Occasional musings on meteorology and other bits of Earth science
Friends down in Yorkshire drew my attention to a serious fire as reported by the BBC. It looks rather dramatic, but I was surprised by the assertion that the plume was “so huge it could be seen from space”. Eyeballing the satellite image against a map, the plume seems to be 50 or 60 kilometresContinue reading No smoke without fire…
Following a number of odd hours of tinkering, spread out over the holidays, and interrupted by those piles of marking, I now have routine upper-air charts in production. The chart archive is at http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/~hcp/chartarch/; it contains a separate folder for each day. It’s a rolling archive: old days get deleted as new ones get added.Continue reading Weather maps: the story continues
On Thursday night we were promised some aurora by everyone from the Guardian to the BGS to the BBC’s “stargazing live” program. It turned out to be a damp squib; I even got a rather apologetic update on Friday from the BGS’s aurora alert system to the effect that not a lot had happened. (YouContinue reading Aurora? What Aurora?
You get some new toys, you have to play with them. The toys in this case are a nice new laser pointer and a convenient mini-tripod for the camera: necessary for the 4-second exposure. Both presents courtesy of my eldest child; many thanks, J. The laser is a 1-mW job: puny compared to those balloon-poppingContinue reading New Toys
