Occasional musings on meteorology and other bits of Earth science
Author: hcpThis is yet another holiday post, about a thing I was reminded of while flicking through my holiday photographs. I am as fond as the next overgrown schoolboy of vintage machines of any sort; I can stand and look at a steam locomotive, traction engine, windmill or vintage car for ages, especially if it isContinue reading Runs by magic?
Tucked away in the middle of the Penwith peninsula, Carn Brea (National Grid reference SW 386280) has all the attributes of a classic lump. (See previous posts here, here, and here.) It is very easy to climb, provides a good view, and has some interesting things to look at. It also has the claimContinue reading Cornish classic lumps
After visiting the Dorset and East Devon coast on our holiday, we headed even further west, to the Penwith peninsula at the far end of Cornwall. The peninsula is almost entirely made of granite, part of a huge intrusion that outcrops on Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor and a few other places. We got a good lookContinue reading Cornish Granite
I’m back home from my summer holidays: a road trip to the far south west of England. One of my wife’s hobbies is collecting UNESCO world heritage sites; the trip was an opportunity to visit the only such site in mainland Great Britain which is listed for its natural attributes rather than its man-made ones.Continue reading A place in the textbooks
The paper that I have been trying to get finished for many months now has finally come out in the discussion stage, in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. It is about the amount of Hydrogen Cyanide (HCN) in the stratosphere (which the MLS instrument has been observing since 2004), and how there have been the largestContinue reading Fires, and El-Niño
I have been reviewing someone else’s paper for a journal and preparing one of my own for submission. And both jobs have caused me to do a thing I do a lot: looking at a figure that uses a colour scale and asking myself whether the colour scale can be improved. A dataset where theContinue reading Colours for contours
I have been in Snowdonia for the weekend, pretending to do some hill walking. The weather was not ideal and I am the sort of walker who can not usually be bothered to make the effort if the clouds are down on the tops. It therefore seemed the day to head for something smaller: anotherContinue reading Two summits for the price of one
This is a YAHP (Yet Another Halo Phenomenon) post, I’m afraid, like this one, and the ones it links to. I took the photo while flying out to Lanzarote, but I am only posting it now as I didn’t have facilities to crop and contrast-boost the photo on my phone, and I didn’t take myContinue reading Subsun
This is another in my occasional series of classic lump ascents. Like the first one, this one is in the Canary Islands. A purist might argue that at 608m, Atalaya de Femés is far too impressive to count as a classic lump, especially as it is the highest point in the southern part of Lanzarote. IContinue reading Another Canarian summit
I am on holiday in Lanzarote, in that gap between the end of teaching and the onslaught of exam marking. The island is, like all of the Canaries, made mostly of volcanic basalt, but the flatter parts are often covered with a layer of wind-blown sands. While poking around the seaside resort of Costa Teguise,Continue reading Lavahenge
