Weather Eye

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By Jeremy Plester

BOTH the lunar and solar tides are in step today, so much higher than usual spring tides will affect the coast of the UK.

Spring tides are not uniform and depend on the alignment of the Sun and the Moon — broadly speaking the better the alignment, the higher the tides.

In the Severn estuary the tides will reach 10.1m (33ft) on the flooding tide at Sharpness Dock, the first time it has been this high since 2002. This is great news for Severn bore enthusiasts.

In the past the bore was something of a hazard and was preceded by cries of “tide ho” to alert rivermen of the impending surge. Without such a cry moored craft were in grave danger of being swamped by the wave. These days, there is more of a carnival atmosphere on the river as all manner of flotsam, boats, surfers and canoes jockey for position to ride the bore as far as possible up river.

This time around the bore is hoped to be a real beauty, as the weather has conspired to enhance its size. Pressure is low and a fresh to strong southwesterly wind has been blowing for several days now adding to the size of the tide in the Bristol Channel. Following on from days of rain in North Wales the river is swollen and will be doing all it can to push back the tide and increase the size of the wave.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

[Andy Bown]

BBC Points West did a good feature on yesterday's Severn Bore. The oddest part being an interview with two women who'd travelled from Surrey to witness it. One of them said she was disappointed at it's height (even though it was a 4* bore on a scale of 1-5.) while the other added she'd expected it to be much higher.

Sorry love, but if it had been much higher you'd have been washed clean off the bank :huh: .

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By Jeremy Plester

PARTS of Central Europe have been hit by a double whammy this week as heavy rain combined with melting snow in the mountains to produce flooding in southern Germany and the Czech Republic. During the middle of the week there were some significant falls of rain across the Alps. More than an inch fell over a large swath of Central Europe, with Mondsee in Austria logging 29mm (1.15in) in the 12 hours up until 6 am on Wednesday morning.

Earlier in the month there were some huge snowfalls, and the rain which fell from relatively mild skies had the effect of producing a big thaw, adding to the amount of water making its way downstream.

This became a deluge, and Prague went on full flood alert on Thursday as the swollen Vltava River threatened to burst its banks across the capital. Almost 10,000 people were evacuated in nearby Znojmo and flood defences in the centre of Prague had to be reinforced. Homes and farmland were also inundated by the flood in parts of southern Germany.

Low pressure is still in charge across the region and the forecast is for mild temperatures in the mountains and more rain over the weekend — so the flood alert will remain, at least for several days.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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By Jeremy Plester

THE MONTH has only just started, yet the weather has been true to form and produced plenty of April showers. The strength of the sun is responsible for the phenomenon; at this time of year the sun’s rays become powerful enough to allow warm thermals to develop in the Earth’s atmosphere. The warm air, being less dense than its surroundings, rises rapidly.

When the rising thermal can no longer hold on to the moisture that it contains, this will readily condense into shower clouds.

During the winter months there is too little power from the sun to allow the thermals to rise high enough, so rarely are conditions right for this type of shower.

The same atmospheric conditions produce showers from mid-March right through until the middle of the autumn, but it is in the month of April that the showers become frequent enough to be recognised as a specific weather feature. Hence the name.

Unlike the high summer, when showers can be lumbering under windless skies, April tends to have a fresh wind blowing. Thus the April shower is little more than a shortlived downpour. The weekend’s showers are good news for horticulturists, however, as according to folklore “April showers bring May flowers”.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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By Paul Simons

OVER the past few weeks several expeditions have began their slow trudge up towards the Everest base camp en route to the top of the world’s highest peak.

Timing is crucial to a successful summit attempt, with people and tonnes of food and equipment needing to be in the right place for the brief windows of opportunity when the ferocious weather clears long enough to allow a final ascent.

The jet stream, a fast-flowing river of air high in the atmosphere, is a frequent visitor to Everest and makes any climbing impossible for much of the year. Winds of more than 100mph blow relentlessly, cloud shrouds the summit and visibility is negligible.

The southwest monsoon, the warm wind which brings rain to the sub-continent, can help mountaineers to get to the summits. For a brief time, usually during late May, the jet stream is pushed away to the north as the monsoon gathers pace.

On Everest the winds slacken, snow ceases and the sun often comes out. By this time climbers must be acclimatised to the altitude and have well-stocked camps up the mountainside if their attempt is to be successful. The window of fine weather rarely lasts more than a few days because once the monsoon is in full flow, snow and strong winds return and climbers have to withdraw.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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By Paul Simons

IT WAS a great privilege to see the solar eclipse last Wednesday in the Sahara in Libya.

It was one of the most dramatic eclipses in living memory. The totality, when the Sun is completely blotted out by the Moon, lasted just over four minutes and, as expected for the Sahara, a cloudless sky gave perfect viewing conditions.

Fantastic shafts of light in the outer solar atmosphere, the corona, could be seen streaming out from the Sun's magnetic poles. Normally these polar streamers are difficult to see because the corona is too bright. But the Sun is currently at its solar minimum, when storm activity on the Sun tends to subside and the corona shrinks, and this makes the polar streamers much clearer.

Another remarkable phenomenon was the extraordinary bands of shadows that danced, snake-like, across the desert sand just before and after the eclipse totality. These were shadow bands, thought to be created by the Earth's atmosphere. As the Sun becomes squeezed into a thin crescent of light by the Moon's shadow, sunbeams are bent by layers of atmosphere of different temperatures, producing narrow bands of shadows. Because the eclipse also creates its own wind, and the atmosphere wobbles around in any case, the shadows perform a strange dance over the ground.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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By Paul Simons

THE solar eclipse last Wednesday in the Libyan Sahara was a marvellous sight. The Sun seemed to be ringed by fire, the rest of the sky was so dark that Venus and Mercury shone bright, and the horizon turned pink, orange and yellow in twilight.

Solar eclipses are astronomical events but they also produce their own weather phenomena. In the Sahara it had been a gloriously hot day but suddenly cooled off at totality, when the Sun was completely blocked out in the eclipse. It also grew windy just before and after totality.

For years scientists dismissed such eclipse winds as a myth. But measurements made in the eclipse of August 11, 1999, over southern England proved it was a real phenomenon.

The Moon’s shadow creates a local cooling, and as the cold air in the middle of the shadow sinks, it hits the ground and pancakes outwards, creating a brief and gusty wind.

Measurements of the 1999 eclipse also picked up small fluctuations in atmospheric pressure. Strangely, these carried on for hours after the eclipse and may have been created in the upper atmosphere as the cold eclipse shadow raced across the sky at supersonic speeds.

Gradually, these disturbances in the upper atmosphere filtered down to the surface over the next few hours. My thanks to the astronomer Dr John Mason, leader of the Libyan eclipse expedition, for his help with this column.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

[Osbourne One-Nil]

I'd like to know how he could have a memory of something from when he wasn't alive.

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By Paul Simons

COULD London face a catastrophic flood? London’s greatest threat comes from a North Sea storm surge charging into the Thames Estuary on a high tide.

That scenario led to the 1953 flood, when more than 300 people were killed on the East Coast and Thames Estuary. But thanks to poor sea defences collapsing along the coast, the floodwaters eased before reaching London.

That disaster led to the building of the Thames Flood Barrier in 1984 to protect the capital. However, a recent computer simulation run by the Met Office, the Environment Agency and eight universities tested how London would cope with a storm surge today. They found that it would take a storm surge 7m (23ft) high — more than double the height of that in 1953 — to breach the defences.

The computer model showed how floodwaters would breach flood defences, rush through streets, flood buildings and affect every London borough. But the simulation showed that precise storm warnings could be given 24 hours in advance and prevent huge loss of life.

The chances of such a freak storm surge is put at once in 1,000 years. But other vulnerable cities and towns in the UK face far shorter odds of flooding, around once in 150 years. And the disaster of Hurricane Katrina last year shows how vital it is to plan for floods.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 8, 2006

By Paul Simons

THE days may be growing longer, but winter still has a grip on the weather. This weekend we can expect wintry showers with sleet and snow in northern England and the Scottish mountains, while a chill wind blows across much of the country.

There is nothing freakish about snowfalls at this time of year, sometimes causing huge disruption. On April 9, 1998, a surge of cold Arctic air collided with mild air from the south and set off a spectacular weather battle that raged for days.

At first, torrential rains set off disastrous floods across central and eastern England, hitting Peterborough, Leamington Spa and Stratford-upon-Avon especially hard. The following day, Good Friday, blizzards swept Scotland. Snow ploughs attempted to clear up to 13cm (5in) of snow on roads around Glasgow, and the temperature sank to minus 9C (16F) at Altnaharra in the Highlands. As the Arctic air tightened its grip, the belt of snow pushed southwards. More than a foot of snow fell in Flintshire, North Wales, where power supplies failed, and hill farmers struggled to save newborn lambs. Even Gatwick received almost an inch of snow. The atrocious conditions continued with more snowfalls in northern England over the 14th to 15th. It came as no surprise that April was actually colder than March that year.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 10, 2006 By Paul Simons

COULD New York be hit by a hurricane? It may sound like science fiction but there are real fears that the city and much of the northeast coast of America is at serious risk. Some forecasters are predicting that a major hurricane could strike the region this year, because of warmer sea temperatures and various climate factors.

It has happened before. In September 1938, a hurricane near Florida swerved and shot northwards at great speed, fuelled by abnormally warm waters, and catching forecasters by surprise. Although the eye of the storm narrowly missed Manhattan, the storm tore into the northeast coast with winds gusting to 295kmh (183mph), causing a massive storm surge and power blackouts. It left 600 people dead.

Today there are some similarities in climate conditions. But New York is far more vulnerable to storm damage — it is more developed, the population is packed into a very small area and a storm could surge through the streets, flooding buildings, tunnels and subways. The fickle nature of tropical storms straying so far north means that there might be only hours of warning before the hurricane struck. Escape from the hurricane would be almost impossible as high winds battered road and rail bridges and put ferry and airport services out of action. Loss of life and damage could be horrendous.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 11, 2006 By Paul Simons

THE football match between Sunderland and Fulham was abandoned because of snow last Saturday.

Looking through the record books, it is difficult to find anything so extreme at a football match at this time of year. Even the worst season’s weather, in the notorious winter freeze of 1962-63, had recovered by April. However, that season there had been 261 match postponements between December and March, some of the fixtures postponed 15 times, and the third round of the FA Cup took 66 days to finish. The backlog of games led to the formation of the Pools Panel, a body of experts who decided what the results should be. However, this ended in mid-March as the weather improved.

The record number of postponements for a single game was in the depths of the cold winter of 1979, when the match between Inverness Thistle and Falkirk was delayed 29 times between January and February. In October 1997 Chelsea were beaten 3-2 in the first leg of the European Cup Winners’ Cup tie against Tromsø, a team of part-timers from Norway. The match was reduced to a farce as heavy snow swamped the pitch and reduced visibility like a fog. Play had to be suspended so that ground staff could sweep snow off the lines on the pitch. However, Tromsø lies inside the Arctic Circle — a long way from Sunderland.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 12, 2006 By Paul Simons

THE biblical story of Jesus walking on water in the Sea of Galilee may have a scientific explanation — he may have walked on a floating slab of ice.

A team of scientists has examined the climate record of the region at the time of Christ and found that it was an unusually cold period, around 3C (5.4F) colder than it is today. Oceanographer Doron Nof at Florida State University believes that a rare combination of a cold snap and the peculiar water conditions in the Sea of Galilee could have created slabs of floating ice.

The lake is unique in having salty springs along one of its shores — an area where many archaeological features linked with Jesus have been found.

Because salty water is dense, it creates a cap under the lake’s surface so that fresh water lying on top of it stagnates and freezes more easily. If the weather turned especially cold, say minus 4C (25F) for two days, it would cool the surface water until it froze into thick ice. Because the springs form patches of salty water under the lake’s surface, the ice would form into slabs. “A person standing or walking on the ice would appear to someone far away to be walking on water,” explained Dr Nof, although he adds, “we leave to others the question of whether or not our research explains the biblical account.”

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 13, 2006 By Paul Simons

IF YOU are looking for an Easter holiday break, one of the most stunning places to go at this time of year is the Greek island of Santorini.

The island is an unusual crescent shape with a steep spine that looks down over sheer cliffs on to the sea. It is also the site of the ancient volcanic eruption of Thera, one of the most catastrophic eruptions in history. About 3,650 years ago, Thera exploded with the equivalent of 6,000 nuclear warheads and left behind a crater six times larger than that of Krakatoa. It shot an estimated 114 cubic kilometres of debris into the atmosphere and the onslaught of dust and acid droplets would have darkened the skies and severely disturbed the climate. This almost certainly wiped out the thriving Minoan civilisation near by.

Another idea is that the eruption may have helped the Israelites escape from Egypt. It gave them the guiding pillar of smoke by day and fire by night described in the Bible.

The collapse of the volcano into the sea would have sucked in a gigantic volume of water, setting off a devastating tsunami throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The Israelites would have seen the sea sucked out, leaving them the sea bed to cross. A tremendous wall of seawater would have followed soon after, certainly capable of wiping out the pursuing Egyptians as they chased behind.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 17, 2006 By Paul Simons

TOMORROW marks the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, a disaster that ranks as one of the most significant earthquakes in history.

At 5.12am a foreshock rocked the San Francisco Bay area. The great earthquake erupted some 25 seconds later, with an epicentre near San Francisco. Violent shocks punctuated the strong shaking, which lasted for 45 to 60 seconds.

The earthquake was felt from southern Oregon to the south of Los Angeles and inland as far as central Nevada. It is now estimated to have measured between 7.7 and 7.9 on the Richter scale. Houses collapsed and many people were killed in their beds. But the most damage was inflicted not by the quake but the fires that broke out afterwards. Roads folded up like paper and gas lines underneath ruptured, setting off an inferno that tore through San Francisco. Winds generated by the blaze created a firestorm that sucked air out of buildings and whipped up giant flames. Most of the water mains had broken during the quake, and so firefighters had little water and eventually buildings were demolished to make a firebreak to contain the conflagration. After three days, the fire had destroyed four square miles of San Francisco, roughly two thirds of the city. Some estimates put the number of deaths as 6,000, and about 300,000 people were left homeless from a population of 400,000.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 18, 2006 By Paul Simons

THERE WAS a stunning sightin Selsey, West Sussex, on February 11. Pete Lawrence, a photographer, took a picture of a faint ring of white light encircling the Moon, with a slight tinge of red on the inside edge.

The phenomenon was a lunar halo. When the Moon is bright and veiled by thin high-altitude cirrus cloud, there is a chance that a ring of light can form. The cirrus cloud is made of ice crystals that behave like glass prisms, bending the light into a circle. Haloes are more often seen around the Sun, as summed up by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass:

The sun was shining on the sea,

Shining with all his might:

He did his very best to make

The billows smooth and bright —

And that was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.

In even rarer cases, the moonlight can be bent into moondogs — slightly coloured splashes of light on either side of the Moon Much more common are coloured rings surrounding the Moon. These are not haloes but coronas, produced by the diffraction of light by water droplets in lower-level clouds. Moonlight can also create a rainbow during a shower, although these look fairly white. The photo of the lunar halo can be seen on the Earth Science Picture of the Day web-site: here for April 12.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 20, 2006 By Paul Simons

THE solar eclipse through North Africa on March 29 was a remarkable sight. Just before totality, when the Sun was blotted out completely by the Moon, rarely seen shadow bands danced across the ground in wiggling faint lines. These bands are created when the last rays of sunlight are distorted by the Earth’s atmosphere.

But in the eclipse of August 1999 seen over the Channel Islands, an even rarer phenomenon of banded lines was seen. Mysterious dark stripes unexpectedly beamed high across the sky up to 20 minutes before totality.

The stripes in the sky were very different from shadow bands on the ground and left astronomers baffled by the sight. The lines ran parallel with the horizon and crossed the path of the Moon at right angles. They lay above and below the sun and ran two thirds of the way across the sky.

One explanation was that bands were shadows of contrails — condensation trails from high flying jets. Two Concordes were known to have flown in the eclipse path over Alderney, but the bands looked more like shadows than contrails.

Another idea was that the drop in temperature during the eclipse might have triggered disturbances in the upper atmosphere. These may have precipitated ice crystals and bent the sunlight into darkened bands. Whatever the explanation, it was an exceptionally rare meteorological phenomenon not seen since.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 21, 2006 By Paul Simons

SAN FRANCISCO has been having a wretched time with torrential rains this spring. But rather than rain, the city is best known for its fogs, and these were first reported by Sir Francis Drake.

In 1579 Drake was on a world expedition in the Golden Hind when he came across a mysterious coastline shrouded in thick fog. The fog was so dense and persistent that Drake was stalled there for nearly a month by “those thicke mists and most stinging fogges”, as he wrote in his log.

In fact Drake never realised that the “fogges” hid the entrance to one of the finest natural harbours on the western coast of the Americas — San Francisco Bay. It was not discovered by Europeans until the 18th century when the Spaniards arrived.

The fogs are caused by the cold Pacific waters swept down from the Arctic running into the warm, moist air wafting off the Californian mainland. When the hot air hits the cold sea, it cools and its moisture condenses into a groundhugging cloud. This sort of coastal fog is common along shorelines in many parts of the world, but the large temperature differences between the Pacific and California coastline creates spectacular fogs. They often start early in the morning and can fill the basin-shaped bay like a bowl of meringue.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 22, 2006 By Paul Simons

IN 1959 Lieutenant-Colonel William Rankin, of the US Air Force, had an unusually close experience with a thunderstorm. As he flew a jet fighter over a cumulonimbus cloud in Virginia, the aircraft suddenly went out of control. Rankin baled out at 47,000ft (14,325m) in temperatures of about minus 50C (-58F) and pressure so low that his body ballooned up. Without his emergency oxygen he would have died.

As he hurtled into the cloud, Rankin was plunged into darkness and pummelled by hailstones while ferocious winds blasted at him like cannon fire. "I felt as though I were a chunk of beef being tossed into a cavernous deep freeze," he described. Lightning shot through the darkness and the air rocked with the sonic booms of thunder.

As Rankin descended lower into the cloud, he was almost drowned in torrents of freezing rain.

After 40 minutes of hell, Rankin finally fell through the bottom of the cloud and landed safely. He managed to get help and was rushed to hospital, his body battered by hail and blackened by frostbite. Rankin's horrific ordeal was possibly the only case of anyone surviving a journey unaided through a thundercloud. This, and other stories of clouds, is told in a new book The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney (Sceptre Books), founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 24, 2006 By Paul Simons

“I WANT to change forever the idea that London is a city of fog, bad food and weather,” said Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, when he visited China recently. While London’s old peasouper smogs disappeared long ago, however, northern China is still plagued by dust storms.

Each spring, clouds of fine yellow dust sweep in from the Gobi Desert and drylands of northern China. But after decades of overgrazing, deforestation and heavy water useage, the deserts are growing larger and sand dunes are edging closer to Beijing. Almost one third of China’s land mass is desert or turning into one.

Some of the worst dust storms for several years have hit this month, blotting out daylight in Beijing and cloaking it and other cities in choking clouds of dust. Millions of people have been left gasping for breath and hospitals have been overwhelmed with respiratory emergencies.

The dust often reaches Korea and Japan, where it closes schools and airports; one South Korean car factory wraps its vehicles in plastic as soon as they come off the production line to stop them being covered in dust. The dust can even sweep around the world. In 1990 skiers in the French Alps found snow had turned yellowish-brown after being showered in sandy dust blown more than 20,000km (12,000 miles) across the Pacific and Atlantic from a storm in the Taklimakan Desert, China, two weeks earlier.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 25, 2006 By Paul Simons

SOME of Britain’s most spectacular wild flowers are responding to the changing climate. Over the past 18 years the numbers of bee and pyramidal orchids have almost doubled and they are spreading further north and west through England. It is thought that hotter summers have opened up patches of bare ground where the orchid seeds have become established more easily.

The bee orchid makes a canny impersonation of a bee to fool the insects into pollinating its flowers, and the pyramidal orchid is so named for the shape of its dense spike of pink or purple flowers.

The change in plant population patterns emerged from a survey by the Botanical Society of the British Isles and the conservation charity Plantlife, involving hundreds of botanists across the country.

They found that other plants taking advantage of climate change included many ferns. The numbers of hart’s-tongue fern have risen by 25 per cent, possibly because its tiny spores spread easily in the wind. However, some plants have fallen victim to global warming. The lesser butterfly orchid and mountain pansy grow in the North of the country in a cooler climate, and both plants have fared worse as temperatures have increased. It is thought that many of our rare mountain plants will suffer as temperatures carry on rising.

Link to TIMES ONLINE - Weather Eye source.

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April 26, 2006 By Paul Simons

TWENTY years ago today the Chernobyl reactor exploded in the worst nuclear accident in history. Radioactive contamination shot into the atmosphere and forced the evacuation of 135,000 people, leading to a dramatic rise in the number of cases of cancer, especially in Ukraine and the neighbouring Belarus.

High-altitude winds spread the cloud of radiation over northern Europe, and on May 2, 1986, the fallout passed over Britain, some 2,400km (1,500 miles) away. The toxic cloud would have caused no harm had the weather stayed dry, but local rainstorms washed down the contamination over a swath of Cumbria, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Radioactive caesium-137 contaminated the ground, and would have been bound up relatively safely in most soils. But the peat in upland areas kept the substance in solution and it became absorbed by grasses that were grazed by sheep. More than a million sheep were contaminated and emergency orders were imposed to prevent their sale.

The legacy of that disaster still lingers in Britain. Although radiation levels have fallen over the years, some hills are still so contaminated that 375 farms and more than 200,000 sheep remain embargoed. No sheep can be moved out of affected areas without a special licence, the flocks are scanned regularly for radioactivity, and contaminated animals banned from markets. Chernobyl is a long way away, but its effects live on.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,8823,00.html

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April 27, 2006

By Paul Simons

IT SEEMED like something from a horror film — last Friday a hole suddenly opened up under a house near Sacramento, California, and swallowed a man, burying him under rubble.

The house was only 20 years old and from the outside appeared perfectly normal. But a giant hole suddenly opened in the floor near the kitchen, plunging the 27-year old man into the crater. Rescuers had trouble reaching the victim because the ground began to shift and over the ensuing days the hole grew to about 9m (30ft) wide and 6m (20ft) deep.

One possible cause was very wet weather. This region in California had up to 63cm (25in) more rain than normal this spring and since late October had more precipitation than any place on the US mainland. That intense rainfall could have dissolved the ground underneath the house to produce a sinkhole. These are particularly common in limestone and carbonate bedrocks, where an underground hole can remain unseen until the land surface collapses dramatically. In Yorkshire the town of Ripon is renowned for sinkholes. The area lies on gypsum rock, which dissolves readily, and over the past 150 years more than 30 significant sinkholes have appeared, reaching up to 20m (65ft) deep, often dragging buildings and gardens into them. In one incident in 1997 four garages collapsed into a hole, and several houses were evacuated and later demolished.

From TIMES ONLINE

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April 28, 2006 By Paul Simons

WHAT will the summer be like this year? Forecasts this far ahead are notoriously unreliable, but one confident prediction has been made for a blazing hot summer, at least in Switzerland. On Monday, the effigy of the Böögg, a snowman-like bogey monster, was burnt in a traditional ceremony in Zurich.

The Böögg stands more than 3m (10ft) tall. Stuffed with wadding and fireworks, it is set ablaze on a large bonfire at exactly 6am on the third Monday in April, although this year it was delayed by a week because of Easter. The moment when the Böögg’s head explodes marks the official end of winter, and the faster it disappears, the hotter the summer will be. This Monday the Böögg’s head blew up after 10min, 28 sec, an impressive time that signals a warm summer. And in recent years the Böögg has scored some impressive forecasts. In 2003, it achieved a record short time of 5min, 42sec and was followed by one of Europe’s hottest summers, with record-breaking temperatures in Switzerland. But last year the burn took 17 minutes and that summer was miserably wet and ravaged by floods. The longest burn was 40 minutes, in 1988, with a summer full of thunderstorms and hail, followed by a cold snap that brought the summer to a premature end in mid-August. How the Böögg’s forecast works remains a mystery.

From TIMES ONLINE

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April 29, 2006 By Paul Simons

IT IS not often that mowing a lawn advances our knowledge of the climate. But a pensioner, David Grisenthwaite, in Kirkcaldy, Fife, has provided scientists with a unique record of climate change in Britain.

Since 1984, he has been keeping a diary of when he mows his lawn, and his painstaking records show that grass is growing for a month more than it did 20 years ago, caused by climate change.

Mr Grisenthwaite’s records began when the Woodland Trust asked people to note when they cut their lawns. The dates of the first and last lawn cutting each year are good indicators of the start and end of the growing season.

When the project finished Mr Grisenthwaite carried on with his diary of lawn mowing. By 2004, his records showed that the first cut in spring was 13 days earlier than in 1984 and the last cut 17 days later.

So important is Mr Grisenthwaite’s lawn diary that the Royal Meteorological Society devoted a research paper to his work in its journal Weather. What particularly amazed the scientists is that the growing season had extended for so long in the North of Britain, when these sorts of climate effects were expected much farther south.

Indeed, in many parts of the country people are mowing their lawns all year round. The lawn recording work continues with Springwatch at www.phenology.org.uk

From TIMES ONLINE