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.

Mountain Meteorology in Action

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

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.

Weather, Smog and the Beijing Olympics

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!

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

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/’.

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.