Weather and Climate Jokes

In aid of Comic Relief on Friday 13th March we are publishing a list of our favourite weather and climate jokes. So if you’d like to send any in to us you can do so at chief.exec@rmets.org – I’m sure we are going to have an entertaining time deciding on our best ones, which we will also be including on our BBC Radio Berkshire broadcast on Wednesday 11th March, so make sure to listen in.

Spring is here - at least in the meteorological sense

No we haven’t redefined the astronomical calendar! Spring officially is still 21 March (the equinox – 12 hours of equal day and night), but in meteorology we think of the seasons in whole months. For us Spring is March to May, Summer is June to August, Autumn is September to November and Winter is December to February.

Two things to look out for: see the latest Met Office Spring 2009 forecasts (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/monthsahead/seasonal/2009/spring.html) and also if you haven’t seen it, it is interesting to look at the KEW 100 (http://data.kew.org/wild/phenology/). The KEW 100 is an index that follows the flowering of different plant species and how that responds to changes in the weather (and of course over longer periods climate).

The KEW 100 is a more recent index taken from a much longer record going back over a hundred years at least. The Royal Met Society used to publish the UK-wide phenological (species flowering) records as early as the 1870s.

The Society and Chocolate

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

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!

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

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

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.