Colder Times

All of a sudden winter is here. Until now the temperature has stayed in double figures but it was much colder yesterday and this morning we had a hard frost. It has barely been above freezing at any point today. It was -2 °C at 7.30pm when I got home from work.

I now wish I’d bought some food for the birds at the weekend as the feeders are empty and I think my little avian visitors need some fuel. At least there are lots of berries around. A wood pigeon visits my garden regularly to feast on them and as a result is now as round as a football and probably too fat to fly.

On the subject of birds, this little chap appeared outside my office window last week. The distinctive red colour on the body doesn’t show up at all in the phone picture but, when combined with the black cap on its head, made me think it was a bullfinch. Bullfinches spend the winter here so maybe I’ll see this one again.

I suddenly thought today that it might be an idea to put some bird feeders in the space outside my office window. It’s enclosed by walls on all sides but open above. It would be a very safe space for birds to feed and it would be nice to encourage a few more avian visitors.

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The Calm Before Lorenzo

It was calm and rather mild this morning as I walked into work, although the news on the radio this morning was filled with news about the rapidly approaching Storm Lorenzo. Lorenzo is a huge storm and was only downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm when it was about 500km from the Irish coast so it could be even more serious than Storm Ophelia, which caused chaos a couple of years ago.

This is how the storm looked in the early hours of this morning:

And this is the projection for later today. The prevailing wind right now is westerly, but this will veer to south-westerly as the storm moves along its (roughly) north-easterly path:

Here is an infra-red image taken this morning showing the outer belts of cloud already over Ireland.

Quite a few events have been called off in anticipation of the arrival of Storm Lorenzo this evening, with heavy rain and gale force winds forecast across the country. There are signs, however, that the low pressure region at the heart of the storm is filling more rapidly than expected, so it might not be as severe as feared, although there remains a significant risk of localized flooding and wind damage, especially in the West. I plan to sit it out at home this evening with a glass or two of wine for company…

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Another Pembrokeshire Dangler

Taking the opportunity of  the Irish Bank Holiday Monday to spend a long weekend in a rather chilly Cardiff,  I find that Wales is once again under the influence of a Pembrokeshire Dangler:

The Northerly airflow that is responsible for this phenomenon (which I first encountered last year)  is causing a bit of a cold snap here in Cardiff, and has even brought snow to  parts of Wales,  but hopefully the Pembrokeshire Dangler will not interfere with my flight back to Ireland.

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Vector Calculus Weather

As it happens I did a lecture today about vector fields as part of my module on vector calculus. Whenever I did similar lectures in the past I used the day’s weather map as an illustration, so this morning I downloaded what turned out to be a particularly dramatic example. The curl of the velocity field around the weather system off the west coast of Ireland this morning was definitely non-zero…

Storm Callum turned out to be not as damaging as feared. Apparently it was rather windy in Maynooth overnight, but I slept right through it.

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The Beast From The East

From my viewpoint in sunny snow-free Cardiff I can only assume that all this talk of The Beast From The East means that Nikolai Valuev is about to make a comeback to the boxing ring.

Standing a mighty seven foot tall, Valuev is the heaviest and tallest man ever to have been a world boxing champion. He retired from the ring on 2009, but I think he’d still be capable of surviving a few inches of snow…

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The Pembrokeshire Dangler

They say there’s a first time for everything, and it turned out yesterday was the first occasion on which I encountered a Pembrokeshire Dangler:

It’s still there today. The Northerly airflow that is responsible for this phenomenon is causing a very cold snap here in Cardiff, but hopefully the Pembrokeshire Dangler will not hang around much longer.

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In Thunder, Lightning and in Rain..

A while before 6am this morning I was woken up by the sound of fairly distant thunder to the West of my flat. I left the windows open – they’ve been open all the time in this hot weather – and dozed while rumblings continued. Just after six there was a terrifically bright flash and an instantaneous bang that set car alarms off in my street; lightning must have struck a building very close. Then the rain arrived. I got up to close the windows against the torrential downpour, at which point I noticed that water was coming in through the ceiling. A further inspection revealed another leak in the cupboard where the boiler lives and another which had water dripping from a light fitting. A frantic half hour with buckets and mops followed, but I had to leave to get to work so I just left buckets under the drips and off I went into the deluge to get soaked.

Here is the map of UK rain at 07:45 am, with Brighton in the thick of it:

I made it up to campus (wet and late); it’s still raining but hopefully will settle down soon. This is certainly turning into a summer of extremes!

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Sleep well last night?

We had a spectacular thunderstorm over Brighton last night. I do love a good thunderstorm. Although I enjoyed the show, I didn’t get much sleep. Judging by the following graphic from BBC Weather, I’m not the only one…

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March Weather in Sussex…

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Winter Weather Contrasts

The world-famous British weather has been pulling out all the stops over the last few days. During a short break in the proceedings yesterday I did a bit of flat-hunting in Brighton. It was a lovely bright morning, with the winter sun low in the sky making the city look absolutely beautiful. Here’s a pic I took with my Blackberry of the Palace Pier from Marine Parade…

I managed to get away at a reasonable hour after the end of the interviews and made it home to Cardiff before the snow arrived, which it eventually did around one o’clock in the morning. It’s still snowing a bit, actually, but it’s now mixed with drizzle. The slushy streets are unusually quiet. There’s not all that much in Cardiff itself, but the examinations due to start at 9am this morning were delayed until 9.30 to allow students and staff extra time to get to the various venues. The main thing is that it’s very dark, with grey clouds filling the sky. Here’s another Blackberry pic, taken on my walk into work this morning..

The contrast with Brighton yesterday is considerable, except for the temperature. Bright and dry in Brighton, dark and damp in Cardiff and cold in both.

Still, at least the “red snow alert” broadcast by the BBC came to nothing. This lot is definitely white.

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