Weather Eye

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April 28, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

NEW research reveals that lawns may contribute to carbon pollution and the greenhouse effect.

The study at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US indicates that one third of emissions is from power generation, another third is from vehicles, and the rest is from fossil fuels used in factories, office buildings, homes and for domestic activities such as mowing the lawn.

Lawns use a surprising amount of energy, in manufacturing and transporting fertiliser, and the gases emitted from the fertilised lawns; and grass that grows faster needs to be mowed more often, making more pollution.

Fertilising an acre of lawn at a recommended dose produces carbon pollution equivalent to that of a family car driven for about 440 miles.

Gregg Marland, one of the study’s researchers, said: “Energy use is embodied in everything that we use and buy.

From producing the latest in shoes to building cars and home improvement products, it all requires electricity and power plants to generate that electricity.

“And just because you may not be burning the fossil fuel yourself, don’t kid yourself into thinking that someone isn’t burning it on your behalf.”

Link to Weather Eye source

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April 29, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THIS week’s thunderstorms terrified many cats and dogs.

But many owners say that their pets also forecast thunderstorms. A greyhound belonging to a friend of mine was whimpering and inconsolable hours before Tuesday’s huge storm broke.

One theory is that dogs respond to the build-up of electrical charges in the air before a thunderstorm.

Owners are advised to let dogs shelter inside cars because the metallic body insulates its interior from static electricity.

There are many stories of cats running around wildly before storms. One farmer near the town of Lawrence, Kansas, reported that his cat moved her kittens to another farm more than a mile away. The next day a tornado struck and destroyed his barn; afterwards the cat and her litter returned.

Certainly, many animals appear to pick up signals from the environment that we are unaware of.

There are hundreds of reports of pets behaving wildly before an earthquake strikes, and so many disappear that one geologist in San Francisco set up an earthquake prediction service based on unusually high numbers of adverts for missing pets in local newspapers.

Link to Weather Eye source

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April 30, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

WE have had a week of spectacular thunderstorms. On Monday, parts of Worcester were hit by 43mm (1.7in) of rain — the equivalent of an entire month’s rainfall in two hours — causing flash floods up to 3ft (0.9m) deep.

Tuesday’s cloudburst in London left cars marooned and hundreds of homes flooded. In North London lightning blasted two houses and set them on fire.

These were described by some of the press as “freak” storms, but the downbursts came from slow-moving weather fronts, giving the rain plenty of time to fall over local areas.

In fact, these cloudbursts are expected to become more common in future as climate change pumps more energy into the atmosphere and stokes up intense thunderstorms.

There was one truly freak event on Monday, though. A ball of light was seen over Brecon, South Wales, before it hit a house in a massive ground-shaking explosion which sent bricks flying in a huge shower of sparks.

This was a case of ball lightning, a rare and mysterious phenomenon thought to involve a ball of plasma generated by strong thunderstorms.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 1, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

FIFTY years ago, American scientists announced that they had turned sunlight into electricity on a commercial scale using a solar cell.

Daryl Chapin, Gerald Pearson and Calvin Fuller made a photoelectric cell using wafers of silicon, and generated enough electricity to run a transistor radio.

The photoelectric effect was discovered first in 1839 by a 19-year-old French physicist, Edmond Becquerel, who found that some metals made electricity when struck by sunlight. In 1904 Albert Einstein began to explain how this phenomenon worked, setting the stage for the quantum theory of light, which led to a Nobel prize.

Today, solar electric cells are one of the great hopes for making power without pollution. The resource is truly colossal: 20 days of sunshine falling on the Earth is equivalent to all the energy stored in the world’s reserves of coal, oil and natural gas.

Solar panels are becoming cheaper, more efficient and easily available for homes.

For more information about their installation, and the grants which are available, go to http://www.est.org.uk/solar/ or contact the Energy Saving Trust on 0800 2983978.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 3, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

MY FAVOURITE fish and chip shop is suffering from global warming. Rising sea temperatures are pushing up the price of cod, when years ago it was cheap and plentiful.

Cod larvae need to eat plankton but the waters off the West Coast have turned so warm that their normal plankton supply has disappeared, leaving the fish larvae hungry. Add to that the overfishing of adult cod and you have a recipe for disaster.

The seas around Britain are warming so much that our cod is being replaced by exotic creatures such as tuna, John Dory and red mullet, more typical of the Mediterranean.

Even a tropical sunfish was spotted swimming past an oilrig off the coast of Aberdeen a couple of years ago.

Those newcomers are advancing up from England and Wales towards the Scottish coast at a rate of about 30 miles each year. But the chances of getting British tuna and chips on the high street are remote; the numbers of all the new fish will not make up the loss of cod stocks.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 6, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE thunderstorms crashing down on Britain this week reminded me of their awesome power.

A thundercloud generates immense electrical stresses capable of building up to 100 million volts charged up between the top and bottom of the cloud.

Eventually that charge bursts through the air with a lightning strike. It can surge up to 40,000 amps, around a million volts, with temperatures of 30,000C (50,000F), five times hotter than the Sun.

Lightning starts off as an electrical leakage about the thickness of a pencil feeding down from the cloud. At the same time, a stream of charges rise up from the ground, usually from trees, church spires or other high points.

When the two streamers meet up they complete an electrical circuit and a lightning stroke instantly shoots upwards at 129 million metres per second (422 million ft per sec).

A lightning bolt has up to 40 zigzag strokes between cloud and the ground, about 30 microseconds each, but all we see is a flickering light. Thunderstorms are fairly few in Britain, but worldwide it is estimated that 100 lightning flashes strike every second, every day, from 44,000 thunderstorms.

Information thanks to the BBC Weather Website

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May 7, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“RAIN before seven, fine before eleven.”

This is quite a good piece of weather lore when fronts bringing rain often sweep through in a few hours, and it summed up the story earlier this week.

But now we are being plagued by sunshine and showers from convection, an explosive mixture of warm air bubbling up from the land and crashing into cold aloft, originally swept down from the Arctic. That has detonated some terrific downpours and thunderstorms.

Already Thames Water reports that the first four days of May had 40 per cent of the entire month’s average rainfall in their region, and follows a wet April when 152 per cent of normal rain fell.

All of which is helping to recharge sorely depleted water reserves from last year’s drought. But the rains are bad news for many farmers, and planting of the potato crop has been seriously delayed.

There is more wet weather to come, and this weekend looks like being damp and chilly, with the possibility of rains spilling into next week.

If it’s any consolation, much of western Europe is festooned with low pressure systems and the Mediterranean has had some atrocious weather.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 8, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THIS has not been a good week for anyone suffering from brontophobia — fear of thunder.

The sound of thunder comes from the immense heat made by a lightning bolt exploding gases in the air, sending a shockwave blasting out at about a mile in five seconds, the speed of sound. You can calculate how far away lightning is by counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder and dividing by five for miles, or three for kilometres.

Although thunder usually travels no further than 25km (15 miles), a world record may have been set on February 7, 1952, when a thunder roll was heard about 110km (70 miles) away east of Cape Town, South Africa; it took about six minutes to arrive after the lightning was seen.

Thunder can crack, crash or rumble. As Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest: “The thunder, that deep and dreadful organ pipe.” It loses its higher-pitched frequencies over long distances, leaving a rolling sound, and is also muffled in cloud and rain. This often explains why a strike can sound like a crash from the closest part of the lightning bolt, followed by a deep rumble from the furthest part.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 10, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

DIATOMS are the forgotten saviours of the planet. These microscopic algae swarm in the world’s seas and just one litre of seawater can contain up to 10 million diatoms.

Diatoms are so prolific they account for a quarter of all the photosynthesis on Earth, feeding on carbon dioxide and turning it into food. When the diatoms die, they sink to the bottom of oceans, carrying their cargo of carbon with them and effectively locking it away — although in a perverse twist, much of the oil we use today was originally tiny globules of oil stored inside diatoms, which over millions of years was squeezed out into oil deposits.

By locking away carbon, though, diatoms help cut down the greenhouse effect far more effectively than the world’s forests.

But diatoms also help cut global warming another way. They give off a gas called dimethyl sulfide, DMS, and new research reveals that they use this gas to protect themselves against damage from ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. The DMS then escapes into the atmosphere and breaks down into substances that helps water condense into cloud droplets. This makes more clouds, so less sunlight reaches the Earth and so the climate cools down.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 11, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“And then the dispossessed were drawn west ... dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry”

John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath

SEVENTY years ago this week an immense dust storm swept up from Montana and Wyoming after blistering heat and drought had parched the ground.

About 350 million tons of earth were whipped up into a black blizzard, trapping people in their homes gasping for air, while livestock and wildlife choked to death outside.

The dust cloud billowed up two miles high and eventually stretched 1,500 miles (2,400km) as far as New York, Washington and Atlanta, and ships 300 miles out in the Atlantic. The dust hung as a yellow haze across the country for days.

The Dust Bowl between 1931 and 1939 was the worst drought in US history, hitting more than three quarters of the country. Research now suggests that it was caused by a slightly warmer Atlantic Ocean pulling rain-bearing winds out to sea, while cooler Pacific waters sent drier air sweeping over the US. The worrying thing is that this weather pattern could happen again.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 12, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

TODAY is St Pancras Day, marking one of the “Ice Saints”: Mamertus, Pancras and Servatius, whose feast days are from May 11-13 respectively.

We don’t know much about these saints, but their days earned an icy reputation, so much so that many sheep farmers avoided shearing their flocks at this time.

An old saying goes: “He who shears his sheep before St Serviatus Day, loves his wool more than his sheep.”

Indeed, over the past century the Ice Saints have lived up to their reputation: it has snowed nine times in the mid-May, and even southern Britain has been hit by snow.

One of the most outrageously cold spells was May 1955.

Icy air and frost arrived on May 10, and four days later snow and sleet beat down.

Then, on May 17, a blizzard tore through the Midlands and South, and Birmingham suffered its worst May snowstorm for 60 years.

Even London had three hours of snow during the night, the last time that a substantial snow has fallen in May in the London area.

The frosts across Britain ended only on May 22.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 13, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

A TERRIFYING incident struck Brecon, South Wales, during an intense thunderstorm two weeks ago when a ball of light flew over the town and hit a building.

Since then, Andy Davis, a local resident, has launched an investigation into this extremely aggressive case of ball lightning and uncovered a wealth of new detail.

A huge white sphere floated down out of ink-black clouds hanging low over the town, hitting a house, smashing the chimney and hurling bricks on to cars about 30m (100ft) away. The ball itself disintegrated into lightning bolts that showered buildings within a quarter-mile radius.

Moments later a crack of thunder shook the ground. Soon after that, a streak of blue-coloured light shot through an office with a loud crackling noise, hit a pipe, bounced backwards and disappeared.

Throughout the town, shopping tills, computers and televisions were badly damaged. It was amazing that no one was injured.

The explanation for all this mayhem is a mystery, except that the storm had generated intense electrical activity. More details are at http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 14, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

SCOTLAND has enjoyed an impressive heatwave this past week.

On Wednesday Stornoway in the Western Isles was the sunniest place in Britain with 14 hours’ sunshine. Glasgow logged the highest temperature, 19C (66F), and on Monday soared to 22C (72F), beating Ibiza on 18C (64F).

The heat in Scotland also detonated some furious thunderstorms; a climber was killed by lightning and downpours set off flashfloods elsewhere. More unusual, on Sunday Altnaharra in the Highlands was Britain’s hottest place with 21C (70F), compared with Rome on 18C (64F). Altnaharra famously holds the joint record for the lowest temperature in Britain: -27.2C (-17F) on December 30, 1995.

On Saturday an even rarer event saw Baltasound in the Shetlands achieve Britain’s highest temperature, 19C (66F).

Usually our weather comes from westerlies off the Atlantic, but this time of year they often die away, leaving western Scotland surprisingly sunny and warm.

This recent heatwave came from northeasterly winds carrying warm air from Scandinavia, where a freak heatwave left Stockholm reaching an incredible 25C (77F) on Sunday.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 15, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

LAWNMOWERS and barbecues will make an appearance this weekend as high pressure from the Azores makes a welcome return and gently bakes Britain in warm, sunny weather.

The last time we saw an Azores high was about three weeks ago, but it did not stick around for long before being bumped off by vigorous depressions. This time the high pressure is more robust and should embrace the country for at least a few days and possibly much longer.

But why so much fuss over the Azores? These tiny volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic, about 800 miles west of Portugal, are home to a vast high- pressure system over the summer.

That high pressure forms when air falls gently from a great height, several miles high. As the air sinks it warms by compression rather like a bicycle pump heating up when inflating a tyre. This usually dries out the air, evaporating any moisture and killing off most clouds, leaving behind blue skies and sunshine.

Sometimes a finger of the Azores high pushes towards Britain, and if it moves slowly it can bring us a long spell of hot weather.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 17, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

IF YOU are thinking of buying shares this week, the current spell of sunny weather may give an added incentive. A study of stock markets around the world indicates that a sunny morning can boost share prices, especially during seasons that are often cloudy.

This is no quirk of statistics. The behaviour of the markets was compared with weather records in London and 25 other major cities over 15 years and showed that sunshine was strongly linked with higher stock market returns. Conversely, unusually cloudy days sent prices down, although rain, snow and other types of wea-ther had no effect.

The difference between an overcast and a sunny day was only nine basis points in the markets, but that small daily lift from sunshine added up to an extra 24.8 per cent per year in returns.

This may all sound implausible, but there is a great deal of evidence from psychology that sunshine helps to put people in a good mood so they tend to take more optimistic judgments.

That good feeling can spill over into buying stocks on sunny days — not necessarily a rational decision.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 18, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE Mexican Air Force disclosed last week that one of its planes had seen a swarm of bright lights hovering and darting around it. The lights remain a mystery, but UFO enthusiasts claimed that they were extraterrestrial.

However, they reminded me of strange lights seen towards the end of the Second World War. Many pilots reported seeing balls of light chase their aircraft during flights in Europe and over the Pacific. The lights were nicknamed "foo fighters" and looked like small balls of fire, usually orange, sometimes translucent.

They often followed the aircraft, occasionally came up and almost sat on their tails or wings, and kept pace no matter what the speed or the aircraft manoeuvre.

German pilots also saw them: in fact, both sides thought that they were enemy radar or secret weapons, but they never caused any damage.

The foo fighters are a mystery to this day. There is still no technology in the world that can perform their spectacular feats, and if the lights were a natural electrical phenomenon, such as ball lightning, it is difficult to explain why they were seen in all weathers.

Information thanks to the BBC Weather Website

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May 19, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

REPORTS have appeared in the press about what this summer is going to be like, and last week a London newspaper even gave regional predictions of temperature and rainfall patterns.

Alas, a detailed forecast for the summer is still in the realms of Mystic Meg. Most meteorologists struggle to give a forecast for five days ahead, let alone weeks and months.

Daily forecasts use measurements from land, sea and air and feed them into supercomputers set up to re-create how the weather behaves. The computers then number-crunch through a vast number of calculations to see how the atmosphere changes hourly over the next few days.

But just a small mistake in tomorrow’s forecast can grow into a huge error in a week’s time, so trying to predict a month ahead becomes impossible using this technique.

Instead, long-range forecasts rely heavily on measuring ocean temperatures, then examining how they behaved in the past to find patterns for the future.

These produce only very rough estimates, though: for Britain this summer they merely suggest that temperatures and rainfall will be average.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 21, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

AN AMERICAN businessman flying his aircraft in crystal-clear skies near mountains in Washington State on June 24, 1947, spotted nine silvery, disc-shaped objects darting around in perfect formation and occasionally flashing very brightly.

Kenneth Arnold described their movements as “like pie plates skipping over the water”, and a newspaper described his sighting the next day as that of “flying saucers”, the first time that the phrase was used.

Within weeks, hundreds of reports of flying saucers gripped the US. But it is likely that Arnold was fooled by a mirage of nine snow-capped mountains more than 100km (60 miles) away. In between his plane and the mountains were intense temperature inversions over two river valleys, where a layer of warm air sat on top of cold air. These acted like lenses, projecting images of the mountain tops high into the sky; where the inversions were particularly strong the images flashed brightly, and they seemed to move because of Arnold’s own movement.

In Britain we get our own strong temperature inversions and mirages in summer — so be prepared for a spate of “flying saucer sightings” here.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 22, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

IN THE days when bathroom showers often used plastic curtains to keep the water in, you could get slapped on the legs by the curtain as soon as the shower was turned on.

But why was the curtain sucked inwards, when you might imagine that the rush of water would push it outwards? Scientists tried their best to come up with explanations. One popular theory was that water shooting out of the shower lowered the air pressure in the bath, rather like air sweeping over the wings of an aircraft as it flies.

But an engineer at the University of Massachusetts revealed another phenomenon: using a sophisticated computer model which analysed the atmosphere in the bath in great detail, he showed that the water droplets from a shower slow down as they hit the air in the bath.

That, in turn, makes the air twist sideways into a vortex, rather like a miniature tornado turned on its side. The low pressure in the centre of the whirlwind sucked in the shower curtain.

Modern showers use glass screens, far too strong for miniature tornados to create any havoc, so putting an end to clammy plastic curtains slapping on to legs.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 24, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“WHAT hath God wrought?” read a message sent on this date in 1844 by Samuel Morse.

It was the world’s first official telegraph message, relayed from Washington to Baltimore, 40 miles away.

Morse tapped out an electrical code down the telegraph line, and at the other end a marker punched out a series of dots and dashes on to moving tape, which was then translated back into English by an operator.

Morse code and the telegraph revolutionised long-distance communication and led to a huge advance in weather forecasting. Ships in those days had to make their own weather forecasts but many were caught in storms and sank.

After Morse’s breakthrough, the British Admiralty set up a storm warning system by gathering information from 40 weather stations around the British and Irish coasts.

Thanks to the telegraph, they sent in reports at the same time each day, so that a synchronised picture of the weather could be drawn up using “synoptic charts”.

When gales were expected, warnings were issued by telegraph to coastal ports, and cones hoisted up poles for passing ships to read.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 26, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“RUBBISH”, said the chief copytaker when he saw my article about the weather deteriorating this Friday. But despite the largely clear skies in the past fortnight, the omens for the weekend are not good: wind, rain and uninspiring temperatures.

I don’t want to be a killjoy, but a pleasant late May is no guarantee of a fine summer.

One awful comparison is May 1944. That month ended with a blistering heatwave on the hottest late spring Bank Holiday on record, when London and much of the South East hit 33C (91F) and even Benmore in Argyll, west Scotland, recorded 28C (82F). It was one of the rare occasions when the hottest day of the year fell in May.

Then it all changed. June roared in with ferocious gales that almost wrecked the D-Day landings, and the foul weather carried on for much of the summer, apart from the first half of August.

Another chilling warning of a deceptive May was in 1922. A great heatwave sent temperatures soaring; Camden in North London hit 33C on the 22nd. Although June was reasonably dry, it was followed by the coldest July of the century and a very dull and chilly August.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 27, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

ON THIS day 100 years ago, London descended into a dark gloom, with gas lights and candles needed even at midday.

What exactly caused this dismal weather is not certain, but it may have been smog from coal smoke. Sulphur and smoke particles in cooler air near the ground used to be trapped under a lid of warmer air higher up, often during a spell of high pressure. A claustrophobic gloom gripped the city, but not everyone saw it so bleakly. The impressionist artists, most famously Monet, were fascinated by the smog. “Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city,” he said.

In 1904 Monet was staying at The Savoy and became attracted to the Houses of Parliament shrouded in smog. Le Parlement, Effet de Brouillard shows the spires of the building standing up like silhouetted fingers shrouded by an air of smoky purples, blues and greys.

In Houses of Parliament, London, Sun Breaking Through the Fog, the Sun is reduced to a feeble ball of light. It was the atmosphere that drew Monet: “I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the House, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located,” he explained.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 28, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE Caribbean has been convulsed by floods after ten days of torrential rain. Nearly 900 people died in the Dominican Republic and Haiti as raging floodwaters tore down hillsides and burst riverbanks, with vast seas of mud and rocks sweeping away villages and towns.

The devastation has been made worse by vast deforestation which has stripped hillsides of the natural sponge of forests that help to contain floods and mudslides.

The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island of Hispaniola, which bore the brunt of heavy rains sweeping much of the Caribbean. The islands there regularly get soaked in heavy showers, as towering thunderclouds bubble up each day and burst with rain in the afternoon and evening.

But these rains were entirely different. Heavy clouds stretched in a swirling mass hundreds of miles across but, amazingly, the winds were so light that this did not even qualify as a tropical depression, let alone a full-blown hurricane.

In fact, the Atlantic hurricane season officially starts on June 1, and forecasters are predicting more hurricanes than average this year.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 29, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE weather forecast for the Bank Holiday weekend in Britain is for sunshine and showers — but that we have weather forecasts at all was inspired by a groundbreaking idea 100 years ago.

Until the 20th century, forecasting involved a good deal of guesswork; watching barometers for changes in pressure.

Then, in 1904, Vilhelm Bjerknes, a Norwegian meteorologist, suggested for the first time that much of the guesswork could be eliminated by forecasting with numbers.

What was needed was lots of weather observations to show how the atmosphere was behaving; information which could be crunched into a few basic laws of physics written down in mathematical equations and then projected into the future. It sounded simple, but the sheer volume of calculations needed made numerical forecasting impossible in those days. Only when the computer was invented could the calculations be done fast enough — and, by happy coincidence, exactly 50 years later, the first computerised weather forecast was made by a group of scientists who were led by Carl-Gustaf Rossby, a former student of Bjerknes.

Link to Weather Eye source

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May 31, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE world’s single biggest weather system, the Indian monsoon, will break any day now.

Surprisingly, perhaps, not every monsoon brings enough rain and in 1899 a catastrophic failure in the rains led to two million deaths in India from drought.

That led Sir Gilbert Walker, head of the Indian Meteorological Service, to try to find a way of forecasting the monsoon. He was convinced that it was tied in with the world’s climate and, in 1904, after years of painstaking research, he revealed an amazing climate pattern. When barometer readings in Tahiti were high, they often fell in northern Australia, and vice versa. That see-saw in pressure coincided with very odd weather worldwide, from drought in Indonesia to mild winters in Western Canada and failed monsoons in India.

Sir Gilbert had stumbled on El Niño, the periodic lurch across the Pacific that can send half the world’s climate haywire — but the idea of a worldwide link was laughable at the time and it took another 60 years before he was proved correct. Unfortunately, El Niño is still too troublesome to make Walker’s dream of monsoon forecasts a reality .

Link to Weather Eye source