Weather Records and Average Temperatures

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.

My New Meteorological Watch

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.

Bank Holiday Weather

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.

Have you heard our regular weather slot on the radio?

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.