Weather Eye

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October 2, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

WHY do sheep seem to glow at twilight? A reader wrote in with this fascinating question, which is not quite as bizarre as it may seem.

Apart from sheep, many wild flowers also turn ghostly, luminous at twilight.

It is created by ultraviolet light reflecting off these natural surfaces, which we see as fluorescence. This is often only noticeable at dawn and dusk when the levels of other wavelengths of light are so low they no longer mask the ultraviolet reflections.

Insects’ eyes are particularly sensitive to the ultraviolet light, and flowers use special patterns of ultraviolet to attract and then guide the insects to their nectar and pollen so that they get crosspollinated.

Even some fungi can use ultraviolet reflections. Blueberries are plagued by a ruinous disease called mummy berry, caused by a fungus which turns the berries hard and white. The fungus imitates a flower by using similar ultraviolet patterns to dupe flies and bees into visiting and carrying off its infectious spores.

However, it is not clear what use fluorescent sheep are.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 4, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

A HUNDRED years ago, tests were made of a kite that could lift a man. Its inventor, Samuel Cody, was best known for his hugely successul Wild West Show “Captain Cody, King of the Cowboys”, which toured Britain.

But Cody was passionate also about kites, and persuaded the British War Office that his man-kite could be used for flying an observer to spy on battlefields armed with telescope, telephone, camera and gun.

In a demonstration at Portsmouth, he flew one of his sons up to 800 feet high and photographed the Navy’s fleet below.

In 1904, Cody was hired as Chief Kite Instructor at Aldershot to test his kites, and lifted a man to a record height of half a mile.

Although aeroplanes soon replaced his kites, Cody demonstrated how a kite could be used to carry a new weather instrument called the meteorograph, that recorded height, temperature, humidity, and wind velocity. He eventually flew the instrument to a new record altitude of 4.2km (2.6 miles).

In fact, weather kites continued to be used up until the Second World War, achieving a record height of 7km (4.4 miles), and helping reveal temperature inversions (layers of warm air over cold air) and high-level winds.

Cody eventually died in 1913 in another one of his flying inventions, the Waterplane. He was buried with full military honours.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 5, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THIS September’s dry spell came as a blessed relief following a summer of unbelievable rain: England and Wales were about 30 per cent drier than the month’s normal rainfall and were also slightly sunnier.

But October looks to be slipping into wet ways again. The month has kicked off with plenty of rain, and long-range forecasts are pointing to more wet and windy weather as westerlies run off the Atlantic, soaking the western side of the UK in particular.

It is somewhat reminiscent of the wet weather of 1917 in Northwest Europe during the First World War.

The Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele, was planned for August to use dry ground, but the heaviest rains the region had seen in decades turned the area into a swamp, infantry slowed down, tanks got stuck and the campaign was rapidly bogged down.

By September the weather turned dry, but the British attack was exhausted.

General Haig prepared another offensive for October, but the rains returned and created even worse conditions for the troops in a lethal quagmire: trenchfoot, pneumonia and lakes of mud in shell craters filled with water.

Eventually a final onslaught on November 7 took the devastated town of Passchendaele, barely a few miles from the original starting line, and at a staggering cost in lives. And a German counter-attack the following year recaptured every inch of ground.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 7, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

WHILE hurricanes have ravaged the Caribbean and the US, another weather disaster has been taking place almost unreported on the other side of the world. Bangladesh is being devastated by floods from one of its worst monsoon seasons in years.

In July and August, floods from monsoon rains swamped two-thirds of the country, killing more than 700 people and leaving about 10 million homeless.

Damage to roads, agriculture and industry was immense. The rains eased until colossal downpours fell again last month. On September 13, the capital, Dhaka, suffered its heaviest day’s rainfall for around 50 years with 35cm (14in) crashing down in just 24 hours. With the land already saturated, much of the country flooded again, washing away homes and newly planted rice fields, hampering relief efforts from the previous floods; millions face near starvation this winter.

The driving force behind the monsoon is a vast heat engine. From March until June, the land bakes into an inferno, and as that hot air rises it draws in cooler, moist winds from the Indian Ocean, which smash into the foothills of the Himalayas with torrential rains.

This is also the start of the region’s cyclone season with the threat of immense damage from high winds, storm surges and crashing waves — the cyclone of November 1970 killed around 500,000 people in Bangladesh, one of the worst natural disasters of the 20th century.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 8, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THERE was a magnificent sunset on Wednesday evening as the sky lit up orange-pink and picked out an assortment of clouds left over from an afternoon of sharp showers.

But what really gripped my attention was a small patch of speckly altocumulus clouds arranged like fishscales. Even more fascinating, the clouds were lit up in faint green, turquoise, purple and pink colours like a piece of shimmering tartan.

This phenomenon is called iridescence, named after Iris, the ancient Greek goddess who passed messages between mortals and the gods. As Iris ran back and forth, her multicoloured robes shimmered, which is how we got the word “iridescence”.

Cloud iridescence has a metallic quality, rather like the colours smeared over an oily water surface. It is very different from a rainbow’s vivid and regularly banded hues, created by light bending (refracting) inside raindrops.

For iridescence, far smaller cloud droplets are needed, as small as 0.001mm.

These tiny droplets diffract the light, slightly bending the rays as they pass around the edges of the cloud droplets. As the light waves bend, they interact with each, rather like waves of water crashing into each other, and this interference creates the coloured patterns.

Iridescence is more common than you might imagine, and particularly in altocumulus, which often trails behind active weather fronts — look fairly near the sun, but not at the sun itself.

Link to Weather Eye source

[kold weather]

wow,thanks highcliffie2,these weathereye reports are most intresting!

[highcliffe2]

Cheers KW :lol: All credit must go to Paul Simons at The Times though for these excellent stories

October 9, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

FOUR hundred years ago today, a brilliant new star suddenly appeared in the night sky. It was a supernova, an exploding star, and was the last known example of one in our galaxy.

Stars run on nuclear energy, and when their fuel supply runs out they die in a spectacular manner.

If the star is particularly large, it collapses under its own gravity and explodes with a blast wave that rips its guts out and blasts the remains through space at about 22 million miles per hour.

The supernova of 1604 was too far away to pose any risk on Earth, but other supernovas have been devastating.

Two million years ago, molluscs and many other sea creatures suddenly died out all over the planet.

The wave of extinctions has been linked to a supernova which is thought to have bombarded the Earth’s atmosphere with cosmic rays.

The charged subatomic particles would have smashed into atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere, severely damaging the ozone layer and exposing living creatures to lethal amounts of the Sun’s ultraviolet rays.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 11, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

IN OLDEN days, several types of plants were used for forecasting rain, from the bit of seaweed turning limp, to the flowers of the scarlet pimpernel closing over — earning it the title “poor man’s weather glass”.

Another well-known plant for forecasting rain was the pine cone, which opens when conditions turn dry and closes when rain is on the way.

Rarely has any plant forecasting been tested, until scientists revealed how the pine cone senses the weather. Inside the cone are wing-shaped scales with moisture-sensitive fibres. As the cone dries, the fibres bend the scale outwards, the cone opens and releases seeds held inside. This arrangement ensures that the cone sheds its seeds only in dry weather when they stand a better chance of being blown away on a breeze.

Now the moisture-sensitive pine cone fibres have inspired a new moisture-sensitive fabric. The University of Bath and the London College of Fashion are designing a type of breathable clothing which reponds to the wearer using tiny pores which open or close according to the humidity. When the wearer gets hot and sweaty, the pores open and allow in air from the outside to cool things down. When the wearer stops sweating, the pores will close and stop air getting in, increasing the fabric’s insulation.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 12, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THIS year has broken all records for tornados in the US.

So far the total number of tornados reported is 1,516, already breaking the record of 1,424 tornados for the whole of 1998 — and the tornado season has not finished yet.

This September, in particular, unleashed a swarm of 247 tornados, way above the average of 47 for the month and demolishing the previous September record of 139 tornadoes set in 1967, based on records going back to 1950.

This extraordinary number for September is partly due to the extremely violent hurricane season. If you imagine a hurricane divided into four quarters, the northeast quadrant of a storm advancing northwards frequently fires off tornados because this is the sector of the storm with the greatest wind shear — the violent winds that spin air like a whirling top which help to create tornados.

Although Britain does not have hurricanes, it has been a stormy year with plenty of tornados. We get an average of 33 tornados each year, but the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation has reported some 50 so far this year.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 13, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“A GOOD October and a good blast, To blow the hog acorn and mast.” There has been plenty of wind over the south of England, thanks to an interesting set-up in the weather systems over Britain.

A large block of high pressure sitting over Scandinavia had dominated the UK, bringing fine and dry conditions for most of us last weekend.

That Scandinavian anticyclone had forced depressions further south, including a fierce storm that lashed the Bay of Biscay. Reports from ships and buoys this weekend indicated winds up to hurricane force in one instance, and waves reaching 6m (20 ft) high. The strong winds battered western France, the northern coast of Spain, and in Portugal, one man was drowned in the rough seas while the storm brought down hundreds of trees, damaging power lines, houses, and almost half the greenhouses in the centre of the country.

By Sunday, the storm edged its way north into the English Channel and hit the South Coast with winds gusting up to 50mph and bursts of rain. The depression continued to push further north while another low pressure system is sweeping in from the west, promising more unsettled conditions over the next few days.

Even worse, some forecast computer models are showing much colder weather next week, feeling more like January than mid-autumn, with the chance of snow on Scottish mountains.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 14, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

NEWSPAPERS this week have carried the story that this winter is going to be freezing cold. The prediction from Metcheck was claimed to show that regular cold fronts will sweep across the country with a white Christmas “almost a certainty” (The Times, October 12).

To be fair to Metcheck, they actually forecast a fairly average winter, fairly similar to last year’s, with only a few cold snaps. In fact, last winter also had several cold spells, but by no stretch of the imagination could you call it a cold winter because temperatures remained above average.

The problem comes from what is meant by the term “average”. If 25 days in a month are fairly mild, but the remainder are cold, that cold snap might drag the average temperature below the seasonal norm — but does that mean the whole month was cold?

Metcheck’s spokesman Andrew Bond explained: “The actual winter is not expected to be that far off the seasonal norm and there are only three or possibly four periods which are expected to nudge the final figure just below the average.”

The Met Office’s own long-range seasonal outlook forecasts a winter of about average temperatures in the UK, or slightly above average in places.

However, another group of forecasters, the WeatherOutlook, are predicting a bitterly cold winter, based on a controversial analysis of the sun’s activity, which is currently very low.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 15, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

RECENTLY I read a fascinating account of four cows standing in a pasture one night with glowing silver and blue lights coming out of their horns.

This might seem like something from a science fiction film, but there was a rational explanation. A big thunderstorm had erupted that night, and the lights were almost certainly St Elmo’s fire, created during thunderstorms when the air reaches a very high voltage and a large charge builds up around the tips of pointed objects — this forms ionised gas that often looks like dancing flames.

St Elmo’s ,Fire was often seen in olden days on sailing ships during stormy weather with lights playing around the masts and rigging, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described in The Golden Legend:

Last night I saw St Elmo’s stars,

With their glittering lanterns all at play

On the tops of the masts and tips o the spars, And I knew we should have foul weather today.

This might explain the legend of the the Flying Dutchman, a phantom ship which was seen haunting the waters around the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, with its ghostly blue lights.

Perhaps its most famous sighting was witnessed by Prince George, later to become King George V, in 1881 aboard HMS Bacchante. He saw the Flying Dutchman appear as a strange red light, as if the ship was all aglow.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 16, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

NEXT week’s weather starts with a nasty depression and a cold front, bringing heavy showers over the UK, some hail and thunder, and possible sleet or snow over high ground in northern England.

The weather front has formed from cold air, originally from the Arctic, ploughing into warm sub-tropical air. The cold air is heavier, so it slices under the lighter warm air and thrusts it high, condensing its moisture into towering clouds that can become thunderstorms. As the cold front passes through, the temperature can plunge as the warm air mass gives way to cold air.

Sydney in Australia experienced a particularly dramatic cold front last week. A heatwave had seen temperatures soar to a new October record of 38.2C (100.8F) on Wednesday, but next day the temperature nosedived from 37C (99F) to 20C (68F) in just an hour as a cold front swept through.

The world’s biggest temperature drop recorded in one day was a fall of 56 degrees Celsius from 7C to -49C (45F to -56F), when an Arctic cold front slammed through Browning, Montana, in the US. on January 23, 1916.

Link to Weather Eye source

That last paragraphy astounds me! :shock:

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October 18, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

TODAY is St Luke’s day, a date said to be blessed with fine, dry weather. This is also known as “St Luke’s Little Summer”, when a high pressure system is supposed to be in control, delivering blissfully sunny, warm weather. However, the cloudless skies can also make the nights chilly as heat escapes into space.

Calm autumnal periods like this are also known as a “goose summer”, which is believed to be the root of the word “gossamer”, the long threads of silk which spiders play out to catch a breeze and then fly off into the air. “When you see gossamer flying, Be sure the air is drying” — so goes an old proverb, meaning that airborne spiders are a sign of fine, dry weather, usually warm with light winds and not too humid. In these conditions, hundreds or thousands of spiders, often tiny money spiders, can take to the air to find new territories to colonise.

Once airborne, a spider can parachute for incredible distances, and some have reached up to 5000m (16,400ft) high in the Himalayas.

The spiders may even have some control over their flight by pulling in their silken trails like a parachute cord, or by relaunching themselves several times.

Once the spiders have landed, whole fields can be left strewn with their silvery gossamer shimmering in the autumn sunshine.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 19, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

IT WAS alarming to read that the Government proposes to build nearly 500,000 homes in eastern England (The Times, October 16). Apart from impacts on the landscape, there is serious doubt about whether the region’s climate can support such huge development.

East Anglia is the driest region of Britain and also has most of the best agricultural land. It already suffers occasional dust bowls called “fen blows”, which whip up the topsoil into clouds of thick dust, but summers are expected to grow drier and erode the land even further. Drought will also drive up demands for irrigation, putting huge pressure on already scarce water supplies. The proposals for a desalination plant on the Thames estuary highlight the likelihood of future water shortages.

In fact, climate change could have a greater impact in East Anglia than any other part of Britain. With a quarter of the region below sea level, there is a growing threat of flooding from rising sea levels, bigger storms, and the land sinking as it bounces back from the end of the last ice age.

The flood of 1953 provided a chilling lesson in what the consequences of these threats might be. The 1953 storm surge which flooded the coast of East Anglia and Thames estuary, killed more than 300 people. Unless huge improvements are made to flood defences, vulnerable homes and land will have to be sacrificed to the sea and low-lying land allowed to flood as natural marshland.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 20, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

A reader asks whether an eruption of the Mount St Helens volcano in Washington state could affect the world’s climate.

The volcano is showing alarming signs of activity, with steam and ash puffing out and so much lava building up in the crater that the mountain's dome is bulging upwards.

When the volcano last erupted, in May 1980, it blew off the top of the mountain, killing 57 people, destroying more than 200 homes, and devastating hundreds of square kilometres of the surrounding.

Some 2.8 cubic kilometres (0.67 cu miles) of rock shot out of the northern flank of the mountain, slicing 400m (1,314ft) off its peak.

Ash from the eruption billowed across much of the US and spread worldwide. But despite this catastrophic explosion, it had surprisingly little effect on the world’s climate. The reason was that the eruption released relatively small amounts of sulphur dioxide, a gas which forms tiny droplets of sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. If that acid shrouds the globe, it does much to block out the Sun’s heat leads to cooler global temperatures.

By contrast, when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in June 1991, it blew out some 6 million tonnes of sulphur which turned into a worldwide shroud of acid. This shaved around half a degree Celsius off average global temperatures the following year and gave us cooler weather.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 21, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THIS has been a stormy month and, according to reports sent in to the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation, some nine tornados have struck England so far.

Horsham in Sussex was hit by a powerful tornado on Thursday, which tore off chimneys, broke windows, snapped branches, and left a half-mile trail of debris.

But another tornado that caught my attention was in Leicester on Friday. This was a smaller event, with tiles flung off houses, leaves ripped from trees, and garden furniture sent flying.

However, a far worse tornado terrified Leicester 38 years ago. On November 15, 1966, a fierce thunderstorm erupted and the Highfields area of the city was rocked by a particularly intense flash of lightning and crack of thunder. The tornado struck almost immediately, lifting up a church roof and leaving the whole building so badly damaged it had to be demolished later.

At a boys’ school, a tower collapsed and crashed down through a roof below, leaving several pupils trapped underneath the rubble. Miraculously, they all managed to crawl out uninjured, and no other injuries were reported elsewhere in the area.

The ordeal was particularly shocking coming just a month after the Aberfan disaster in South Wales, when coal waste slid down a mountainside into the mining village of Aberfan killing 144 people, mostly children in their primary school.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 22, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“WINGED with red lightning and tempestuous rage”

Milton, Paradise Lost

A bolt of red-coloured lightning was reported during the storm in London on Wednesday night. This is far from unique: red lightning was seen in Yorkshire in August.

Legend says that blue lightning is a sign of hail, white lightning suggests a dry atmosphere, yellow indicates dusty air and red shows that there is plenty of rain.

More certain is that a lightning flash is created in much the way that switching on a fluorescent light makes it glow — the electric current excites gas molecules and they give off light.

You can see another excited gas in a fascinating experiment. In a very dark room, adjust your eyes to the darkness and crunch on some hard mints or sugar cubes with your mouth open close to a mirror, or smash the mints or sugar with a hammer.

You should see tiny bluish-white sparks — the crunching generates a voltage that excites nitrogen gas in the air and makes it luminescent with the same colour as lightning.

The high-voltage fields in lightning make nitrogen, as well as oxygen, glow white or blue-violet.

As for red lightning, one idea is that it is created in very moist air, with the hydrogen in the water glowing red.

Alternatively, it may be caused by air pollution — red lightning is supposed to be more common in large cities.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 23, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

LONDON is not usually prone to tornados, but today marks the anniversary of a terrifying tornado that hit the capital in 1091 — in fact, according to the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (Torro) it ranks as one of the worst in British history.

“A dreadful whirlwind” struck during a storm, demolishing around 600 houses, which in those days were timber-framed with thatched roofs, although miraculously these did not catch alight from indoor fires.

Several churches were badly damaged, including the church at St Mary-le-Bow, where part of a wall collapsed, the roof was torn off and two men were killed.

To give an idea of the tornado’s power, roof rafters about 28ft long were whirled around and driven so deeply into the street of Chepe — now Cheapside, Old London’s main thoroughfare — that only about 8ft of the wooden beams remained above ground.

At the Tower of London, the stone White Tower, begun in 1078 and still at that time unfinished, was “sorely shaken by the tempest” and the old wooden London Bridge swept away by a surge in the Thames.

Link to Weather Eye Source

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October 25, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE mushroom season is in full swing and in Scotland it is especially impressive.

Not only are wild fungi thriving in the wet conditions, but they are flourishing well into the autumn as their growing season extends longer — over the past 15 years, the mushroom season has grown about four weeks longer as the climate has become warmer.

Not only that, but six new species of fungi have been discovered in Scotland. The newcomers have migrated from the south, and it is thought that these, too, have been attracted to the warmer Scottish climate.

But there are concerns that the fungal invasion could herald the start of new plant diseases in Scotland — two of the new invaders are mould fungi which attack leaves of some garden plants.

Other plants may fall victim to fungal disease they had been immune from previously, thanks to changes in climate. One example of a plant under attack is the rhododendron, which until the past ten years rarely had mildew. Now it can be infested with the fungal disease, possibly due to the milder conditions.

At the other extreme of climate, the Scottish Highlands are no longer cold enough for four alpine species of lichens — a partnership between a fungus and alga, or cyanobacterium and alga. These lichens are thought to have vanished because conditions grew too warm, and they simply had nowhere to retreat to.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 26, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it” Mark Twain.

THIS is Energy Efficiency Week, a chance to do something about the weather or, rather, climate change caused by carbon dioxide pollution.

A quarter of all carbon dioxide pollution in the UK comes from energy used for heating and electricity in homes.

Domestic lighting pumps out about 5 per cent of Britain’s total carbon dioxide pollution, and video recorders and televisions on standby each year eat up about £150 million worth of electricity.

Quite apart from conserving energy, it is possible for householders to turn their homes into miniature power stations.

Solar-electric panels are now quite attractive, and even in our climate turn out respectable amounts of power.

In fact, if the roof of every home in Britain had a solar cell the power generated would be equivalent to eight medium-size power stations. And that energy would go straight into the home, avoiding losses as it is carried through the National Grid and substations from power stations.

The criticism of renewable energies is that they work onlym for limited periods — solar only works in daylight, for instance. However, more power sources are being developed for homes, including small domestic wind turbines. Powergen is testing a central heating boiler that turns waste heat

into electricity. More information can be found on the Energy Saving Trust website www.est.org.uk

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 27, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

“O WILD West Wind, thou breath of autumn’s being”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

The weather today promises to be diabolical, but it should come as no surprise. The period from October 26 to 29 and between November 9 and 12 is almost always terrible. In fact, this period is so predictably awful that one study recorded this bad spell each year between 1889 and 1940, earning it its own name — the late-autumn rains.

But how can the weather be so tied to the calendar? One reason is an extra kick to the jet stream in late October, as cold air thrusts down from the increasingly cold Arctic and hits the warmer Atlantic and subtropical air.

The jet stream and collision of air masses also sets off Atlantic storms passing over or close to the UK and growing increasingly frequent.

To make matters worse, on October 25-26 a northerly outbreak of biting cold air sometimes sweeps down and sends temperatures plunging.

The only saving grace of the period is that a brief respite of warm, sunny weather from a high-pressure system can sometimes squeeze in between these bouts of storms.

The late-autumn rains are a remarkable example of a “singularity”, a regularly recurring weather event pegged to a certain date in the calendar.

Some singularities are more reliable than others, and unfortunately this week is proving the late-autumn rains to be one of them.

Link to Weather Eye source

[Guest Mrs murphymoo]

Thanks for that Ryan - these articles are so interesting

I really enjoy reading them

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October 28, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

BY THE time Hurricane Charley roared into Florida on August 13, most people had fled their homes — and so, it seems, had the local sharks.

Scientists had been tracking sharks tagged with acoustic receivers in an estuary at Charlotte Harbour, Florida. Some two or three hours before the hurricane reached land, the creatures slipped away from the estuary. A day later, after the storm was over, the sharks returned.

What is especially intriguing is the timing of the sharks’ rapid departure. It coincided with a sharp drop in air pressure that came as the hurricane approached. Other research has revealed that microscopic hair cells in the inner ears of sharks, and also rays, can sense changes in pressure as tiny as five millibars.

Changes in atmospheric pressure affect water pressure, so the sharks would probably have felt the 50 millibars pressure drop before Hurricane Charley hit.

But why would a pressure change make the sharks want to leave their home?

Although the estuary should have been a relatively safe haven from the storm, it is also shallow. That could present a problem for sharks, because a big storm surge could push the sharks onshore and leave them stranded.

Perhaps as the pressure drops, the sharks might feel it would be sensible to move to seek deeper waters.

Link to Weather Eye source

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October 30, 2004

BY PAUL SIMONS

THE clocks go back tomorrow and we will be plunged into what feels like the beginning of winter.

Although the clocks make no difference to the weather, it does signal the changing seasons and that can have some surprising effects on us.

The lurch into dark evenings can trigger depression and lethargy as the lack of daylight sets off seasonal affective disorder, which is thought to affect half the population.

Research reveals that we go through other changes at this time of year. Blood cholesterol levels peak in autumn and winter and heart attacks increase in December and January. Winter brings falling rates of conception, more problems in pregnancy and, strangely, beards grow more slowly.

Perhaps we show signs of hibernation by sleeping more and putting on weight. Two “hibernation” genes have been discovered that tell our bodies to burn fat rather than carbohydrates.

Most spectacular of all, space agencies are investigating a hibernation substance that could put astronauts to sleep, perhaps for years, on long space flights to the outer planets.

Link to Weather Eye source