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!
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Can we enjoy the Cricket in our BBQ Summer?
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.
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.
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
It's good to see that people are interested in clouds again
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?
Clouds are truly fascinating things, whether you are a student of physics or just a casual admirer. To a trained eye they can tell you a lot about what’s happening in the atmosphere and to an untrained eye there is a lot to enjoy about the aesthetics of how something as simple as water can create such beauty. Clouds have deep cultural references in our society; they have inspired paintings, poetry, and yet we somehow seem to have lost touch with them.
If you are a sailor or a pilot you probably keep a close eye on what the clouds are doing, but most of us don’t pay, much attention at all. In times gone by when many of us spent more of our working day outside we would read the clouds as a way of knowing what to expect for the day and possibly the next. But over the generations we’ve become more detached from the environment around us. However there is no excuse; so come on teachers, take those children out of the classroom for half an hour and teach them to look up and record what they see – you can even send me a note about it here at the Society and we’ll put in on our website.
Over recent days there has been a lot of news coverage about the naming of a new cloud variety – something which hasn’t happened for over 50 years – and the name being proposed is ‘Aspiratus’, which I think is quite appropriate if you look at the images of these clouds (http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/gallery/index.php?x=browse&category=52&pagenum=1).
Clouds are one of the few things that are free for all of us to enjoy. When was the last time that you spent a spare 5 minutes and just looked skyward?
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Weather and Flu
I was talking on the radio this week about relationships between weather and flu and it occurred to me with all our advances in medical sciences there is still a lot we don’t know about things that are common to us, like the flu virus.
That’s not to do down the virologists as we know a lot of technical information about the virus and that it has different strains (this swine flu appears to be from the H1 N1 strain) and how viruses generally transmit across large populations thanks to some clever epidemiological studies - that by the way use the same mathematics that model the spread of new technologies, like the iPod, across populations. However we don’t really know how viruses interact with the environment in detail.
Take the weather for example. We know flu peaks in the winter months in Europe (between December and March in the northern hemisphere to be a bit more precise), but what we don’t know is whether that is due to changes in things like temperature and the UV in sunlight directly, or simply that it’s how people respond to these changing weather conditions that help transmission. For example, people tend to congregate indoors more in the winter months, where a greater number of people are in closer proximity and often humidity is higher (which perhaps helps the virus survive).
Almost certainly humidity is a factor in virus lifetime and transmission. We can see that in the tropics the flu cycle is much extended beyond the winter months, in large part because of the humidity.
After all that technical detail, the best defence we have is to wash our hands. How often does solving a difficult problem come back to basics!
That’s not to do down the virologists as we know a lot of technical information about the virus and that it has different strains (this swine flu appears to be from the H1 N1 strain) and how viruses generally transmit across large populations thanks to some clever epidemiological studies - that by the way use the same mathematics that model the spread of new technologies, like the iPod, across populations. However we don’t really know how viruses interact with the environment in detail.
Take the weather for example. We know flu peaks in the winter months in Europe (between December and March in the northern hemisphere to be a bit more precise), but what we don’t know is whether that is due to changes in things like temperature and the UV in sunlight directly, or simply that it’s how people respond to these changing weather conditions that help transmission. For example, people tend to congregate indoors more in the winter months, where a greater number of people are in closer proximity and often humidity is higher (which perhaps helps the virus survive).
Almost certainly humidity is a factor in virus lifetime and transmission. We can see that in the tropics the flu cycle is much extended beyond the winter months, in large part because of the humidity.
After all that technical detail, the best defence we have is to wash our hands. How often does solving a difficult problem come back to basics!
Friday, 24 April 2009
Living in Different Climates
I’m recently back from Miami and a tour of some of the Caribbean islands on holiday. Great holiday and my first time to the Caribbean. Travelling south in the Caribbean Sea it occurred to me that I wouldn’t want to live in a tropical climate. I would miss the seasons. They do have changes in the weather – very hot, or very wet and very hot! It’s nice for a holiday, but it wouldn’t be for me as a way of life. I like the variability that our seasons bring - even, like this week, when I get wet through walking into the office.
We adapt to our weather pretty well in the UK, except for the occasional snow flurry, but it doesn’t really impact on our way of life in a big way! I’ve seen written that weather has a £2 – 3 billion impact on our economy each year on average, and individual events can have equally large and comparable financial and social impacts.
Businesses can now buy a wide range of services to lessen the impacts of weather on their performance (it’s no longer a feasible excuse for a business to use to their shareholders for poor performance). The Public Weather Service provides the variety of weather warnings we see on the web, TV and hear on radio that helps us manage our own lives. But that’s certainly not as simple in some countries who suffer the impacts of significant and severe weather on a regular basis. It does genuinely affect the way people live their lives and I think, interestingly, the way in which those countries will choose to move forward in their own growth and development that will certainly be founded in very different cultural (weather-driven) roots.
Now I need to balance out my reflections with something a little less philosophical so here is the temperature profiles for my flights as my regular blog readers have come to expect of me. These show my descents out of Amsterdam at 1237 UTC on 11 April (as I flew via here) and then into Miami at 2300 GMT on the same day.
You can see from the plot that although much later in the day, the atmosphere is quite a bit warmer all the way through the troposphere. The zero degrees C isotherm was almost 2 km higher in Miami in the late evening than it was in Amsterdam around midday. You can probably also tell from the profiles that it was a pretty smooth take-off and landing.
My hope is that you’ll be encouraged to collect the same information when you next take a flight and send it to the blog.
We adapt to our weather pretty well in the UK, except for the occasional snow flurry, but it doesn’t really impact on our way of life in a big way! I’ve seen written that weather has a £2 – 3 billion impact on our economy each year on average, and individual events can have equally large and comparable financial and social impacts.
Businesses can now buy a wide range of services to lessen the impacts of weather on their performance (it’s no longer a feasible excuse for a business to use to their shareholders for poor performance). The Public Weather Service provides the variety of weather warnings we see on the web, TV and hear on radio that helps us manage our own lives. But that’s certainly not as simple in some countries who suffer the impacts of significant and severe weather on a regular basis. It does genuinely affect the way people live their lives and I think, interestingly, the way in which those countries will choose to move forward in their own growth and development that will certainly be founded in very different cultural (weather-driven) roots.
Now I need to balance out my reflections with something a little less philosophical so here is the temperature profiles for my flights as my regular blog readers have come to expect of me. These show my descents out of Amsterdam at 1237 UTC on 11 April (as I flew via here) and then into Miami at 2300 GMT on the same day.
You can see from the plot that although much later in the day, the atmosphere is quite a bit warmer all the way through the troposphere. The zero degrees C isotherm was almost 2 km higher in Miami in the late evening than it was in Amsterdam around midday. You can probably also tell from the profiles that it was a pretty smooth take-off and landing.
My hope is that you’ll be encouraged to collect the same information when you next take a flight and send it to the blog.
Wednesday, 25 March 2009
The Winter of 2008/09 and Spring 2009
The official statistics on the winter were produced by the Met Office's national climate information centre last week and confirmed that it was indeed a 'cold winter' - well at least colder that we have been used to since 1995/96 in England and Wales and 1996/97 in the UK, with temperatures 0.5 deg C below the 30-year average. The rainfall was more marked with some areas of the UK recording less than 70% of the average rainfall for the period.
But perhaps the thing that will stick in the minds of most of us was the significant snowfall in the first week of February which brought depths of snow greater than 15 cm across many parts of the UK. The last time we had a winter snowfall of that size was in February 1991.
Enough of weather-past. We had the Vernal Equinox at the weekend signalling Spring is with us now - so what should we expect? Well the latest Met Office seasonal forecast is suggesting that it will be a near or slightly below average Spring for temperatures and rainfall. But what is an average Spring I hear you say. For temperature that's an average of 7.4 deg C and for rainfall that's about 232 mm (or around 9 inches) in total across the three months from March to May.
If you had to guess the wettest Spring month what would it be - you might say April because of the old adage April showers bring forth May flowers, but actually its March. March accounts for 96 mm of our rainfall on average, April some 70 mm and around 66 mm in May - so you can see March is wetter by quite a bit. May as it happens is our driest and sunniest month of the year on average. That's probably enough weather statistics for one entry.
But perhaps the thing that will stick in the minds of most of us was the significant snowfall in the first week of February which brought depths of snow greater than 15 cm across many parts of the UK. The last time we had a winter snowfall of that size was in February 1991.
Enough of weather-past. We had the Vernal Equinox at the weekend signalling Spring is with us now - so what should we expect? Well the latest Met Office seasonal forecast is suggesting that it will be a near or slightly below average Spring for temperatures and rainfall. But what is an average Spring I hear you say. For temperature that's an average of 7.4 deg C and for rainfall that's about 232 mm (or around 9 inches) in total across the three months from March to May.
If you had to guess the wettest Spring month what would it be - you might say April because of the old adage April showers bring forth May flowers, but actually its March. March accounts for 96 mm of our rainfall on average, April some 70 mm and around 66 mm in May - so you can see March is wetter by quite a bit. May as it happens is our driest and sunniest month of the year on average. That's probably enough weather statistics for one entry.
Friday, 13 March 2009
Who said meteorology isn't a laugh a minute? Weather and Meteorological Jokes
So here are some of the best jokes we had in for our Comic Relief challenge - 'best' meaning arbitrarily selected by me but probably gives you an indication of how bad the others were!
Why was the cloud late for work - because he mist the bus
What do you call a sheep with no legs - a cloud
Two weather satellite antennas got married, the wedding was good but the reception was fantastic
and my personal favourite (which is cheating because its really a glaciologists joke):
A guy walks into the doctors with a piece of lettuce sticking out of the top of his shirt. The doctor says that looks nasty and the guy says that's just the tip of the iceberg!
Why was the cloud late for work - because he mist the bus
What do you call a sheep with no legs - a cloud
Two weather satellite antennas got married, the wedding was good but the reception was fantastic
and my personal favourite (which is cheating because its really a glaciologists joke):
A guy walks into the doctors with a piece of lettuce sticking out of the top of his shirt. The doctor says that looks nasty and the guy says that's just the tip of the iceberg!
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