weather

Thundersnow is go! (for weather geeks)

by Gareth February 4, 2011

It’s been snowing in America. It snowed quite a lot in Chicago. They even had thundersnow, which is rare enough to have excited Weather Channel presenter Jim Cantore quite a lot. I’ve never experienced thundersnow. I’m almost jealous. Almost. The ripe peaches at Limestone Hills are some compensation… More on American snow at Jeff Masters’ [...]

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Winter, fire and snow

by Gareth December 26, 2010

Serendipity leads me to this great film: in the British winter of 1963, railway workers battle to keep the trains running. There’s one corker of a shot of a steam engine barrelling into a drift, plenty of impressionistic cutting and a wonderful soundtrack (an extended arrangement of Sandy Nelson’s Teen Beat). Directed by Geoffrey Jones, [...]

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Fixing the Sky

by Bryan Walker October 8, 2010

The notion that if it comes to the worst in climate change we can fall back on geoengineering  receives little credence in James Rodger Fleming’s new book Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate control. Fleming is a science historian and in the claims of some of today’s would-be climate engineers he [...]

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Bless the weather

by Gareth May 6, 2009

As if to demonstrate to its peers what the art of good science communication is all about, MetService has just launched a blog. Bob McDavitt (left – great pic!) has posted an excellent article about autumn colour, describing the process that creates the yellows and reds that make our countryside reliably spectacular at this time [...]

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Fires (which burn brightly)

by Gareth February 10, 2009

The sheer scale of the Victorian bushfire tragedy (over 170 dead at the time of writing: BBC coverage here) is apparent in this false colour satellite image from NASA’s Earth Observatory, captured on Feb 9th. Melbourne is at the top of the bay bottom left, and two large brown areas are the extensive burnt areas [...]

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Fractured air

by Gareth February 8, 2009

The roots of the recent cold weather in Britain and eastern North America lie in unusual goings on high in the atmosphere above the North Pole, as this animation from NASA’s Earth Observatory demonstrates (full video here: 6MB .mov file). The left hand image shows vorticity (rotation, roughly) and the right the temperature at 20km. [...]

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Long hot summer

by Gareth February 5, 2009

There’s record heat in Australia and deep snow in England (with more to come, say Met men), and it’s all consistent with continuing global warming. Over at Wellington’s leading public transport blog, this is enough to inspire a remarkably ill-informed diatribe: Following the news as I do, it was delicious today to see the global [...]

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Nice weather for ducks

by Gareth January 15, 2009

A couple of days ago, NIWA published its climate summary for 2008 — a comprehensive overview of all the weather events that went together to make last year what it was. In general, 2008 was sunny and warm for New Zealand, but with many notable extreme weather events — a “rollercoaster” of a year, according [...]

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Once upon a time there was an ocean

by Gareth August 10, 2008

The Arctic summer sea ice cover could be reduced by 2013 to “a few outcrops on islands near Greenland and Canada between mid-July and mid-September”, according to new research reported in The Observer [UK] today. The paper also suggests that this year could still see a new record minimum. Wieslaw Maslowski, the US Navy researcher [...]

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Ice ice baby

by Gareth August 5, 2008

The fat lady’s not yet in the building, but her limo’s outside the theatre. There’s another five or six weeks of melting to go, but there’s more than just sea ice melting in the Arctic, and more than my few meagre wagers riding on how summer turns out ‘oop North. Here’s a compendium of interesting [...]

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