knocker

Very interesting posts Coast. Don't know whether anyone has mentioned it but there is an interesting article "The history of Biggin Hill met. office" by W.S. Pike in Weather magazine April 2005, Vol, 60, No. 4. A brief snippet. "The savage German air attacks during August 1940 (from Eagle Day on the 13th onwards) were specifically directed at Dowding's No. 11 Group Fighter Command airfields in south-east England, and Biggin Hill was hit twice on the 30th. Three of the four met. office observers were killed as they took shelter underground at about 1710 GMT in the second (low-level) raid. In fact, these were all three people who had written the hourly weather observations in the large pocket register, namely Norman Arthur Roberts (Observer in Charge). Leading Aircraftman Thomas Charles Joseph Brunning and Leading Aircraftman Edwin Henry Frederick Butfield. Following an immediate decision that the airfield was to be evacuated by all but essential personnel, the surviving observer (R. H. Jessop) rescued the pocket register from the damaged met. office building and, for the next few days, maintained rudimentary observations without instruments "from a house on the northern edge of the airfield" (note by Jessop in the register). This was likely to have been in a small row of houses by the bend in the main road to Bromley".

Probably not to the second question but I'm very reluctantly beginning to think it's the lesser of two evils. A german power plant has started testing CO2-scrubbing algae. I wonder how much this would reduce emissions. I have to admit I'm a tad doubtful that the MIT figures will be repeated in practice. http://www.physorg.com/news199006396.html

A further extract from the transcript of the talk by P. G. Ratcliff on the Meteorological reconnaissance flights may be of interest. "Well, you will need to know something about the typical type of sortie; the long-range sortie involved an outward leg of 700 n.mi. at 950 millibars, with observations at 50 nautical mile intervals and additional sea level observations at every fourth position. There was a climb at the terminal position, after the sea level observations, to 500 millibars with temperature observations every 50 millibars and a top leg of .seven positions, followed by a descent to sea level, again with a sounding. Finally a low-level leg at 950 millibars or in stormy conditions, with very low MSL pressures, a low level section flown at, say, 920 or 930 millibars. Now a point to make about that viewfoil you see there. There were no definitive reconnaissance tracks; they were constantly being modified to suit operational requirements, as were times of the terminal ascent, and a number of flights which were originally straight out-and-return tracks were modified to a triangular form. So those tracks displayed were only nominal -in case of the nitpickers! And if I may go off-track for a minute, excuse the pun, there was no definitive Met air observer or at least no-one of that trade who could be recognised as such from his uniform. This anomaly arose because the men in the first four or five training courses undertook a short air gunnery course at RAF Manby and on successful completion were awarded the Air Gunners brevet. That was fine but unfortunately the powers that be then decreed that the air gunnery course was an unnecessary part of the training. This meant that a significant number of Met air observers were denied a flying badge their first operational tour of some 800 flying hours. It took the personal intervention of Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, C-in-e Coastal Command, to put matters right and the Met air observers were finally awarded a flying badge of their own just before the end of the War. (the 'M' brevet). If I could now turn to one other very important flight which was the PAMPA Flight which I think we could call Weather Photo Intelligence Flight. I am not sure about their installation of fixed cameras but I certainly know they carried hand-held cameras just to prove their point to the forecaster when they got back from their sorties! The PAMPA Flights operated over enemy territory; originally there were two Spitfires with No 1401 who you remember had moved to Bircham Newton. Later on an establishment of Mosquitos was approved with a two-man crew, pilot and navigator, who also operated as the Met air observer. They commenced operations about Hay 1942 and then soon after that No 1401 Flight was up-graded to become 521 Squadron and in the Spring of 1943 the whole PAMPA operation was split-off from 521 Squadron and the aircraft and crews moved to Oakington to become 1409 Met Flight which was part of No 8 Group R.A.F. Pathfinder Force".

johnholmes said: I'll have a search C but I suspect that weather forecasting during the B-o-B was pretty rudimentary. The WAAFS plotting data is fine its just how much detail other than over the UK was available and then the forecasters ability to forecast for 12-24 hours ahead. anyway I'll have a look around. I know that later in the war met recce flights became routine into various sectors of the Atlantic and, I think, Mosquito aircraft were sometimes fitted with weather recording data when they flew over after a bombing raid to collect photo evidence of damage. I don't know whether this image of filght routes is of interest. It's taken from a talk by P.G.Rackcliff. A small extract from the talk may also be of interest. . "It would be very untoward not to refer to some of the pioneers in a talk of this nature and you will hear Alec Haslam's name repeated again, but I think we need to go back to Capt C K M Douglas* of the Royal Flying Corps who was with 15 Squadron in France in 1916 and later with 34 Squadron. Douglas took every opportunity to record temperature and cloud observations, and although wounded and posted to Home Command where he also undertook some observations in UK, he was back in France in 1918 and joined the Meteor Flight at Berek, which obtained upper air data for the Meteorological Section of the Royal Engineers, under the command of Lieut-Col E Gold who was probably well known to many of you" * Later to become senior fore caster at CFO, Dunstable. Mention of Capt. C. K. M. Douglas brings to mind the the most important forecast ever made. I refer to the forecast for Operation Overlord. I've been scratching around for a booklet I have by Dr. Stagg on the subject to no avail. Peter Cockroft has written a brief account: http://www.bbc.co.uk...r_feature.shtml

Interesting article. Apparently there are plans to have an industrial scale plant up and running by 2011 in the UK, and for the cement to be mainstream by 2014-15. http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/382357/carbon_from_pollutant_to_potential_resource.html

I think carbon capture is a non starter for a number of reasons and is basically being trumpeted by the coal lobby. Just to take a couple. Firstly, independent analysis suggests that that full-scale commercial implementation of carbon capture will not occur until 2030. Even if it worked the time scale is far too long. Secondly, as Clive Hamilton points out, the scale of the proposed carbon capture enterprise is vast. “By 2050 some 6000 underground carbon dioxide repositories, each receiving a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, will need to be in operation. Carbon capture supporters frequently point to the Sleipner project as proof that the technology can work. Located over a gas and oil well in the North Sea, the Sleipner storage project separates carbon dioxide from natural gas produced from the Sleipner West gas field and injects it into a large saline formation some 800 metres below the seabed.(This does not, of course, eliminate the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere when the natural gas is later burned to generate energy.) Jeff Goodell writes: It is an enormous engineering project deploying one of the largest offshore platforms in the world. But compared to the engineering effort that would be required to stabilise the climate, it's nothing. It would take 10 Sleipner-size carbon dioxide storage projects to offset the annual emissions of a single big coal plant. An even more striking indication of the size of the enterprise comes from energy expert Vaclav Smil. He calculates that in order to capture just a quarter of the emissions from the world's coal-fired power plants we would need a system of pipelines that would transport a volume of fluid twice the size of the global crude-oil industry". Ref: Tony Hamilton, Requiem for a Species, P. 163

I'm not sure that whether we fare better or not is the correct question to ask. That may be "should we even be considering going down any route that is fraught with unknowns (as you point out) at all"? It smacks of a quick fix to me. As Clive Hamilton points out, instead of decoupling growth of the economy from growth of carbon emissions, the climate engineers want to decouple global warming from growth of carbon emissions. The Royal Society has published the findings of a major study into geoengineering the climate http://royalsociety.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=10768

I must admit that the latest proposal for geoengineering has only recently caught my eye and I have to say I’m completely underwhelmed. It smacks a little of the proposal some years ago that marine phytoplankton growth might be stimulated by fertilising surface waters of the North East Pacific, the Equatorial Pacific, and the Southern Ocean (an area a of over 10% of the world’s ocean). These waters contain abundant nitrate and phosphate, but support an unusually low biomass. It was thought that this was due to lack of iron so the idea of iron enrichment of surface waters was born, thus increasing the biomass, and sequestration of CO2 from the atmosphere. Anyway back to the latest: In 1892 Edvard Munch witnessed a blood-red sunset over Oslo, Norway. Shaken by it, he wrote in his diary that he felt "a great, unending scream piercing through nature". The incident inspired him to create his most famous painting, The Scream. The striking sunset was probably caused by the eruption of Krakatoa, which sent a massive plume of ash and gas into the upper atmosphere, turning sunsets red around the globe and cooling the Earth by more than a degree. Now a powerful group of scientists, venture capitalists and conservative think tanks is coalescing around the idea of reproducing this cooling effect by injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to counter climate change. Despite the enormity of what is being proposed - nothing less than seizing control of the climate - the public has been almost entirely excluded from the planning. http://www.countercurrents.org/hamilton240710.htm A more detailed article. http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of-stratospheric-geoengineering.ars I view this with much trepidation.

Agreed but I'm not sure I get the point you are making.

111600z Temp 16.9 Wind NW 10mph Vis. 35km Pressure 1017 rising. Quite a pleasant afternoon with about !/8 of Cu at 2500' and 5/8 of Sc at 4000'

The senior forecaster I referred too in my post was talking specifically about the current heatwave in Russia. It wasn't a general discussion about past heatwaves and the position of the jet.

There was a senior forecaster from the Met. Office on the Today programme this morning explaining the weather in Russia and the heavy monsoons in Pakistan. In simple terms it's down to our old friend the jet stream being much further south than normal (I think he said it's around the Nepal Plateau) which in effect 'traps' the very hot air over Russia and has led to the tragic events in Pakistan. I've attached the 111200z 250mb wind chart for Russia. Well I think I have. I'm having a bit of trouble learning the procedure. How do you upload an image to the forum?Are, seems to work.

I was on a weather ship out in the Atlantic in the early seventies and a depression of 923mb (from memory) went shooting through. I drew the short straw and had to fill the upper air balloon. No joke being out the lower open deck with the wind gusting over 100kts and seventy foot seas crashing over the ship. Looking back it amazes me that no one was killed on weather ships over the years.

You can keep your cold winters. I still remember working at Larkhill Met. Office during the 1963/3 winter with 20 foot snow drifts and no heating in the office or the radar. Talk about cold; brass monkeys weren't even in the frame.