Occasional musings on meteorology and other bits of Earth science
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?
For various reasons, I have had to miss out on this year’s residential field trips. I made up for it a bit by volunteering to demonstrate on the first year geology trip to Arthur’s seat — geology right on our doorstep. Particularly so for students living in Pollock Halls, Edinburgh’s biggest concentration of student accommodation,Continue reading Geology on the doorstep
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
Sigh. I am on strike for a couple of days. You might wonder what university lecturers do when they are on strike, and, indeed, why they bother. What we do while we are on strike probably differs a lot from person to person. I am not the sort of person who likes standing on picketContinue reading Out, sisters and brothers, out!
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
I have just got back from a week’s holiday in Crete. I spent most of this studiously avoiding thinking about work. But on such a rocky island it is hard to avoid noticing the rocks. Annoyingly, I could not find an geological guide of any sort to the island, so I had to just lookContinue reading Geology (and an earthquake) on holiday
The weather was nice enough over the Easter weekend for a short walk at Cove harbour, some 12km down the coast from Dunbar. Cove is one of those places where you really feel surrounded by the geology and get a visceral sense of the depth of geological time. The rocks on this stretch of theContinue reading More coastal geology
We are coming to the end of the semester, which means that we have done the pilot balloon experiment again (see previous posts here and here). The weather was splendid on the Monday … and not that bad on the other two days. This is Thursday’s balloons, all ready for the off. I never getContinue reading Up on the roof
It is innovative learning week again, so, as in previous years, I joined the meteorological walk up Arthur’s seat. Here we are, measuring the temperature and pressure at the summit trig point. The atmosphere was in hydrostatic equilibrium just as much as in 2014 and 2015: (see 2014 post for details). If anything, the points formContinue reading ILW: nice weather for a change
