Weather Eye

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September 2, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“SEPTEMBER blow soft ’till the fruit’s in the loft,” goes an old piece of folklore. September certainly blew in with a very soft, warm breeze as almost the entire UK was bathed in sunshine because of high pressure.

More anticyclonic activity promises to give a welcome respite from August’s bruising rainfall, but the good weather will be fighting a procession of Atlantic depressions trying to invade western and northern areas in particular.

Long-range forecasts indicate that September may see a good deal of sunny spells and warm days, although northern areas are likely to have more unsettled conditions with near-average rainfall.

The Met Office’s seasonal forecast trends indicate that October and November could return to higher than normal rainfalls. With the ground saturated and underground water tables high, the Environment Agency says that there could be a threat of flooding in many places this autumn and winter.

Perhaps the only saving grace is that temperatures look set to stay above average, making this another remarkably warm year.

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September 4, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE ASP World Surfing Tour went to the town of Hossegor in southwest France last weekend.

Hossegor is a small town between the forests of Landes and the seemingly endless sandy beaches which line the Bay of Biscay. The coast there is exposed to just about everything the Atlantic has to throw at it.

Storms way up in the North Atlantic point huge swells towards the region and although they take time to arrive, the result is awesome waves.

The reason Hossegor is chosen for important surfing events like the one last weekend is the presence of a deep offshore trench known as the Gouf de Capbreton.

Most of Western Europe is surrounded by a continental shelf, a boundary of fairly shallow water, which from a surfing point of view, is bad news as the shallow seas strip a lot of the energy from the wave as it drags along the seafloor before breaking on the beach.

In Hossegor, however, the deep trench means that very little of the wave’s energy is lost before it crashes on the beach. The result is big, steep and hollow waves — a perfect setting for the world’s best surfers to compete.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 6, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

HURRICANE Frances spiralled its way across Florida this weekend and American weather agencies gave warning of strong winds, heavy rain and tornadoes.

The three combined produce massive amounts of damage, but there is a more sinister threat lurking underneath the top line of the weather reports — storm surges.

These occur when high winds spinning around a hurricane push a bulge of water across the sea’s surface. Once the bulge starts there are a whole host of processes that can make matters worse when the surge approaches the coast. The hurricane’s track, wave size, atmospheric pressure, tides and the shape of the coastline can all play a part.

In extreme cases, when all the elements combine to produce powerful surges, sea levels can be swollen to as much as 20ft or 25ft above normal levels. With large swaths of Florida very close to sea level, the dangers posed by these surges is obvious and can be a much greater threat to life than high winds or rainfall.

Some estimates claim that up to 70 per cent of all hurricane-related deaths are caused by these surges.

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September 7, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

IN THE winter of 1902-03 Captain Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Edward Wilson set a record for venturing farthest south and revitalised the race to reach the South Pole.

Reaching a latitude of 820, 17'S was a magnificent achievement, but the pioneering trio were woefully under-equipped by today’s standards. There had not been time to learn to ski or to handle dogs, their clothing was far from ideal and their nourishment was poor.

Natives of the polar north had learnt, centuries before, that well-ventilated clothes were the key to staying warm. Without this, the day’s sled-dragging would soon lead to a sweaty layer of moisture inside their clothes.

Scott and company found at the end of each day that the cold would penetrate their clothes and that a layer of ice would form between their clothes and their skin.

They did have one fine piece of armour against the cold; the finnesko boot. Made from an ancient Lapplander design, it was crafted from reindeer fur and stuffed with sennegrass, a type of Scandinavian hay that absorbed moisture and gave extra insulation.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 8, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

FLORIDA is reeling. First came Tropical Storm Bonnie, then devastating Hurricane Charley, three weeks later was Hurricane Frances and now Hurricane Ivan is storming up the Caribbean towards Cuba with Florida in its sights.

Is this a freak of nature, or something more sinister? Early September is the peak of the hurricane season, and the number of tropical storms and hurricanes is not much above average so far. Over the past several years Florida has had a relatively calm time with hurricanes.

But groups of hurricanes can occasionally pile into one region, and 1955 was especially strange. On August 12, North Carolina was hit by Hurricane Connie, with huge winds, rains and tornados — the first hurricane to cause more than $1billion (£564 million) damage.

Only five days later, Hurricane Diane dealt a greater deluge of rain, setting off terrific floods which killed 200 people. A month later Hurricane Ione hit North Carolina, again with greater wind speeds, and left six dead. It was a tragic episode, but a coincidence.

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September 10, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

WAS it my imagination, or has the traffic been much louder over the past few days?

There is an explanation: the anticyclone which brought glorious sunshine and calm conditions also set up a fascinating weather phenomenon.

A huge temperature inversion lay over Britain, with a lid of very stable warm air sitting over cold air, instead of the other way around.

This inversion acted like a sort of ceiling, trapping sound waves that would normally escape high into the sky. So, the rumble of far-away traffic hit the lid of warm air and bounced back down to the ground, making plenty of extra noise. But higher-pitched sounds tended to punch through the inversion layers, so that whistles and sopranos got lost among the lower-pitched noises.

This strange arrangement can also play even spookier tricks. Radiooperated garage doors can spontaneously open. That is because signals from radio stations, radio communications or radar also bounce off the temperature inversion, and some of the stray signals can open the doors.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 11, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

HARDLY has one hurricane finished then another comes charging along at breakneck speed.

But this present bout of furious activity could be upstaged over the next century by a new generation of even more powerful hurricanes as the Earth grows warmer.

Hurricanes are warm-water junkies, feeding off tropical or sub-tropical seas for most of their energy. As the world’s seas are growing warmer, on average, this extra heat could drive hurricanes to peaks of frenzy not experienced before.

Computer models reveal that if tropical seas warm on their surfaces by a little over 2C, they could boost the strongest hurricane wind speeds by up to 12 per cent.

This may not seem very much, but the amount of damage from wind rises in proportion to the square of the wind speed. In other words, a 120mph wind does four times the damage of a 60mph wind.

Also, the colossal rainfalls from hurricanes could increase. The computer simulations reveal rainfall increasing up to 28 per cent, causing even more devastating flashflooding with resulting landslides, mudslides and widespread inundations.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 13, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

During the period 1812 to 1813, Britain and the US were at war with each other. American gunboats were guarding St Mary’s on the coast of Georgia when, in September 1813, a huge hurricane struck and the entire naval force was scattered or sunk.

An immense storm surge of water rose up from the sea and left one boat high and dry, as reported by the commodore of the naval defenders: “The Saucy Jack privateer, of Charleston, lying ready to sail, is now lying high and dry on a marsh that must be at least 5 ft above the level of low tide.”

Modern calculations show that a category 3 or 4 hurricane had produced a storm surge of some 6m (19 ft).

Historical records such as this have revealed that hurricanes come and go in cycles lasting decades. An intense period in the late 1860s to 1900 was repeated in the 1930s to 1960s and now activity appears to be renewing, especially for major hurricanes.

One reason is a slow fluctuation in sea temperatures in the North Atlantic and as these grow warmer they help fuel more hurricanes.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 14, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

WHY don’t hurricanes hit Britain? Neither this week’s storms nor the so-called hurricane of October 1987 were anything like a hurricane.

The seas around our shores are simply too cold to fuel a hurricane’s voracious appetite for energy.

Hurricanes need a sea temperature of 26C (79F) or more, with plenty of humid air, which means they form only in the Tropics. As that wet, warm air rises it condenses into cloud droplets in towering thunderclouds and releases vast amounts of energy, fuelling a frenzy of wind and rain.

A hurricane forms within one enormous mass of warm air, but storms in Britain are created from two air masses, warm and cold air, battling each other along weather fronts. The eye at the centre of a hurricane is a strange oasis of calm weather, free of clouds, where the air sinks down from a great height; in the centre of a storm in Britain, the air rises.

Strangely, winds at high altitudes can kill hurricanes by cutting off their tops, which are weak. But British storms are driven to greater powers of frenzy by winds at high altitudes.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 15, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

HURRICANES cause so much destruction, is there any way to kill them off?

Unfortunately, hurricanes are powerful — but that has not stopped some ingenious ideas being proposed. One suggestion is to bomb them, but they release heat energy at a rate equivalent to a nuclear bomb exploding about every 20 minutes.

In the 1960s, scientists tried to seed the tops of hurricanes with silver iodide to produce extra clouds and steal some of the humid air that helps to drive the winds. The results were inconclusive and there were fears that the seeding might send a storm careering off a new course.

Recently, it has been claimed that a moisture-absorbing gel might weaken hurricanes. But you would need 400 heavy cargo planes to drop 40,000 tons of the gel every 30 minutes around an averaged-sized hurricane eye.

Because hurricanes feed off warm water for much of their energy, one idea is to cool the sea with icebergs or dry ice. But thousands of square miles of ocean would need to be cooled, and at very short notice.

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September 16, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

TONY BLAIR has emphasised that the Government is committed to cutting carbon dioxide pollution to fight global warming.

He sees renewable energies as crucial, but they only work when the elements are working.

Some experts are fighting for more nuclear power stations to be built, because nuclear energy does not pump out carbon dioxide.

But the concrete and energy needed to build the power plants create carbon dioxide, and there is the huge problem of what to do with the nuclear waste left over.

American scientists have proposed an alternative, based on 15 technologies. One of these measures is to capture carbon dioxide at power plants and inject it into disused undersea oil fields.

There is a crying need for new, clean energy for other reasons, such as an energy gap as our power consumption rises just when many old power stations are reaching the end of their working lives.

Also, the price of oil is soaring at a time when Britain has become a net importer of oil, thanks to its dwindling oilfields in the North Sea.

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September 17, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

SIXTY years ago today Operation Market Garden was launched by the Allies to push into Germany from Holland and end the Second World War in Europe. The airborne battle involved thousands of aircraft and armoured vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of troops.

The weather was crucial for the airlift, and meteorologists forecast at least two days of clear weather starting on September 17, 1944. But the next day fog over England grounded reinforcements, while over Germany and northern Holland the weather cleared and allowed the Luftwaffe to attack the invasion force.

By the time the weather cleared, Allied troops were running out of supplies while the Germans had rushed in reinforcements. Operation Market Garden failed. For the Dutch population expecting liberation in occupied Holland, the bitter winter brought mass starvation.

Although the Allies had made mistakes in Operation Market Garden, if the weather had held they would have stood a good chance of beating the Germans and saving countless lives in a quick victory.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 18, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

I WAS sad to read that the folklore weather forecaster Bill Foggitt died recently, aged 91.

Bill looked for signs in nature to predict the weather and argued that plants, animals and insects gave better forecasts than modern meteorology.

He began his folklore career when he looked at climate records kept by his family for more than 200 years, originally started by his great-grandfather to help to understand frequent floods in Yarm, Teesside.

Foggitt became fascinated by how trees, pine cones and the rest of nature could be read for clues about how the weather would change in the days and weeks ahead.

He notched up some impressive achievements. During a cold outbreak in the winter of 1985, the Met Office gave warning of a prolonged freeze, but Foggitt noticed a mole poking its head up through the snow and dismissed the forecast: he was proved correct.

Later that year, Foggitt went head to head with the Met Office in a test of daily forecasts over the summer. He scored 88 per cent success compared with the 74 per cent accuracy of the Met Office.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 19, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

A READER wrote in with an account of the ground glistening with rainbow colours shining off spiders’ webs in the early morning sun. He had witnessed a rare “dew bow”.

Like a normal rainbow, this phenomenon is created by light bending and reflecting inside drops of water to make a multicoloured bow. But dew bows are created from dew on the ground, not raindrops in the sky.

The sun has to be low enough to strike the dew at a sharp angle. The dewdrops also need to be plump and round, and spiders’ webs help because their fine gossamer tends to make dewdrops stand up into rounder shapes.

Dew bows are rare sights, partly because they are often masked by the long shadows cast when the sun is low in the sky.

Although spiders’ dew bows could theoretically be seen most of the year, autumn is one of the best times. Ideal conditions are bright sunny mornings after clear, chilly nights, when the ground has cooled enough for dewdrops to condense.

The best places are often in forest clearings or on meadows, which lie in shade for a long time in the morning.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 21, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

A WEATHER record was broken on Friday, when the highest known number of lightning strikes were recorded in one day in Italy.

Some 99,000 lightning bolts were detected, beating the previous figure, 90,000 strikes on July 14, 2002. Amongst the damage was a British plane hit shortly after taking off from Naples en route to Manchester. The flight was forced to return to Naples, but no one was injured.

Italy had been buffeted by exceptionally violent storms since last Tuesday, and on Thursday and Friday a storm unleashed unusually heavy rain, which drenched some places in more than their September average in only a few hours.

It is estimated that across the world, more than 1.2 billion lightning flashes occur every year, mostly in the Tropics.

But there is some dispute over which tropical region is struck most often. Brazil claims 70 million strikes are recorded on average each year, although Kampala, Uganda, lays claim to being the thunder and lightning capital of the world, with more than 280 thunderstorm days annually.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 22, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

ACCORDING to astronomy, autumn officially begins today with the autumn equinox.

This is when the Sun is overhead at midday on the equator, and also marks equal lengths of day and night worldwide: the word equinox derives from the Latin aequi, meaning equal.

In olden days, mariners feared gales around the equinox, and certainly it has lived up to its reputation so far this week, but is it a myth? There is often a sharp rise in the number of high winds in the second half of September, but there is no reason why the autumn equinox should suddenly turn the weather ugly.

One explanation is that this time of year is when the hurricane season reaches a crescendo.

Hurricanes often execute a grand U-turn across the Caribbean and Atlantic, swerving back into the northern reaches of the Atlantic where they die in cold seas.

But their legacy of warm, wet air often becomes entangled in Atlantic depressions heading our way, beefing them up into dramatic storms which batter Britain.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 23, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

IN 1894, Charles Wilson stood on Ben Nevis and was amazed when his shadow loomed large on a nearby bank of mist, sheathed in a halo of coloured light.

It was a phenomenon known as the Brocken Spectre, caused by mist droplets reflecting light like a cinema screen, and the halo was created by light scattering on the droplets.

Wilson, a physics student, was so impressed by the vision that he tried to recreat it in a laboratory. He saturated dust-free air with water in a chamber and lowered the pressure, the conditions inside real clouds, yet few droplets formed. But when he fired X-rays through the chamber, a cloud billowed up as atoms of gas turned into ions with electrical charges, on which cloud droplets condensed.

Wilson realised that he could use his cloud chamber to see the tracks left behind by sub-atomic particles, which showed up like “little wisps and threads of clouds”.

The cloud chamber was a huge breakthrough in the study of electrons, other sub-atomic particles and radioactivity, for which Wilson was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 24, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE huge downpours of rain in August and over the past week have brought at least one benefit — the early autumn fungi are revelling in the wet conditions.

“In the past few years it was much drier at this time, with far fewer fungi around,” comments Peter Roberts, mycologist at Kew Gardens. “This autumn we’re seeing many more, especially large mushrooms and toadstools.”

Many of these specimens are edible, with a good appearance of boletes — also known as ceps — chanterelles, and hedgehog fungus. Another early autumn fungus making a fine display are species of Russula, fairly brightly coloured toadstools with whitish-creamish stems and gills, often found in acidic woodlands. Some of them are edible, but others are poisonous.

In fact, among this fine crop of fungi lurk some even more unsavoury characters. The wet weather has been kind to many poisonous fungi, and in particular Amanita phalloides, the death cap.

This looks fairly innocent — an olive-green toadstool with white gills underneath, a white stem and a ring around it — but the death cap lives up to its name and is responsible for many of the serious fungal poisonings in Britain each year.

The safest way to appreciate wild fungi is to join a fungal foray with local wildlife and conservation organisations, which can be found at fungus.org.uk.

Link to Weather Eye source

[R.P. McMurphy]

Thanks Highcliffe for the Information, keep up the good work.

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Cheers Glenn

September 25, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“THE moon was low down, and there was just the glimmer of the false dawn that comes about an hour before the real one. But the light was very faint,” Rudyard Kipling wrote in his story The False Dawn.

The false dawn is a real phenomenon known as the Zodiacal Light. This looks like a ghostly cone of light, brighter at the base and growing fainter towards the top.

Because it appears in the night sky an hour or so before dawn, it is easy to be fooled into thinking that it is the first sign of morning twilight.

But this ethereal, misty light is actually sunlight reflected off interplanetary dust, the debris left over from the formation of the planets about 4.5 billion years ago, and left floating around in outer space.

At our latitude in the northern hemisphere, the Zodiacal Light can be seen from now until about the end of October.

However, its light is so faint and misty that you need a very dark location, without moonlight, haze or any man-made light pollution.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 27, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

IT’S LIKE a zombie that refuses to die — Hurricane Ivan was supposed to have died out days ago, but has made a bizarre and very unwelcome reappearance in the Gulf of Mexico.

To recap, two weeks ago Ivan battered the Caribbean before hurling into Alabama and cutting a swath up the eastern side of the country up to Pennsylvania and Ohio. With fierce winds, huge rains, flooding, mudslides and tornadoes it left a vast trail of destruction and a total of more than 100 people dead.

But then something weird happened. Ivan split in half — the stronger top half went charging off northwards and the lower half slunk off west. This son of Ivan seemed to have drifted out harmlessly into the Atlantic, but then sprung another surprise — it boomeranged back across Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, recharged itself on the warm sea waters and slammed into Louisiana and Texas with more wind, rain and high seas. This is a pretty rare incident and is yet another amazing twist in one of the most savage hurricane seasons for many years.

Another worry is Hurricane Jeanne, which devastated Haiti last week with more than 1,000 dead in floods and landslides. It then swung north into the Bahamas and is skirting along Florida’s Atlantic coast, the fourth time that Florida has been hit by a hurricane in four weeks.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 28, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

A RECENT proposal to build six towers off the Suffolk coast has raised a storm of protest from local people and conservationists (The Times, September 6). The steel monuments would represent the lost medieval churches of Dunwich, which sank into the sea centuries ago.

Dunwich was one of England’s most prosperous towns. It boasted several churches and monasteries, a mint, two hospitals, street markets, shipyards where Edward I had warships built, and a harbour with a huge fishing fleet and ships trading with countries including Iceland and France.

But it was a constant battle to keep the port open, with the sea tearing into the soft, sandy coastline.

Storms battered the harbour, and in 1328 a great tempest choked up the entire harbour and finished Dunwich as a port.

By the 16th century more storms were ripping into the heart of the town itself and houses would from time to time disappear into the sea.

Today the ghostly relicts of old Dunwich lie underwater up to a mile offshore. All that remains on land is a picturesque village perched on a sandy cliff, but its fate has grown more precarious.

Sea erosion has picked up speed in recent years. The shoreline retreats at an average of about one metre a year as storms, rising sea levels and the sinking land all take their toll.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 29, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

AUTUMN has well and truly arrived. On September 16, clear skies and light winds allowed temperatures to drop well into single figures over much of southeast England; in Redhill, Surrey, the thermometer plunged to -0.1C (31.8F) for a short time early in the morning, achieving the first air frost of autumn in lowland Britain.

Several readers have written asking why Redhill on many occasions is recorded as the coldest place in Britain, even colder than the Scottish Highlands.

The weather station there is sited at Redhill Aerodrome, a grassy airfield flanked by gently sloping hills around the North Downs and an embankment of the nearby M23 motorway.

The ground is sandy, and on clear nights with little wind, the soil rapidly loses heat and cools the air above it rapidly.

That cold air is dense and slides down the surrounding slopes like water, collecting in a shallow dip, known as a frost hollow, which is prone to frost and bitterly cold temperatures, as well as mist and fog from early evening until the following morning.

However, Redhill’s notorious status as one of the coldest recorded places in Britain may be coming to an end.

The Met Office is considering moving the Redhill station to avoid these cold anomalies, which is a huge shame because it represents dozens of other frost hollows dotted across the valleys of southeast England.

Link to Weather Eye source

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September 30, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

YESTERDAY the Earth experienced a bomb shooting by at more than 40,000kph (24,500 mph) — a cosmic equivalent of a close shave. An asteroid 5km (3 miles) long, and shaped like a nobbly potato, hurtled within about 1.5 million km (960,000 miles) of Earth — just four times the distance to the Moon — and near enough to see through a telescope.

This asteroid is named Toutatis, a Celtic god beloved of the French cartoon character Asterix and his friends, who regularly called on Toutatis for protection in case the sky some day fell on their heads. Although the asteroid Toutatis will be too far away to fall on our heads, it is the largest known asteroid to whizz by so close in more than a century.

However, as Toutatis roams the solar system it swings by our way every hundred years or so, and there is a good chance of it hitting Earth in the next several tens of millions of years.

If that happened, the impact would blast a crater miles wide and an area larger than the size of France could be destroyed. The debris spewed out would send shockwaves through the world’s climate.

But even so, such an explosion would not be quite as catastrophic as the meteorite that struck Earth 65 million years ago and which is believed to have killed off the dinosaurs.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 1, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

IN THE 1970s a strange hum was reported to be plaguing Bristol. It was so bad that almost 800 people replied to a newspaper survey asking “Have you heard the Hum?”, saying they could hear a low-frequency noise that sounded like an idling diesel engine which never stopped. It was driving them mad, but the source of the noise could not be traced.

In fact, mysterious deep hums have been heard worldwide, ranging from Hawaii to Sweden, but the causes of the noise have never been found.

Now a new study reported in the journal Nature reveals that the hum could be made by the world’s oceans.

A series of seismometers set up in California indicated that the hum came mainly from the North Pacific during winter, then shifted to southern oceans during southern hemisphere winters before moving back north again in October.

It seems that the hum follows winter across the world.

It clearly involves large releases of energy near, or at, the Earth’s surface, but has nothing to do with earthquakes because the hum can be recorded on days without any seismic activity.

Instead, the scientists suggest that the noise is generated by winter storms churning up deep ocean waves which drum on to the seabed and set off vibrations heard as low-frequency hums, although usually these are way below the limits of human hearing.

Link to Weather Eye source