Occasional musings on meteorology and other bits of Earth science
My classic lump from this year’s holiday in Tenerife was Montaña Sámara. At 1937m above sea level it sounds quite impressive, until you note that the nearby car park is at 1875m, leaving only about 62m of ascent and half a kilometre of walking (one way). Like Montaña Chayofita, this hill is a cinder cone:Continue reading Another day, another volcano
Ahhhh. The east coast of Scotland, on a beautiful sunny spring day. Time for folks inland to bask in the sunshine and those right on the coast to experience their very favourite weather phenomenon: the sea fog, or haar. A glance at the Met Office chart for 06:00 today suggests a high risk of aContinue reading Haar
This is the first chance I have had to blog since going on the meteorology field course to Arran with the third-year geophysics-and-meteorology students. And I am already on another field course (of which more later); this part of the academic year is truly chaotic. The students spend the week doing a variety of meteorologicalContinue reading Meteorology on Arran
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
The fuzzy patch of light near the top of the picture is a halo phenomenon called an upper tangent arc. I grabbed the snap from Dunbar station while dashing for a train. Despite keeping a lookout for halos (see previous posts here, here, here, and here), and despite the fact that it is supposed toContinue reading Off at a tangent
I got a nice view of the Earth’s shadow on the sky this evening. As usual with these things, there is a good explanation on the atmospheric optics web site, together with a photo taken in a rather more exotic location. The background in my photo is not a Chilean volcano; it is the ratherContinue reading Earth Shadow
I mentioned a year or three ago that we are moving to the use of python, with the numpy and matplotlib packages, for teaching scientific computing. I also mentioned that I was having to do some learning myself as I have used R for this purpose over the last few years. A thing that happensContinue reading Dots and snakes.
As in previous years, I judge how warm 2016 was by whether the grapes on my grape vine have bothered to ripen. Right now is the time to check, as we are well into November, and have had the first serious frosts. At least some of the grapes had ripened when I took this pictureContinue reading A good year?
A friend of mine who is on holiday in Cape Cod recently posted this nice picture on Facebook and remarked that they seem to have flat rainbows in that part of the world. Spotting unusual rainbows and halos is one of my hobbies (see earlier posts here, here, here and here), but this wasContinue reading Flat rainbows
I’m working at home today, ostentatiously in order to get some quiet time to think about the improvements we are making to the third year of the geophysics degree. Really, the reason was to give myself a chance to observe today’s transit of Mercury from the comfort of my own home. I was not atContinue reading Transit of Mercury
