. Apparently the winner was ‘meteorology’ with 21 which beat the ‘Society’ only getting 19 mentions. My Head of Communications will want to make sure I get the ‘Society’ to the top of the ranking next time around!

Can we enjoy the Cricket in our BBQ Summer?

2009-07-08T06:13:00.000-07:00

I was just relaxing on Sunday after the busy schedule of our biennial conference and looking forward to our Ashes series when two things caught my eye. The first was that we were holding a test match in Cardiff. This fairly historic event seems to have completely passed me by, but goes down well in our household – my wife’s Welsh.

The second was an article we recently published in our house journal Weather on the correlation between El Nino (the large-scale warming of the oceans off the coast of Peru) and the outcome of the Ashes test matches. Apparently there is a statistically significant link between what we call a positive El Nino phase and Ashes victories for the Australians.

Thinking about this it does make sense as a positive El Nino phase tends to lead to prolonged warm, dry conditions in Australian, and our antipodean friends must be more used to batting and bowling on hard, dry pitches than we are, that’s for sure. I know what you’re thinking; it’s nothing to do with El Nino, they are just better than us. Well that may be so, but the study also shows that in the opposite phase, which we call La Nina, we do far better in terms of Ashes results.

What does that mean for this test series I hear you ask. Well, we are just entering a positive El Nino phase, but often the effect of El Nino relatively speaking is less in the UK than in Australia – so you have to make of that what you will, but I still have my fingers crossed for us to sneak it on a gripping last test!

By the way, if you are planning to go to the Cardiff test, then Friday this week looks the best day – it looks a very cloudy and wet weekend. For the remaining part of the season, I’d aim for one of the July test matches. Climatologically July is sunnier and drier than August in the UK, so on average you’re more likely to have less rain interruptions and more sunshine. Whether that will help the home team is another matter.

It's good to see that people are interested in clouds again

2009-05-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

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?

Weather and Flu

2009-04-29T04:11:00.000-07:00

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!

Living in Different Climates

2009-04-24T04:09:00.000-07:00

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.

The Winter of 2008/09 and Spring 2009

2009-03-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Who said meteorology isn't a laugh a minute? Weather and Meteorological Jokes

2009-03-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

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!

Weather and Climate Jokes

2009-03-03T01:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Spring is here - at least in the meteorological sense

2009-03-02T01:34:00.000-08:00

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.

The Society and Chocolate

2009-02-12T01:36:00.000-08:00

I learned an interesting fact today, that the value of the world’s scientific journal publishing industry is worth about the same as the UK spends on chocolate each year – apparently £2 billion.

The other interesting fact if you are thinking of renewing your Society membership is that statistically people live longer if they belong to professional and learned Societies, although I suspect that might not be the case if you are one of the people principally responsible for the UK’s turnover in chocolate!

Freak Weather

2009-02-04T01:36:00.000-08:00

I’ve had occasion to look up some strange weather statistics recently and came across some very interesting records. For example I didn’t realise that the records for the hottest temperature, which previously was held by El Azizia in Libya with 58oC, was broken. Apparently in 2005 a temperature of 70.7oC (that’s 159oF) was recorded in the Lut Desert in Iran – boy is that hot! Also why is it that when we talk in extremes we always go back to Fahrenheit (or inches in rainfall) as if it makes it sounds more dramatic. Speaking of rainfall there is a place in the Hawaiian islands where they have regularly between 460 to 512 inches of rainfall a year, that’s between 11 to 13 metres.

But my most favourite freak weather records are where we get reports of when it rains strange objects, like the frogs in Llanddewi in 1998, or the worms in Jennings Louisiana in 2007.

Did you know there is even a freak weather explanation for the Loch Ness Monster – I won’t even go there.

We think it's cold here!

2009-01-15T09:59:00.000-08:00

I’ve spent this week in Phoenix, Arizona, at the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting. This meeting is an important one for us, as each year we hold our exhibition promoting our scientific journals, we meet many of our international members at our evening reception and we have our bilateral meeting with the AMS executive team to discuss areas of possible collaboration. And its good to renew old friendships.

We often joke about the weather with our US colleagues as we regularly have very extreme unseasonal weather for the AMS meetings. However we seem to have broken the trend this year. Phoenix itself is used to extreme weather conditions. Average summer temperatures are amongst the hottest in the US. On 26 June 1990 they reached an all-time high of 50°C (some 122°F). Rainfall is pretty sparse but there is a period between July to September where humidity levels are high.

This time of year is seasonally the coldest in Phoenix, with temperatures falling between a maximum of 19°C (67°F) and a minimum of 7°C (45°F). This week it has been up in the high end of the climatology - about 16°C (61°F) with sunny blue skies, as a result of a large high pressure sitting over the lower south west past of the US. To the north, much of the rest of the US has been experiencing some pretty cold weather with heavy snowfalls and some of the coldest parts experiencing temperatures around -42°C (-45°F), which is pretty chilly in anyone’s book.

But it wasn’t just the weather that made this year’s meeting a particularly special one. It was that 23 of the world’s meteorological Societies (the largest ever gathering) met to establish an International Forum for Meteorological Societies, where we can discuss issues of common interest and share best practice. The framework for the new forum was put in place and its first meeting will be in January 2010 at the AMS’s next annual meeting in Atlanta in January 2010.

As usual I managed to get hold of some upper atmosphere data from the Phoenix flight, through the in cabin screen displays that show altitude and temperature. Unfortunately I only got hold of some low level temperatures from the cabin display going into Phoenix. Coming out of Phoenix I managed to get some better data.

Surface temperature was pretty much the same on both days, but it was warmer in the upper air by some 5 to 6°C consistently up through at least the first 2.5 km. What’s interesting in the data from the 15th is the drop in temperature in the lowest 500 m or so showing a cold layer of low level air around the airport – I haven’t really looked into the properly, but possibly some cold air drainage from the surrounding mountains.

Weather Records and Average Temperatures

2009-01-03T04:32:00.000-08:00

I was reading over the Christmas holidays that there are records of the weather that go back as far as 13th Century BC. The records were found amongst the Anyang oracle bones, which give us an historical account of the Shang dynasty in China. But it’s the way in which nature responds to our weather that gives us the long record that we use for studying our climate beyond the more systematic observations we have over the last century or so – the sorts of information that comes from tree rings or trapped air in ice cores, and that is what we call paleoclimatology. It’s these observations together with our complex climate models that help us to understand and give context to how our climate is changing.

Our recent summers haven’t been great in the UK, most likely a response to the effects of a strong La Niña – a large pool of cold water of the south-American coast. This natural feature of the earth’s climate has masked the underlying warming of land temperatures to some extend. That being said the climate models are telling us that by all accounts 2009 is set to be a warm year globally, although the seasonal forecasts for the UK are showing that we will have a cold start – with colder than average temperatures in January and an average February.

Very Cold December

2008-12-28T04:30:00.000-08:00

It’s been the coldest start to December since 1976. Very cold Decembers are not uncommon but a little unusual as our coldest months in the UK are usually January and February. I was talking about the cold weather to some friends over Christmas and we got on to talking about why we can feel hot or cold. I don’t mean that the heating isn’t on or there’s a freezing wind outside, I mean where the sensation of heat actually comes from.

Well, something feels hot to us because the atoms inside it are moving fast, and when it feels cold they are moving slowly. We interpret this movement through the feeling of something being hot or cold, and a thermometer interprets as a certain temperature, in for example degrees Centigrade of Fahrenheit.

Scientists often use Kelvin as a measure of temperature rather than deg C or deg F. The bottom of the Kelvin scale is 0 K or Absolute Zero. What got me thinking about this recently was my God Son who asked me what is Absolute Zero. I was able to give the temperature 0 K or -273.15°C, but not the definition. It’s one of those things that I am sure I did know and could make a reasonable guess of what I thought it was, but to be precise I looked it up for myself. And it is as you might guess a point at which no more heat exists.

What that means specifically in classical kinetic theory is that there should be no movement of individual molecules at Absolute Zero. In practice we don’t of course know this as we have never been able to observe anything at 0 K, but we have come close in the laboratory. The experimental evidence shows us that as we reduce temperatures close to 0 K molecules do slow right down, but there is still movement.

Mountain Meteorology in Action

2008-10-22T04:59:00.000-07:00

I was lamenting on what a bad decision it was not to take my new watch (re Blog of 12th October 2008) on my recent trip to Peru and the chance I would have had to give it a good test out in the Andes and to take a meteorological observation in Machu Picchu (what a fantastic place to visit by the way – twice as good as any photos you might have seen).

Fortunately the plane I travelled in was an Airbus with one of those screens that gives you temperature at different altitudes, so on take-off and landing I had the chance to record some upper air observations, and here are a couple below relating to my landing and then take-off at Lima airport:

You can see that they certainly do not conform to the ‘standard atmosphere’ (as defined by the International Civil Aviation Authority) of temperature changing by around 6°C per kilometre. Coming into Lima (blue line) you can see a warm layer of air just below 2 km that extends right down to about 700 m.

The flight from Lima into Cusco was an example of some of the challenges that aircraft have at high altitude. The landing is very spectacular as the plane circles around the mountains and comes into land in a shallow valley at around 3,600 m. You can hear the engines at high revs in the closing turns to maintain the lift they need to turn in the much thinner air (lower air pressure).

I was hoping to see some of my favourite lenticular clouds in the mountains, but not this time. However I did see some amazing cloud formations. Here is one example below; along with a picture I took at sunrise coming through the clouds as I travelled out of Cusco on a train to Machu Picchu.

My New Meteorological Watch

2008-10-12T05:11:00.000-07:00

With one thing and another it has been a while since I last put ‘finger-to-keyboard’ so to speak, but felt I should share a few thoughts about my new meteorological watch.

At my age it is not often I get excited about my birthday (perhaps that is just because I am a bit miserable, as my wife reminds me), but this year I had a very exciting present – no not a vintage Harley Davidson bike, an antique Les Paul guitar, or tickets to see Catherine Jenkins in concert (front row seats); it was a meteorological watch. Yes, you did read correctly a watch that makes observations of the weather. I have had much fun with this, making observations of temperature pressure and altitude. It reminded me of a few things apart from how hopeless I am at finding out how it all works.

The first was how careful you have to be when making observations, to understand what is being observed (like the temperature of the atmosphere, or my wrist), and that the observations are well calibrated. I am waiting to my next blue sky day at the coast to set my altitude and pressure calibrations.

The second was that what I am measuring is all inter-related. Pressure, temperature and humidity are all related. For example in the troposphere, a very small layer of the earths atmosphere relatively speaking that is closest to the surface of the earth and where we have all of our weather, pressure decreases with height in the atmosphere and so does temperature, by roughly 6oC per kilometre (if we make some assumptions about what we call a standard atmosphere). I wonder whether my watch really does measure temperature, pressure and altitude independently or whether, as I suspect, it uses some of our understanding of how these things are linked.

Paint the whole world with a Rainbow

2008-08-29T07:24:00.000-07:00

When you have lots of sunshine and showers around like we’ve had recently (well OK we’ve had more showers than sunshine) then it’s ideal conditions for rainbows. We see rainbows when the sun shines through the raindrops. More precisely the sunlight is refracted in the raindrop and is split into the different colours that make up the sunlight – you might remember doing something similar in the school science lesson when you shine a bright light through a prism (a glass pyramid). The refracted light is then reflected off the back of the raindrop at an angle of around 42o, which defines the angle in the sky that we see the rainbow. The blue light is a shorter wavelength and so is refracted at a bigger angle than the longer wavelength red light, which means that in the bow you see the red at the top and the blue near the bottom.

Sometimes you can see a secondary rainbow and I’ve included a picture above I took of a primary and secondary rainbow this year in Cornwall. The secondary rainbow occurs when the light undergoes a double reflection in the raindrop. Because this is a second reflection the colours occur upside down compared to the primary rainbow, and they are dimmer. We call the area in between the two bows Alexander’s band after the ancient Greek Alexander of Aphrodisias who wrote about it. It is possible on very rare occasions to see a third bow, but as by this stage the light is very dim and it appears in the direction of the Sun it is extremely difficult to spot.

There are a few different mnemonics that help you remember the seven colours of the rainbow, but my favourite is ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’ – that’s Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

Rainbows have been talked about for many years. The ancient Greeks wrote about rainbows as a path made by Iris (the messenger of the Gods) between heaven and earth. Chinese mythology speaks of a slit in the sky sealed by the Goddess Nüwa using stones of five different colours. The Bible in the story of Noah talks about the rainbow of a sign from God that life would never again be destroyed by floods. But perhaps the most famous is that the Leprechauns keep their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Unfortunately you will never reach the end of the rainbow for two reasons. The first is that because it’s an optical effect then it moves as you move and so you can never reach the bottom. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, a rainbow is really a circle, it’s just that we see half of it.

There are two things that stick in my mind most about rainbows. The first is the fantastic painting by Constable of Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. I first saw it in the National Gallery, and read about the painting of it in a great book by John Thornes (called John Counstable’s Skies, which I can definitely recommend to you). My second abiding memory is from the Wordsworth poetry I studied at school. His 1802 poem "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold The Rainbow" begins:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!…

How do I follow a career in Meteorology and do I need a degree in Meteorology to become a Meteorologist

2008-08-13T03:55:00.000-07:00

Download Paul's BBC Radio interview on careers in meteorology

With exam results out and lots of young people thinking what they might do next, we thought it would be a good idea to say a bit about how to become a meteorologist. You can’t do a GCSE or A-level in meteorology so what should you be thinking about choosing to study?

Well, many people who end up in Meteorology come from a science background and in particular have studied subjects such as Maths, Physics and Chemistry at GCSE, A-level, and for a degree. Increasingly there are organisations that are employing people from backgrounds in environmental science and geography, but often there will be a requirement to undertake further studies to give people the scientific background needed, whether working as a meteorological researcher or an operational forecaster. Check out our ‘Spotlight on Careers’ page to see how just a small cross-section of our community ended up in meteorology ‘http://www.rmets.org/activities/careers/spotlight.php’.

Very few Universities offer Meteorology degrees, but there lots of related courses that will equip you well – and a number of MSc courses that give an opportunity to convert over to meteorology if you feel you would like to understand more about the science. The Society accredits Undergraduate degree and MSc courses and you can find a list on our website at ‘http://www.rmets.org/activities/careers/courses.php’.

I’m conscious that I am biased, but meteorology offers some great career opportunities, often involving travel within the UK and internationally – meteorology is a very international community. You can work as:
• an operational weather forecaster – and there are many facets to a role like that, including TV and radio presenters if that’s something that interests you.
• a weather observer - either taking observations or working in the development of instrumentation from simple rain gauges right through to aircraft equipment, weather radar and the development of new satellite technologies.
• consulting services - which is an increasing area of growth within the community that brings in business skills to provide advice to companies whose bottom line is affected by the weather.
• research scientist – either working in a university group or at one of the UK’s meteorological research institutes and centres, working at the forefront of weather and climate science.

You can find out more about the range of employers across both the public and the private sector in our section about ‘Who Employs Meteorologists’ (http://www.rmets.org/activities/careers/index.php).

For those working in meteorology already we also offer Vocational Qualifications and you can find out about the NVQs/SVQs in weather forecasting and weather observing, and how to become a Chartered Meteorologist at ‘http://www.rmets.org/activities/careers/index.php#qualifications’.

The Planning for our Climate Change Question Time

2008-08-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

We are just in the final planning stages for this year’s Society event at the British Association’s Festival of Science – a Climate Change Question Time. The Festival moves around the country and this year, in part I suspect to mark its status of European City of Culture, we are in Liverpool.

In preparation for the event we did some filming on the streets of Liverpool in late July, asking members of the public about climate change. I have to say that we had a very warm and friendly welcome and we collected quite a number of excellent and interesting interviews which we hope to be able to put up on the Society’s website before the end of September. We will be using a small selection of these to open our Question Time event. I promise to put a link to these in my blog when we have them ready as I know that you will enjoy watching them and hearing what people have to say – I am sure you will find that many of their thoughts and questions are similar to the ones you have.

The event will be in the style of Question Time and we are delighted to have a panel of very distinguished and internationally respected meteorological scientists who have been very actively involved in, amongst other things, the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The panel includes:

• Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Director of the Gratham Institute for Climate Change and a newly appointed member of the Government’s Climate Change Committee;
• Dr Peter Stott, the Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the world renowned Met Office’s Hadley Centre, and a lead contributor to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report;
• Professor Jo Haigh, Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College, whose area of expertise includes the Sun’s impact on our climate;
• Professor Piers Forster, the Roberts Research Fellow and Professor of Climate Physics at the University of Leeds, working in the field of climate forcing and feedbacks.

The aim of the event is to allow members of the public to ask the questions directly of the scientists that they want answered about climate change. The event will be followed by a reception where people will be able to meet with the members of the panel on a one-to-one basis and also see meteorological experiments demonstrated by the Society’s school Met Ambassadors.

It’s a meeting open to the public and if you would like to come we would be delighted to see you there – we are in the Quaker House (22 School Lane) in Liverpool city centre from 6-8pm on Tuesday 9 September. There is a small charge on the door, but if you register with us in advance (with Sue Brown at sue.brown@rmets.org or on 0118 956 8500) we will be able to provide you with a ticket for free entry. You can find out more details of our and other Festival activities at ‘http://www.the-ba.net/the-ba/FestivalofScience/’.

What is it about Young People and Umbrellas?

2008-08-11T07:19:00.000-07:00

On Thursday evening last week it was absolutely chucking it down. I was checking the weather radar to plan my best time to make a break for home and realised that I wasn’t going to get away with it – so I got out the umbrella and headed off.

I just couldn’t believe how many people were walking around just getting soaked because they didn’t have an umbrella. Now this is where I’m going to sound a bit like an old fogy, but there were all young people! My very unscientific survey suggested that 100% of people over 60 were brollied-up, some 50% of 60-30 year olds (of which I fall into) had umbrellas, but to my great dismay, not a single young person was carrying an umbrella (excuse my arbitrary definition of ‘young’).

So when did it become uncool to carry an umbrella. I was trying to think back to my younger days and whether I carried a brolly around with me. I did, but I then realised that this wasn’t much help as I could never have been described as cool.

Is the answer that we need Apple - the makers of the iPod and iPhone – to design the new iBolly or perhaps persuade Posh and Becs to carry around one of our Society unbrellas (which by the way are very reasonably priced for that special someone in your life). Or should we resign ourselves to the fact that the younger generation would rather be at one with the elements that be seen dead carrying one of our most British of traditions – and to think, they will never have that life experience of getting half way home and remembering that they have just left there nice new umbrella on the bus.

Weather, Smog and the Beijing Olympics

2008-08-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

Since Henry Des Voeux allegedly invented the term Smog (an amalgamation of smoke and fog) in 1905, it hasn’t been in the news as much in the UK since the 1950s. Perhaps the most infamous being the Great Smog of London in 1952, which is said to have resulted in over 12,000 deaths, and led of course to the introduction of the Clean Air Act in 1956. Those kinds of smogs were the result of heavy coal burning in factories and homes, but modern day smogs are a little different.

These days smogs are more often a result of industry and transport emissions, and have two parts to them. The first are emissions of the Oxides of Nitrogen, Volatile Organic Compounds and Carbon Monoxide; the sort of thing Councils measure in those road side cabins that you might have seen. These are the primary pollutants, but there are also secondary pollutants caused as a result of sunlight reacting with the primary pollutants to create Ozone at ground level. Ozone is good for us up in the atmosphere because it protects us from harmful sunlight, but down at ground level it’s bad for us to breath. All of these primary and secondary pollutants combine to give us what we call photochemical smogs.

The big cities of the world do suffer from these kinds of smogs, like Mexico City, LA, and of course as we’ve seen on the news recently Beijing. And it’s not good news for those with breathing difficulty or those athletes who have to compete in those conditions.

It’s not the only challenges that athletes will face. August is one of the warmest and most humid months in Beijing with temperatures rising to 30oC and humidity as high as 75%. This can have two effects. Sweating cools us down because when the sweat evaporates from the skin it uses heat to turn the liquid into a gas and leaves the skins surface much cooler – we’ve all experienced that when we’ve got out of water before we’ve had the time to dry off. The high humidity reduces or can even prevent the sweat from evaporating. We sweat more and then end up very dehydrated. The second problem is that as our body temperature rises we push more of our blood towards the skin surface where it has a chance to cool, and away from muscles and body organs and we start to feel tired – and in extreme cases can lead to heatstroke.

We can’t do much about the temperature and humidity, but what about the smog. Well unfortunately that’s affected by the weather as well. Taking cars off the road and closing factories to reduce the emissions will certainly help, but if they don’t have the right kind of weather, then it will take a while for the smog that’s there to disperse. At this time of year when the upper parts of the atmosphere are warm then this can stop air rising and taking pollution away – it acts like a kind of lid to trap in the pollution. On a positive note though, because of the high temperatures and humidity there is a chance of thunderstorms which will help to wash out the pollutants.

Good luck to China for a great games and best of luck to Team GB – bring back lots of medals guys. By the way when are they going to make weather forecasting an Olympic sport!

St Swithin’s Day and Flooding

2008-08-06T06:22:00.000-07:00

Since I last blogged I’ve celebrated Yorkshire Day (on 1 August) and perhaps more meteorologically relevant St Swithin’s Day on 15 July. I’m sure you know the old saying that if it rains on St Swithin’s Day, then it will rain for 40 days and nights afterwards.

The saying comes from the story of the much loved Bishop of Winchester. As a man of the people he asked to be buried outside, where people could walk on him in the wind and rain – and in 862AD that’s what happened. But juts over 100 years later some monks decided to move St Swithin to a resting place inside the cathedral but the move was delayed by 40 days and nights of rain, supposedly St Swithin himself weeping in displeasure.

I read that the saying has been tested 55 times in the past and on none of the occasions when it rained on 15 July did it continue to rain for the next 40 days and nights – but it makes a nice story.

The day after St Swithin’s Day I was in London at a dinner with Sir Michael Pitt and Lord Chris Smith (the new Chairman of the Environment Agency), very appropriately talking about flooding, and more precisely the implementation of the recommendations from Sir Michael’s report on the floods of 2007. The report is very well considered and, I think, one of the best reviews for Government I have seen in a long while and stands a real chance of making a difference to the management of flood risk in the UK and importantly the effect on people’s lives and property.

There’s one part in particular that I think is well overdue, and that’s the greater coming together of our weather and flood prediction work with the Environment Agency and the Met Office working more closely on both their research and operational programmes – potentially through a joint centre.

How to make a model rain gauge - with on air commentary

2008-07-17T01:04:00.000-07:00

Download Paul's BBC Radio interview with live rain gauge construction!

Last week was wet, and not just outside of the studio. We thought it might be fun and interesting with school holidays coming up to do something on how to make your own weather observing instruments. So, I embarked on a brave attempt, Blue Peter-style, to build my own rain gauge and water barometer live on air – with mixed success.

It started well with the simple rain gauge, but the barometer proved a bit more tricky, and I seemed to have some problems with maintaining pressure. But despite my poor attempt, and the stick that I had from colleague afterwards, it is easy to do and if you are interested then there are some very simple instructions (with helpful pictures) on our website at http://www.rmets.org/weather/observing/index.php

This week something less taxing hopefully!

How does the rain gauge work?

2008-07-04T07:16:00.000-07:00

Download Paul's BBC Radio interview on rainfall

There are lots of different types of rain gauges, weighing gauges, tipping bucket gauges, siphon gauges, etc. but the ‘standard rain gauge’ used by the Met Office (as a reference gauge) is a copper cylinder with a knife-edged brass rim of 127 mm (5 inches) diameter, which is set in the ground with the top of the gauge 300 mm above ground level . Inside is a glass bottle contained within a removable overflow can. The top, cylindrical part of the rain gauge contains a funnel that directs the rain into the glass bottle.

Last week I was asked how come one gauge will measure the same depth of rainfall as another gauge that has a completely different diameter – surely the one with the bigger diameter will measure more rainfall because the whole at the top of the gauge is bigger. Well yes and no!

Gauges are ‘calibrated’ to make a measurement of a standard cubic volume of water. That is, the measuring scale in the gauge is designed to show you the depth of water in mm as if it had fallen through, let’s say for the sake of explanation, a volume of 1 m high onto an area of 1 m square. What that means is if you had two gauges of different diameters they might collect different amounts of water in them, but if you compared the measuring scale from the two gauges you would notice the two scales would not match each other – they would both be calibrated differently.

Here’s what I mean as an example. Let’s say you had two gauges, both the same height, but the first gauge was twice the area of the second one. And let’s say that the first gauge is a quarter full. If we pour the water from the first gauge into the second gauge, the second gauge would then be half full. That’s because as the second gauge is only half the volume, the water will go twice as far up in the gauge.

In order that we make sure we have the same depth reading in both gauges we would therefore need to calibrate the second gauge so that the measuring scale was twice as wide. I think this picture helps to explain.

Why not try making your own rain gauge with just a 2 litre plastic bottle, it’s lots of fun and you don’t need to worry about calculating areas and volumes!.

It’s getting darker by the second

2008-06-26T02:50:00.000-07:00

Watch a related video of Paul being interviewed on BBC Radio Berkshire

Well, we’ve had the longest day for 2008 and summer has officially begun, albeit a very windy start – the Yorkshire relatives had their plant pots blown away last week! On the radio slot this week we were talking about why we have seasons and of late it’s certainly felt like we’ve had all of these in a week or so (not quite as Crowded House sang about). It did remind me what interesting weather we have by virtue of being an island near a large ocean and continent in the mid-latitudes, and how lucky we are that we don’t have to battle the sort of severe weather that some parts of the world face this time of year.

Central Europe has been having some lively weather if the football coverage is anything to go by. But for a change, Glastonbury had a very sunny start. Tonight (Thursday) and Sunday might require the wellies to be unpacked, well at least the shower coat anyway. I noticed on Sunday that The Verve, Leonard Cohen, Neil Diamond and Gilbert O’Sullivan are playing – now there’s an eclectic music mix that sounds like the sort of thing you get when you put your iPod into Shuffle mode.

I’m a tennis fan so I’m hoping that we have some very seasonal summer weather for the next week of Wimbledon, but by all accounts it does look like we might be in for a shower or two on the middle Sunday and later in the second week. Let’s hope Andy Murray’s still out on the court braving the elements!

A Career in Meteorology - Where do we find our future Meteorologists?

2008-06-23T03:08:00.000-07:00

The Society has been a member of the Science Council since its inception. We have always felt that this was an important organisation to be part of and continue to be actively involved in several of its programmes of work, particularly strong evidence-based policy support, the development of science education, and showing young people what interesting career choices exist in science, and in particular meteorology.

I found this year’s Annual Science Council lecture really though provoking – it was on the topic of how to make science more interesting to young people. In part my interest was an issue of timing because we are thinking ourselves about how we might tackle this challenge as part of our new Education Strategy.

I was astonished to see that the findings show of those choosing science as a career, some 28% of children have made this choice by the age of 11 and 63% by the age of 14 – it really brought home to me how important it is to have good quality science teaching in primary and early secondary school, and not just at A-level. As a mathematician, I have to note this bit, those who do well in maths go on to succeed in the wider physical science disciplines. In fact, it turns out that the A-levels that make you most employable are Maths, Physics and one other – and that certainly true for those wanting to make a career in meteorology.

One interesting observation was how unstimulating some science lessons can be when they involve learning by rote rather than discovery, and that flashes and bangs might be all well and good, but if you are designing a science curriculum that appeals to both boys and girls, then it has to look more widely to issues around how science can be used to address some of the difficult and challenging global problems we face. And there are many examples we can point to that also make stronger links with learning ‘outside the classroom’ and from ‘peer-to-peer’.

I think meteorology offers all of this. I guess there is too much to mention in specifics here, so I’ll return to this later in the summer, but if you would like to find out more about how people have made a career in meteorology, then you can visit our ‘Spotlight on Careers’ at ‘http://www.rmets.org/activities/careers/’.

Royal Met Soc AGM- it’s that time of year again

2008-06-20T03:00:00.000-07:00

Watch a Youtube Video of the AGM

It was my second AGM last week since being in the job. It is always a busy time for the HQ team, close to our last Council before the summer break and the start of the new term. And it always signals change for us, with new editions to the Council team, and with this year a new President-elect, Professor Julia Slingo. Julia is based at Reading University and one of her many roles includes the National Centre for Atmospheric Science’s Director of Climate Research. We were particularly delighted to see Julia received the OBE this year in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for her services to Climate Science.

One of our members said to me last week that I seemed to be “enjoying the AGM far too much”. I confessed that I did for a number of reasons. The first is that it was an opportunity to share with the broader membership our achievements in the year (which the HQ team are very proud of) and bring to a conclusion the latest phase of changes to our governance structures, which we have invested a lot of commitment in over recent times. We’ll say more about that in our Members Handbook which we will; be sending out in the Autumn.

The second is actually being able to meet and talk to the membership, to hear your thoughts on how we are doing (there is nothing like some personal feedback) and to share a common enthusiasm for what we are all trying to achieve with the Society for meteorology. We offer lots of personal benefits to membership, but it was a useful reminder that because of our members the Society is able to do much more for meteorology as a science and a profession. Myself and Liz (that’s Liz Bentley, our Head of Communications who started with us this year) have been talking recently about how we can tell members more about what the Society does for the wider community by virtue of the help and support we receive through membership.

Thirdly, we had our Annual Awards to celebrate success, which is something that (in a very British way) I believe we don’t do enough of. I know I’m biased, but sharing a drink with friends and colleagues at the end of the day at our awards reception reminded me very much of why meteorology is such a great community to work in.

What is Wind?

2008-06-13T02:42:00.001-07:00

It’s Father’s Day on Sunday (too late for a card now!), but the weekend is also the European Wind Energy weekend. I was asked one of those simple yet hard to explain questions like why is the sky blue (for a later week’s discussions) this week - why are there winds? Well, the answer I gave was very simply the air moves from points of high pressure to points of low pressure, which creates our wind – of course it’s a lot more complicated than simply describing what we call ‘the pressure gradient force’, but that’s basically why we have wind.

The air doesn’t always manage to move directly from High to Low pressure because it can be affected by the wider scale flow of our atmosphere (on the big scale) and local temperature differences (on a small scale), so like lots of things in meteorology we have effects going on at many levels or as we call it spatial scales.

Speaking of scales, and we like our measuring scales in meteorology, we have lots of ways of measuring winds. The most famous of course is the Beaufort Scale (named after its inventor Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort) which measures wind in a range 0 (clam) to 12 (hurricane force). For stronger winds, specifically for tornadoes, we have the Fujita scale after Ted Fujita (or more correctly now the Enhanced Fujita scale), which goes from EF1 to EF5 and relates to the scale of damage, and we have the Saffir-Simpson scale for Hurricanes, which goes from Category 1 to the most severe at Category 5.

One strong wind that has become more commonly talked about in a few recent TV documentaries is the Jet Stream (or more specifically the Polar Jet Stream). This is a very strong jet of air that travels at great speed high up in the atmosphere, in fact about 10km up (or for those of you not yet metric, that’s just over 6 miles up). This jet stream can often bring bad weather across the Atlantic to the UK, and last summer in particular when the jet was over the UK (instead of its more usual northerly summer position) we saw some pretty unseasonally wet and windy weather.

I once read that if we could harness just 1% of the power of the jet stream then we would have enough energy to power the world’s current energy needs – but 10km is a heck of a long power cable!

Meteorological Training

2008-06-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

Sitting on a train returning from another fascinating visit to the Royal Navy’s school for training their weather forecasters I felt bound to capture a few thoughts on the day.

The visit was to talk more broadly about the development of professional accreditation for the sector as a whole. One topic we did specifically discuss was the ideas the Society has for a new professional charter qualification, the Chartered Meteorological Technician (CMetTech).

The idea behind this is to offer a new professional development pathway for those people who undertake a range of very important tasks around observing equipment and measurement, helping to prepare and deliver analysis and forecast products, and providing support to customers of meteorological information.

Sitting along side the Society’s existing CMetTech, this would mirror the new WMO classifications of: WMO Meteorologist; and WMO Meteorological Technician

As well as being great hosts, I was also left with the impression of how professional their training school and instructors are. The pride they take in the important work that they do, and what a talented and experienced group of instructors they have – with a clear passion for meteorology.

The training school, based at HMNB Devonport in Plymouth, equip the Navy’s officers and ratings with the skills to provide the wide range of meteorological and hydrographic services required by the Navy. Many of those who pass through this school go on to provide invaluable operational services and when they return to civilian life are very much valued by the weather service providers as top quality forecasters and observers.

In our book, a career in meteorology is well worth following.

Snow on 2nd June?

2008-06-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

On the radio programme this week we were talking about the climatology of
2nd June, with particular reference to the Coronation in 1953. In planning the big day the Palace approached the Met Office to recommend a day with ‘the most suitable’ weather. The Met Office suggested the 2nd June as climatologically the sunniest and mildest day of the year – ideal for a coronation event. As we know the Palace decided on this day, and also as we meteorologists know, there is a distinct difference between weather and climate – needless to say it poured down all day!

Phil Kennedy, the radio presenter whose show we appear in, said that his wife (whose birthday is on this day) recalls snow on 2nd June in 1975, which stopped a cricket match at Lords. I have not had a chance to check this out yet, but it is on my list to look up the daily weather summary on my next visit to the Met Office. It did also start me thinking what was the latest snowfall that we have ever experienced in the UK, with, I suspect, some very different answers for Scotland and the rest of the UK?

Andrew's Sky Question - The impact of haze on sky photographs

2008-06-01T01:20:00.000-07:00

We had a question from an Andrew about haze and the impact it has on his photos of the sky. Andrew, we did not catch your phone number on the message you left so please get in touch again on 0118 9568 500 and we’d be delighted to talk with you further.

However to try and anticipate your question; haziness can have several possible causes. It can be caused by smoke or dust in the atmosphere, or a more general heavy aerosol content. It’s when you have large aerosol content that the light is scattered at sunset to produce the sometimes spectacular red and orange skies. I’m no photographer, but I’m told that because it scatters red wavelengths less. Photographers often use yellow filters in hazy conditions to enhance the image contrast.

Haze has an internationally recognised meteorological classification as distinct from fog and mist, which are more related to the water vapour in the atmosphere. Haze is more commonly a dry air feature. Very dense haze is known as smog.

Bank Holiday Weather

2008-05-30T07:16:00.003-07:00

If you were in the more Northern parts of the UK you probably enjoyed the sunny Bank Holiday weather, but not so for us southerners (sorry Dad I’m not betraying my northern roots), being bashed around by some truly dreadful wet and windy weather. Not being able to do any of the things we had planned for the long weekend, like the garden (so it is true that every cloud does have a silver lining!), I was searching around on the internet to see if I could find some information of weather observations for Bank Holidays – no luck.

With the help of John Prior, Head of the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre (NCIC), I did find this interesting site ‘http://www.booty.org.uk/booty.weather/metinfo/NFL/Lspring.htm’. If anyone has any interesting comments on the meteorology or perhaps interestingly a climatology of Bank Holidays then I’d be interested to hear about it.

By the way, keep an eye out for the analysis of May weather that will be issued next week by the NCIC. I suspect we are in for some interesting rainfall percentages across the UK.

What are the real benefits of being a member of the Society?

2008-05-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

This week the Society launched its new project to look at both developing the benefits of Society Membership and to investigate whether we should look to broaden the opportunity for members with a more general interest in the weather to be able to have stronger links with the Society. There are some really interesting concepts in here about the future direction of the Society – but that’s for a later blog entry.

The starting point for our discussions at the Project Board was to review the current list of benefits. It’s the first time I’ve seen us list all of them in one place, and several things struck me. The first was how many we have. The second, which follows on almost immediately, was how bad we are at publicising all these. For example did you know that as a Member of the Society you are entitles to discounts on computer software, Wiley books and weather instruments from the Weather Shop if ordered through the Society.

The third thing that occurred to me was how many members we have that join the Society, not necessarily to take advantage of the personal benefits, but to support their professional and learned Society and the work it does for meteorology. Whilst they may not benefit directly certainly Meteorology does.

For instance our work with the Science Council and Government in improving the quality of curriculum resources that foster children’s interest in studying science that’s well taught in the classroom, helping to promote careers in science and funding programmes that help those scientist convert into meteorology, the development of professional qualification and accreditation schemes that drive up the standard in service provision and instrumentation, the contribution we make to groups like the UK Flight Safety Committee, and our work to support the policy work of Government and the Select Committees of Parliament, with some interesting work recently on the Climate Change Bill.

That’s only some of the work we do behind the scenes, and (although we can always be better at what we do) it reminded me of what a fantastic organisation the Society is, what influence it does carry and what an interesting and rewarding job I have.

Have you heard our regular weather slot on the radio?

2008-05-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

For eight weeks now I have been contributing to a regular weekly weather discussion slot on BBC Radio Berkshire at 6.20 pm on a Wednesday evening.
I was a little apprehensive initially about making such a commitment, but so far I have enjoyed it and I hope managed to encourage (at least in small part) a greater general interest in something that has fascinated me for a lot of my life.

A couple of weeks ago we talked about the tropical cyclone that had then just hit Burma, and the week before last Roger Brugge joined us from the Climatological Observers Link to give an interesting commentary on Berkshire weather. Last week we spoke about how mercury is being discontinued in thermometers. We got onto a bit of the history of thermometers and talked about the fact that the first thermometer was a water thermometer invented by Galileo – which a number of people have a modern-day version of in their house. You can see one in the picture.

One of the hardest parts of doing this is having to think of a new topic to talk about each week, so if you have any ideas please let me know – any suggestions would be gratefully received.

Climate change becomes fashionable

2008-05-23T04:20:00.000-07:00

It is probably an odd entry to begin a blog with, but I wanted to say a few words about the ASBCI’s Annual Clothing and Textiles Conference which I gave a talk at last week. The conference is for those working across the fashion sector, from the chemists involved in developing new high tech textiles through buyers for high street stores to the designers.

The theme of their conference this year was the impact of weather and climate on the industry – and I gave a keynote talk on climate change and seasonal forecasting.

I was pleased to have taken the time to go. It is an audience that we would not normally connect with and as well as debunking some of the climate myths and misconceptions, it was also a valuable opportunity for me to profile the work of our .Corporate Member weather service providers within this important part of the retail sector. I had some very valuable discussions in the margins of the meeting, but what struck me most of all is how much is lacking from our knowledge of regional climate that is actually practically useful to such retail businesses who operate in global markets and supply chains