Occasional musings on meteorology and other bits of Earth science
I took the car for a spin in the Lammermuir Hills south of Dunbar last weekend, in the hope of re-charging the battery after a prolonged refusal to start from cold. The car’s electrical problems have got worse since, and it is now in the garage, but at least it did not die on meContinue reading The Great Conglomerate
Nearly three weeks later, I have more or less recovered from the geophysics field course. We were back on the Medoc peninsula this year. I blogged about this field area when we went there three years ago, so I won’t re-hash the whole thing. But here are a few random thoughts that occurred to meContinue reading France again
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
I described some time ago how I set one of our gravity meters up to make a continuous recording of gravity variations. (The live plot of today’s gravity is here.) The main thing observed is the daily gravity tide, caused by the apparent motion of the Sun and Moon across the sky. But the gravityContinue reading Gravity detects geopolitical event
This 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
