Tag Archives: Weather

General, Web/Internet

Weather

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A while back I added another little application to the today screen of my PDA – SBP Weather. It is a pretty straightforward tool that displays a summary weather forecast for a chosen location for either the next four, five or seven days. In my case it is periodically querying the BBC Weather site to get a local forecast for Wokingham.

What is interesting is to note the frequency with which the forecast changes, even during the course of a day, which shows up the inaccuracies of modern forecasting, especially when trying to summarise the weather for an entire day, for a pretty localised area. Indeed on a couple of occasions I tend to find that the current day symbol doesn’t always match up with reality.

Having said that, perhaps it’s down to the changeable weather we’ve been having recently. After our heat-wave at the beginning of the summer most of August has been sunshine and showers, and at times pretty chilly for August. Quite often the symbols are switching between various levels of sun, cloud and rain, so it is really trying to determine whether a particular bank of cloud will cross this part of England without dropping rain or not!

Needless to say, right on cue, the long range forecast over at MetCheck is predicting a mini-heat wave just in time for the schools going back. MetCheck also includes an interesting ‘rest of year’ forecast page, which includes a percentage probability. What is surprising is that there are certain parts of the forecast that have a pretty high, sometimes even 100% accuracy. The reason of course is that there are regular patterns of weather across the UK, so whilst you can’t predict exact temperatures, or exact weather, you can make broad statements about what is likely to happen.

General

Feeling the Heat

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Heatwave

So today, the temperature is potentially going to break the all time record for July. The BBC are predicting a temperature of 35°C, with the possibility of it going higher locally. The weather forecasters are describing this as exceptional – the average temperature for this week in July is usually 21°C to 23°C – although it is worth bearing in mind that this is the third time this year that the temperature has exceeded 30°C, and the second time that the Met Office has issued a heat wave warning.

Of course, bearing in mind our usual temperature range, the UK is not overly well set up for this level of heat, hence why the heat wave warning always includes contact details for the NHS health advice line. We have air conditioning in the office, however typically we don’t have the instructions for the hieroglyphics on the control panel – good thing we’ve got the Internet though…

At home, like most UK houses we don’t have any air conditioning, so instead we’re getting quite well practiced in where to put fans, which windows and curtains to open and close at which times and so on. Upstairs is usually rather too warm most of the time; however we can usually keep the living room cool enough that we keep the patio door closed as inside is cooler than outside. The other useful trick is to remember that modern houses especially have loads of insulation. In terms of the roof, this tends to be above the ceiling, of the top floor, rather than directly beneath the roof. This means that as the house warms up, all the heat gets trapped by the insulation in the loft, however opening the loft hatch releases that heat past the insulation, so is a great way to dissipate heat. However the loft itself also gets very hot when the sun is beating down on the roof, so equally we tend to keep the hatch closed during the day, so as not to try to add too much to the heat.

If your interest in the weather extends further, I’ve recently added a new plug-in to the today screen of my PDA – SPB Weather. Although out of the box it retrieves its weather data from a site in Russia, the forums on their website include a template and instructions to enable the use of the local BBC weather forecasts from their website as the source of the data. Looking at the predictions for the next few days, the temperature is going to settle back down a bit, with some cloud and rain predicted. However it still not to the seasonal average, and looks like it may still be nudging 30°C.

General

Be Careful What You Wish For…

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I have to say, like a number of other people I was getting pretty fed up with the dismal May we had to put up with… However, I think I’d rather have the rain than this, at least I could escape the rain inside. With the soaring temperatures we’ve had for the past few days there is no escape at all, even with all the windows open it is still like a sauna in the house. Not only that, the sunshine and heat has kicked off the pollen and sent my hay-fever into overdrive, so even if I do manage to find a cool spot somewhere, I’m still sneezing…

Thankfully, it does look like the weather will settle into something a bit more comfortable in the middle of next week, certainly down from the almost 30 degree heat and high humidity we’ve had the past few days, will definitely be a relief around here….

General

Grey

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A friend of ours always used to say that one of the reasons she went skiing every year, apart from the fact that she liked skiing of course, was to escape the tedium of the weather that never did much at this time of year. I have to say that although one of my favourite weather anecdotes is the bit of research that compared the Met Office weather forecast with assuming that the weather tomorrow would be the same as today (called the persistence forecast) – and found that the assumption was often more accurate than the weather forecast – I’ve never noticed it that much. True the weather is fairly consistent, but there were always some differences from day to day.

However, this year is a bit different, for the past couple of weeks the weather has done absolutely nothing. There has been no wind, no rain (we are in the middle of one of the worst droughts for a century), and the temperature has been hovering at freezing or below for what seems like an age. Last week was not too bad as there was not much cloud, so at least it was sunny, but for the whole of this week, it has just been gloomy and grey, with full cloud cover the entire day. It is now at the point that it is so dry that even with the sub-zero overnight temperatures there has been no frost either. Roll on spring, then maybe we’ll get a bit of variety!

MobLog, Pictures

Rainbow

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Double Rainbow

Today was one of those days that I was glad I now have a camera phone that can take half decent pictures. All during the day the weather had been pretty changeable, although leaning more towards the dreary drizzle that you tend to get coming in to winter. However about half-past four we had a really heavy downpour, complete with heavy dark clouds. But as with the rest of the weather today it moved off quite quickly, to be followed by fairly clear skys behind. With the sun starting to set it meant we got the spectacular sight that I’ve tried to capture here, a double rainbow, the brighter part of which arched over the whole sky, and the most incredible contrast between the white within the rainbow and the heavy grey outside. I have to say, the picture doesn’t really do it justice.