The Geographer: Wicked and Wonderful Weather (spring 2023)

Spring 2023

The magazine of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society

The Geographer

Wicked and Wonderful Weather

The Marvels of Meteorology

•Maps and Words for Rain

•Unusual Forecasts and Angry Weather

•The Met Office, RMetS, and the Scottish Meteorological Society

•Storm Chasing and Secrets of Weather

•Career Paths and a Meteorological Life

•Mountains and Snow Patches

•COP15 in Montréal

• Reader Offer: Angry Weather

plus news, books, and more…

“Bad weather always looks worse through a window.”

Tom Lehrer

The Geographermeteorology

Welcome to the first Geographer magazine of 2023. I hope this year can be a positive and productive one for us all.

We have chosen the fascinating topic of meteorology as our theme to kick-start the new year. The weather remains the most common topic of conversation for friends and strangers alike, in particular as a safe introduction to deeper discussion, reflecting our social comfort zones, and our uncertain weather, of course. But it also reminds us that everyone has an innate interest in geography; after all, meteorology is part of geography and part of everyone’s daily experience. We all experience the weather every day, but how many of us actually understand it?

For this edition of The Geographer we sought contributions from some of those who, day-to-day, help us to understand the weather, help explain its impact, and help people to understand and plan for it. From local forecasts for chocolate and crisp deliveries, to reading natural signs and predicting weather and cloud patterns, to international forecasts and climate, and the individuals and institutions that professionally work in this arena, there is so much of interest, so much to know and learn, so much to discuss. So, next time someone begins a conversation with an observation about the weather, we hope you’ll smile and think of one or another of the articles in this magazine.

With thanks to the Royal Meteorological Society, the UN World Meteorological Organization and the Met Office for their help in securing articles and for all the wonderful contributions. Enjoy...

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS

RMetS Membership Offer

The Royal Meteorological Society is offering readers of The Geographer an exclusive 25% off membership subscription before the end of May, including print copies of the monthly Weather journal. Contact the Society via info@rmets.org or call 0118 2080 142 and quote ‘The Geographer’ to take advantage of this special offer. For more details on membership and benefits, visit rmets.org/membership

RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU

tel: 01738 455050

email: enquiries@rsgs.org www.rsgs.org

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A glimpse of the past

Charity registered in Scotland no SC015599

The views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the RSGS.

RSGS: a better way to see the world

More gems from RSGS’s collections are coming to light, such as this example of C19th weather instruments being used in the field. It is just one of many hundreds of glass plates our volunteer Collections Team are now working their way through, painstakingly cataloguing and sorting. The collections include all sorts of images: an early photo of Niagara from the mid-1800s, images of Egypt and hieroglyphics from the early 20th century, alongside teaching slides, and we look forward to unearthing more treasures as the task unfolds.

Biodiversity COP15

After being postponed four times due to the pandemic, COP15, the 15th United Nations Biodiversity Conference, was held in Montréal, Canada over 12 days in December, after originally being planned to take place in Kunming, China. Almost 200 countries agreed to a new set of goals and targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by the end of the decade. Conversations at the conference revolved around developed countries wanting to ratchet up the framework’s ambition, while developing countries sought reassurance that developed countries would offer sufficient support and resources to allow them to follow suit. The resulting Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework replaces the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, agreed at COP10 in 2010. The final deal included a target of ‘30×30’, an ambition to conserve 30% of the world’s land and 30% of the ocean by 2030. A second ‘30×30’ goal also made it into the final package, with developed countries agreeing to mobilise $30bn for developing countries by 2030.

See pages 12–13 for a Royal Canadian Geographical Society review of the conference.

Lorna Ogilvie FRSGS

In January, we were delighted to present Honorary Fellowship to Lorna Ogilvie in thanks for her years of volunteering for our charity in a number of roles. Starting as an office volunteer at RSGS HQ in Perth and as a Member of the RSGS Perth Group, Lorna was later elected as a Trustee and member of RSGS Board, before serving as Chair of the Local Groups Committee, in which role she has brought energy, discipline and vigour. Lorna received her Fellowship from former RSGS Board Member Alister Hendrie at an Inspiring People talk in Perth.

Cover image: Storm Eunice, Midhurst, West Sussex. © Christopher Ison, RMetS Weather Photographer of the Year 2022 main winner Masthead: Image by Josep Castells from Unsplash.

Shackleton’s Ship Beneath the Ice

On 28th March, RSGS is hosting a special event at Perth Concert Hall with the team from the Endurance22 Expedition, which discovered Shackleton’s lost ship Endurance after it had not been seen since it was crushed by the ice and sank in the Weddell Sea in 1915.

We’ll hear first-hand from Expedition Leader Dr John Shears, Subsea Manager Nico Vincent, and Documentary Director Natalie Hewit, as they recount their ground-breaking discovery and their journey 3,008 metres beneath the ice to video and photograph the legendary ship.

The Endurance22 Expedition brought together world-leading marine archaeologists, engineers, technicians, and sea-ice

scientists on South African icebreaker SA Agulhas II, one of the largest and most modern polar research vessels in the world.

Join us for what will undoubtedly be an incredible story from dedicated experts who have been involved in this monumental discovery, and hear first-hand of the challenges of preparing for and filming an expedition of this significance.

28th March

Tickets are available from www.perththeatreandconcerthall.com, priced at £18.50* for general admission, £14.50* for RSGS members, and £8.00 for students/U18s (*inclusive of a £2.50 booking fee per ticket).

book tickets

An evening with Doug Allan and friends

Over 500 people came to hear Doug Allan speak at Perth Concert Hall in December, as he reflected on successes and setbacks from 40 years of natural history filmmaking. Sharing some truly incredible stories and images from documentaries such as Planet Earth and Ocean Giants, he made the evening truly one to remember.

RSGS took the opportunity of this special event to present RSGS Honorary Fellowships to broadcaster Dougie Vipond and businessman David Connor, and the prestigious Scottish Geographical Medal to former RSGS President Professor Iain Stewart.

Dougie Vipond is best known as one of the founding members of Scottish pop rock band Deacon Blue, but it is for his work across many broadcast genres, presenting series such as BBC Scotland’s The Adventure Show and the rural affairs series Landward, that he was awarded a Fellowship.

David Connor was recognised for his work as Regional Director of Warm Zones, set up to trial a new not-for-profit area-based partnership approach to delivering energy efficiency measures and address fuel poverty.

Iain Stewart was awarded the RSGS Scottish Geographical Medal for his work as RSGS President from 2012 to 2022, and his many contributions during a critical period of change and growth for the Society.

L-R: David Connor, Iain Stewart, Dougie Vipond.

Blog highlights

We continue to make weekly additions to our blog (www.rsgs.org/blog), covering a range of interesting topics and news about our awards and projects. Recent posts include:

• The Challenger Expedition: peering into the abyss: in December 1872 the Royal Navy ship HMS Challenger set sail on an extraordinary four-year voyage around the world, in what has been called the Apollo mission of the Victorian era.

• The coldest dwelling on Earth and a disappearing turkey: RSGS Writer-in-Residence Jo Woolf shares four stories of explorers and the unusual places they spent Christmas.

• 2023: climate and the year ahead: Chief Executive Mike Robinson reflects on the year that is upon us, the potential for a fresh start and some fresh impetus to see action around some of the critical issues facing our society.

• The Nukak: the last Indigenous people to be contacted by mainstream Colombian society, and one of the last nomadic tribes in the country, has been fighting to return home for more than 30 years.

meteorology

America’s winter weather

A bout of extreme weather hit the United States this winter, with certain parts of the country affected by a variety of strange events from atmospheric rivers to falling-iguana warnings.

California was affected by a series of deadly storm systems called atmospheric rivers, which are long and narrow regions in the atmosphere that transport water vapour out of the tropics, resulting in either rain or snow when these ‘rivers’ make landfall. California was also affected by bomb cyclones, a quickly strengthening system which happens when barometric pressure drops at least 24 millibars in 24 hours.

The Great Lakes region was hit by lake-effect snow, which happens when cold air moves across the Great Lakes, passing over the lakes’ unfrozen and relatively warm waters, and the warmth and moisture is transferred into the atmosphere. As that lower portion of a storm system becomes warmer, the less dense air rises and leads to snow on the US side of the Great Lakes. The winter also brought about unusually cold weather in Florida and resulted in Miami’s office of the National Weather Service issuing an unofficial warning for falling iguanas. This is due to a real phenomenon: when coldblooded iguanas get too cold, they fall into a catatonic state and literally drop from the trees.

Fred Daniels (1943–2022)

We were sorry to learn of the death in December of one of our long-standing Edinburgh-based members and speakers. Fred and his wife Rita travelled on foot together through some remarkable places, including China, Tibet and The Silk Road, overcoming all sorts of difficulties en route. He later gave some very amusing talks to RSGS audiences about his remote travels. He delighted in so many small things and made his friends laugh again and again. He is remembered for his lively and bubbly personality, his very cheerful nature, and his friendliness towards all.

The Pole of Possibility

Dr Karen Darke MBE FRSGS, RSGS Explorer-in-Residence; Professor Mike Christie, Professor of Environmental and Ecological

Economics, Aberystwyth University

Leaving for Antarctica on 12th December 2022, Karen Darke attempted to become the first paralysed person to journey deep into the Antarctic continent. She was joined on the journey by Mike Christie, and by Inverness-based filmmaker Mike Webster. Karen, paralysed from the chest down, travelled across the Antarctic plateau using arm power alone, on a specially adapted hand-pedalled tricycle and by sit-ski. It was the first time any woman in her position had embarked on a journey in the icy continent, and whilst not the primary aim of the project, it was a World and Guinness Record.

On their month-long journey to their Pole of Possibility (www. karendarke.com/the-pole-of-possibility), the team aimed to create more ‘ICE’:

I = Inner gold: explore how we can work with mindset to uncover one’s potential or ‘inner gold’;

C = Connection: insights into developing our connectedness and interconnectedness to self and others, to enhance well-being and effectiveness;

E = Environment: research ways in which people can increase respect and value of our natural environment.

The team undertook research to help develop a deeper scientific understanding of multiple ways people benefit from and value the Antarctic continent. Professor Christie will assess the impact that melting and associated sea level rise will have on people’s well-being and livelihoods; assess the ‘non-use’ impacts that people may feel as a result of the loss of Antarctica’s ice and biodiversity; and provide recommendations as to what ordinary people could do to curb their impacts on polar regions, nature and the climate.

With filmmaker Mike Webster’s expertise, the team documented their journey and message on the importance of creating more ICE. The film, which will be made available to the wider public, will pay tribute to the benefits that the adventure mindset, the wilderness and a simpler existence can have on our mental health, showcasing the possibilities that can arise when we focus on a seemingly impossible goal, no matter who we are.

Scotland on ‘hot list’

Scotland has been named one of the ‘hottest’ countries to visit in 2023. Wanderlust, the UK’s leading independent travel magazine, curated a list of the 30 hottest countries, cities and regions to visit in 2023. Scotland was the only country in the UK to make the list, with its culture being cited as one of the main reasons to visit.

the stories at rsgs.org/ blog

“It was a World and Guinness Record.”

Climate Solutions

Climate Solutions has gone from strength to strength, with more than 100,000 learners now subscribed to the course. WSP Global and Cora have recently joined the growing list of corporate partners, which includes Jacobs and Baillie Gifford.

During the previous quarter we delivered workshops to the University of Highlands and Islands, Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) and the Scottish Parliament. This feedback from Mhari McLeman, Head of Strengthening Communities in Shetland, HIE, is a fantastic reflection of how well the training has been received: “The Climate Solutions Professional training course has ignited a real enthusiasm in me to learn more, both at a personal level and to help me do my job better. It’s making me question everything, and I’m looking at social and economic development in a whole new way. It was the best and most inspiring professional development course I’ve done during my whole career.”

It’s critical that everyone understands the seriousness of the climate emergency, and what we can do to make a difference. There are different versions of the course to suit every type of learner, from beginner to boardroom. Visit www.rsgs.org/climate-solutions

Policy participation and priorities

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive

We continue to be involved in various policy-setting areas of work. The cost-of-living increase continues to bite, and whilst this represents real challenges for a small charity like ours, we have been trying to help others, convening groups and matching needs with support. Working with Perth & Kinross Council and the Perth City Leadership Forum, we helped initiate a ‘gift card’ scheme for local residents in extreme poverty, and we remain part of the local taskforce.

In agriculture, the ARIOB (the ministerial group on future agricultural subsidies) continues, albeit at a slower pace than anyone envisaged, held back by civil service processes and parliamentary timetables. It is starting to get urgent, and there is a strong desire for more clarity on the changes that are being considered. This is a real opportunity to enhance the value of agricultural holdings not just for food production but also for soil management, carbon sequestration and biodiversity, but only if it instigates meaningful change, and this is still to be confirmed. I spoke and was on a panel at this year’s Scottish Agricultural Organisation Society conference about these changes.

Other talks include a 2050 Climate Group event, describing how to make things happen in the policy arena and how people can get more involved, at a Universities Scotland event, on the potential impacts of climate change on the world stage, and to the Perthshire Society of Natural Science, on Perth’s ambition to become a biodiversity capital for Scotland.

Weather on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars on 18th February 2021, near the northwest rim of Jezero crater, on the inner northwest slopes of Isidis Planitia. On board was the most complete environmental station yet sent to another planet: the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA).

MEDA makes weather measurements, including wind speed and direction, temperature and humidity, and it measures the amount and size of dust particles in the Martian atmosphere. This provides context for the investigations that other rover instruments and systems are conducting, and supports the planning of future missions.

An international team of scientists led by Jose A Rodriguez Manfredi of Spain’s Astrobiology Centre has analysed results for the first 250 sols (solar days) of the mission, northern hemisphere spring to early summer, revealing a spatially and temporally variable meteorology, and unveiling the diversity of processes driving change on today’s Martian surface at Jezero crater.

See www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-01084-0 for the article published in Nature Geoscience, and mars.nasa.gov/ mars2020/weather for general recent weather reports from Mars.

Arctic seabed creatures may adapt

Scottish Association for Marine Science researchers who are studying possible environmental impacts of reduced Arctic sea ice have discovered that there may be hope for creatures in the darkest depths of the ocean. Parts of the Arctic could be ice-free in coming decades, which could spell disaster for the Arctic ecosystem as the food web is partly fuelled by the formation of sea ice algae on the underside of the ice sheet.

In spring, as the ice naturally begins to melt, these algae sink through the water column, sparking a feeding flurry for a host of organisms, not least creatures on the seabed such as starfish, sea cucumbers and shrimp. These, in turn, are eaten by a range of fish, including those important to the fishing industry and which are the main source of food for larger predators such as beluga whales and seals.

New findings, however, suggest that while the more energyrich sea ice algae are an important food item when they are available, the availability of open water algae may be enough to provide the energy to support seabed creatures, indicating that whilst sea ice algae are important, we must not overlook the part that phytoplankton play in fuelling the Arctic ecosystem.

© Callum Whyte | SAMS

Margaret Paterson FRSGS

In December, we were very pleased to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to dedicated volunteer Margaret Paterson, for her long-term, consistent, positive contributions and dedication to the RSGS head office team. Having begun as a Fair Maid’s House volunteer 12 years ago, Margaret soon started helping in the office, where she has supported staff by maintaining and updating electronic files and folders, solving problems, and offering technical and administrative help whenever she can. She is a valued member of the RSGS team who has brought great fun and humour to her role.

Climate awareness investment

A report by Reform Scotland has criticised the Scottish Government for the lack of clarity around what is needed for the country to reach its net zero targets. After praising the Government for the huge progress that Scotland has made with efforts to move away from fossil fuels, the report went on to highlight that domestic heat and road traffic have been increasing in recent years and these trends must be reversed. For this to happen, there must be leadership from the Scottish Government towards providing education and awareness programmes, to increase awareness about what is needed to tackle climate change, and the urgency of the crisis.

Alan Kinder FRSGS

In November, we were pleased to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to Alan Kinder. Alan has been Chief Executive of the Geographical Association (GA) for the last eight years, and has been instrumental in the development of numerous geographical resources which are highly valued by teachers. During his time at the GA, Alan has worked tirelessly and with great success to keep the subject of Geography alive and relevant.

Dr J A Evitt FRSGS (1931–2022)

Jack Evitt was born in Glasgow and graduated in medicine at Glasgow University, whereupon he joined a practice in Wigton in 1958 and then moved to Stirling in 1960, joining a larger practice where he stayed until his retirement. In his younger days, Jack travelled extensively to places such as Iran, Bhutan, Peru, Canada, and South Africa, where he travelled on the Blue Train between Cape Town and Pretoria, and three times to India, a country he was very fond of.

Jack was an ardent member of RSGS, and was one of our very early members in Stirling. He was responsible for the recruitment of new members on many occasions, and eventually became chairman over a four-year period. He was a very keen photographer, and gave many talks at the Local Group’s monthly meetings and Wednesday afternoon meetings of the Travellers Club at the Smith Institute in Stirling.

Jack shall always be remembered as a very popular member over a sustained period, and for his generosity to RSGS. He shall be sadly missed by all.

Inspiring People

The 2022–23 Inspiring People programme of 90 face-toface public talks across mainland Scotland allowed RSGS audiences to hear from some brilliant speakers. Here are just some highlights: TV presenter and author Cameron McNeish, reflecting on four decades of chronicling Scotland’s majestic landscapes and outdoor communities; photographer Colin Prior, on visiting the remote and magnificent Karakoram mountains, and on his sources of inspiration and influence in his work in over 50 countries; filmmaker Libby Penman, on her years of filming epic wildlife in Scotland; kayaker Sal Montgomery, sharing her latest stories and adventures from road-tripping around America and British Columbia with her kayak; and a host of others befitting the best national talks programme in Scotland.

We now look forward to planning our 2023–24 programme. If you have suggestions or recommendations about possible speakers for next season, please contact us at enquiries@rsgs.org

Fellowships for farming

We were delighted to award RSGS Honorary Fellowships to Nigel Miller, Pete Ritchie, and Andrew and Seonag Barbour, for their outstanding work towards promoting sustainable farming in Scotland, as panellists of the Farming for 1.5°C Inquiry, and for their individual efforts towards rebuilding our declining biodiversity. The awards were presented at RSGS headquarters by the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Islands, Mairi Gougeon MSP.

The Farming for 1.5°C Inquiry brought together farmers, academics and NGO representatives to publish a consensus pathway for making Scottish farming climate compatible. In a highly praised report produced last year, Farming 1.5: From Here to 2045, the Inquiry was able to set out a credible way forward, by convening different perspectives and aspirations from farmers, scientists and policy experts.

Memorable maps

Included among the RSGS collections are thousands of fascinating maps. The expert volunteers on our Collections Team are keen to share stories and details of them more widely, and so we are delighted to have launched a ‘Memorable Maps’ series of monthly blogs, available at www.rsgs.org/blogs/view-point. The first two blogs featured are:

learn more about maps

• Running Survey of Christmas Island (1942), a map of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean;

• New Economic Map of Scotland (1943), illustrating the main economic regions of Scotland in a single black and white map.

L-R: Andrew Barbour, Nigel Miller, Mairi Gougeon, Seonag Barbour, Pete Ritchie.

James Croll Medallist

The 2023 James Croll Medal, the highest award of the Quaternary Research Association, has been awarded to Colin Ballantyne, Emeritus Professor of Physical Geography in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews. The medal is named in honour of James Croll, the brilliant 19th-century Scottish polymath who developed the astronomical theory of climate change, which explains the alternation of glacial and interglacial periods in terms of variations in the Earth’s orbit. The medal is awarded annually in recognition of a lifetime contribution of original research in the field of Quaternary science. Colin will be familiar to many RSGS members through his contribution to the RSGS Inspiring People talks, his numerous contributions to the Scottish Geographical Journal, and as author of a bestselling book, Scotland’s Mountain Landscapes: a Geomorphological Perspective

New ‘warming stripe’

Professor Ed Hawkins MBE FRSGS of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading has updated his innovative global temperature graphic with a new stripe for 2022.

He said, “The data from 2022 is stark, however you look at it. Whether you view the figures in their raw form, or look at the data as another red line added to the climate stripes, the message is clear. Excess heat is building up across the planet at a rate unprecedented in the history of humanity. The latest coloured stripe added to the global warming stripes image is the second-darkest red, but is very close to being in the darkest red category. This is remarkable, given that an ongoing La Niña in the Pacific has helped to hold temperatures down. When we see a return of a neutral or warming phase of El Niño, the darkest red stripes will return. This should be a cause for alarm, but not alarmism. If you think how hot 2022 was, and then realise that those 12 months will likely be one of the coolest years of the rest of our lives, I think we will regret not having acted sooner on these warnings.”

See the Show Your Stripes website (showyourstripes.info) for more information, including regionalised stripes.

Rory Stewart in Perth

Polar Medallist

Polar explorer and RSGS Vice-President Sir David HemplemanAdams has been awarded the Polar Medal second clasp in recognition of his prolonged service in the acquisition of knowledge and understanding of Polar regions. He becomes one of only five people this century to receive a second clasp to his Polar Medal, for work in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. His first Polar Medal was awarded in 2012 by the late Queen Elizabeth II, making him the only person to have been awarded Polar Medals for the Arctic and Antarctic by both the late Queen and the King.

University Medals

We are delighted to say that four young people were awarded RSGS University Medals in 2022. These Medals are awarded to the outstanding graduating honours geography student in each of the Scottish universities as recommended by heads of department. The winners were:

• Dundee: Sarah Carlyle, BSc Geography, and now pursuing a Masters in Spatial Planning and Sustainable Urban Design;

• Heriot-Watt: Anastasia Cooper, BSc Geography, from the first cohort of students on this new degree programme, and with exceptional results throughout her courses and for her dissertation on sustainable fashion;

• St Andrews: Charlotte Evans, MA Geography with Social Anthropology, now on a year of international travel and research as an R&A Scholar;

• Stirling: Ailsa Oxnard, BSc Environmental Geography, having shown unusually high levels of commitment and dedication to the degree, and been integral in keeping the University’s Geography Society going over three years.

Many congratulations to them all, and to David Verdugo-Raab who was awarded the 2021 University Medal from the University of Dundee, and is now pursuing a Masters in Global Change Geography.

Crichton Carbon Centre Fellows

3rd August

We are delighted to say that Livingstone Medallist Rory Stewart OBE FRSGS will give a special talk for RSGS on Thursday 3rd August in Perth. Rory, most recently acclaimed for his successful The Rest Is Politics podcast, will be reflecting on his experiences of walking across Afghanistan, as detailed in his book The Places In Between. We will announce details in the summer.

In January, we were pleased to present Honorary Fellowships to Dr Mary-Ann Smyth, Gillian Khosla and Vimal Khosla, for their work as co-founders, directors and creative leaders of the Crichton Carbon Centre, creating a hub of expertise in climate change awareness, which gradually developed into a centre of expertise in peatland restoration, with an international reputation.

Colin Ballantyne on Ben Macdui.

Global stripes, 1850-2022.

Sarah Carlyle with Professor Sue Dawson.

Anastasia Cooper.

Ailsa Oxnard.

L-R: Mary-Ann Smyth, Gillian Khosla, Vimal Khosla.

Robert FitzRoy and the origins of the Met Office

Dr Catherine Ross, Archivist, Met Office

The Met Office was founded in 1854 under the leadership of Captain (later Vice-Admiral) Robert FitzRoy. He was a brilliant Royal Naval surveyor and from 1831 to 1836 he captained the Beagle on her famous circumnavigation of the globe, with the young naturalist Charles Darwin as a suitable gentleman companion for the voyage. From his naval background, FitzRoy had a strong understanding of the importance of the weather to the lives of those at sea. He was thus the perfect choice to lead the fledgling Meteorological Office, whose purpose was to further understand the nature of the weather in the oceans, particularly the Atlantic Ocean, in order to protect life and property at sea.

Initially the Met Office focused on the collection of data, especially marine data. This was then shared with other national meteorological agencies in a huge international data sharing initiative aimed at significantly increasing understanding of climatology around the world. Following the Royal Charter Gale of 25–26 October 1859, the role of the office moved from scientific data collection to weather forecasting.

The Gale is considered the most severe storm to hit the Irish Sea in the 19th century. The most famous ship to founder during the night was the steam clipper Royal Charter. The ship was on the last leg of her two-month journey from Melbourne to Liverpool. She was one of the fastest and most famous emigrant ships operating during the years of the Australian Gold Rush, and could carry up to 600 passengers and cargo. As conditions in the Irish Sea deteriorated, the captain of the Royal Charter had to decide whether to seek shelter at Holyhead or carry on for Liverpool. He chose to continue, but at 11pm the decision was made to anchor. By 2.30am both anchor chains had snapped. Despite cutting the masts to reduce the drag of the wind, the Royal Charter was driven inshore and her steam engines were unable to make headway against the gale.

She struck the rocks at Point Alerth, Anglesey, and battered by huge waves, quickly broke up. The precise number of dead is not certain as the complete passenger list was lost in the wreck. However, it is thought to be about 459 souls, including all of the women and children aboard. There were only 40 survivors, and it remains the highest death toll of any shipwreck on the Welsh coast.

The wreck gained much coverage in the national press and focused attention on the desire for storm warnings to reduce further such losses. Based on his experiences collating meteorological observations over the previous five years, FitzRoy believed that his department could provide such a service. He produced a series of charts and used them to write a detailed report to prove that the storm could have been predicted. Through his analyses of the Royal Charter Gale and other storms, FitzRoy demonstrated the validity of his models and proposed a national storm warning system. There was doubt amongst the scientific establishment that the weather could be predicted in any meaningful way, but the government permitted FitzRoy to test his new science of weather forecasting and to establish a Storm Warning service. The service used the new electric telegraph to collect observations taken around the British coasts. These were assessed at the Meteorological Office headquarters in London and, if necessary, storm warnings were issued to the relevant areas. The warnings then had to be conveyed to ships before the days of radio communication, so FitzRoy developed a simple but highly effective method which used a combination of cones and drums made from canvas. His system is

“The Storm Warning service is believed to be the oldest national forecasting service in the world.”

Photo by Axel Antas-Bergkvist from Unsplash.

Royal Charter, held by John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

credited with saving hundreds of lives and he became a hero to many in the maritime community, including the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).

The first warning was issued on 5th February 1861. The Storm Warning service is believed to be the oldest national forecasting service in the world. It continues to this day and is now known as the Shipping Forecast. FitzRoy’s visual cone and drum warning system was so effective that it continued in use until 1984, by which time maritime law required all vessels to carry a radio.

FitzRoy went on to develop and distribute a barometer to aid fishermen who operated from small harbours that could not benefit from the Storm Warning service, almost bankrupting himself in the process. He also felt that a weather forecast would be of interest to the general population, and placed the first ever public weather forecast in The Times on 1st August 1861.

Sadly, as brilliant a man as he was, he may have overstretched himself here. The first forecast was actually correct, but in more unsettled periods there was simply insufficient scientific understanding and data to enable the production of accurate land-based forecasts, and his work was heavily ridiculed and criticised by the scientific establishment. This may have contributed to his tragic suicide in April 1865. He never received the recognition he deserved for his ground-breaking achievements, and so it is rather ironic that his last forecast was produced on the orders of Queen Victoria, who required a weather forecast before sailing to her retreat at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. To finish this article here would be to do a disservice to FitzRoy’s substantial legacy. He wrote the first ‘textbook’ on the science of weather forecasting, in which he introduced terms that are now familiar to us, such as ‘synoptic’ and ‘forecast’. The term ‘forecast’ is now universally understood, but it was actually invented by FitzRoy to differentiate his scientific approach from previous methods. In his book, FitzRoy states: “prophecies or predictions they are not: the term forecast is strictly applicable to such an opinion as is the result of a scientific combination and calculation.” FitzRoy also understood that forecasting dealt with a chaotic atmosphere and therefore it could never be an exact science. He stated that “a forecaster... should only employ words indicative of probable extent of variability.” Using probabilities rather than certainties to describe expected weather conditions is the style of terminology still in regular use in all forecasting. The work of FitzRoy and his successors brought about the birth of modern scientific meteorology, and the start of the long road that leads to meteorological and climatological science as it stands today.

The National Meteorological Archive

The National Meteorological Library and Archive seeks to preserve the National Memory of the Weather within the archive, and to support, develop and enhance the understanding of weather and climate science through our specialist library collections. The Library is situated within the Met Office HQ on FitzRoy Road, Exeter, and the Archive is a short walk away in Great Moor House where it shares facilities with Devon Heritage Centre. The archive holds literally thousands of tonnes of observational documentation from 1854 to around 2005, after which most records are held in electronic format.

Whilst the majority of our collection is located in Exeter, the data records are divided across three of the four nations of the United Kingdom. The main archive in Exeter holds data for England and Wales. Data records for Scotland are largely held at or are in the process of transfer to National Records of Scotland, and data records for Northern Ireland are held at the Public Records Office Northern Ireland. The Met Office retains ownership and supports access to all of the records, wherever they are stored.

The National Meteorological Library and Archive is no longer an analogue resource alone. We provide a huge e-book and e-journal resource for staff and members of the public, and we also archive our digitised files and born-digital records. Digital archiving is the great archival challenge of our times, but with the Digital Archive comes the opportunity not only to preserve digital Public Weather Records but also to share them on a global scale. Our Digital Library and Archive is a vast resource of digitised data records and publications, and also born-digital UK and global charts, National Severe Weather Warnings, Air Quality forecasts, and even Space Weather

If you would like to find out more about the National Meteorological Library and Archive and our collections, please visit www.metoffice. gov.uk/research/library-and, which also has links to search our online catalogue and explore our Digital Library and Archive, or get in touch with us via metlib@ metoffice.gov.uk.

“The work of FitzRoy and his successors brought about the birth of modern scientific meteorology.”

Admiral FitzRoy’s storm barometer. © Met Office

The Scottish Meteorological Society’s contribution to the science

Founded in 1855, the Scottish Meteorological Society (SMS) set up and maintained a network of voluntary observing stations in Scotland, until the Met Office took over the responsibility in 1920 and the SMS amalgamated with the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) in January 1921. This climatological network provided the data to define the climate of Scotland, but during its period of existence the SMS achieved much more in relation to the development of the science of meteorology. A large part of this was due to the work and publications of Alexander Buchan, who was its paid Secretary from December 1860 until his death, aged 78, in 1907. In 1902 he was the first recipient of RMetS’s Symons Memorial Gold Medal, when he was described as “the most eminent British meteorologist.”

By the middle of the 19th century it was recognised that progress in the understanding of weather and climate required reliable and consistent observations on a global scale. In 1850 a British Meteorological Society (from 1866 the Meteorological Society, becoming in 1883 the Royal Meteorological Society) was founded in London, but its influence was little felt north of the border. In Scotland a number of individuals and organisations had kept daily weather records, but there was no systematic acquisition of meteorological data for Scotland. In 1854 Sir John Stuart Forbes and David Milne Home drew up a Prospectus of an Association for Promoting the Observation and Classification of Meteorological Phenomena in Scotland. At a public meeting on 11th July 1855, a Scottish Meteorological Society was formed. The Honorary Secretary was the Geographer Royal for Scotland, Alexander Keith Johnston.

Among the supporters was W Pitt Dundas, the newly appointed Registrar General for Scotland, who wished to include meteorological data in his quarterly reports. Dr James Stark, the Superintendent of Statistics in his department, took the initiative to write to known observers all over Scotland and provide them with a standard form on which to enter their observations. In 1856 he was appointed as the paid (but part-time) Secretary to the Society. He resigned in 1858, when he had created a network of more than 70 stations. There are manuscript monthly returns from the Scottish stations from 1857, and these have recently been digitally scanned by the Met Office. Books containing the Minutes of the Meetings of Council of the SMS exist, covering the period 1859–81, and these provide a great deal of information on the operation of the Society.

Measurements of air temperature require the thermometers to be shielded from direct radiation from the sun, but to allow air to pass over them as freely as possible. A great variety of

thermometer screens was in use. The Council Minute Books show that in 1860 the Society was investigating the design of boxes with louvred sides to be used by their observers. At a Council Meeting in 1864 Thomas Stevenson, of the family of engineers to the Northern Lighthouse Board, demonstrated an improved model with double louvres, which could be obtained at a modest price from an Edinburgh firm. Details of the box were published in the Journal of the Scottish Meteorological Society (JSMS). The screen was rapidly adopted by the Society’s observers, the Met Office used it at their telegraph observing stations from 1873, and in 1874 the Meteorological Society recommended that it should be used at their observing stations. The use of the stands spread widely through the far-flung British Empire in the late 19th century. The Stevenson screen is not perfect, but without it the task of comparing temperature records over the last 150 years would be much more difficult and contentious.

Alexander Buchan had been a schoolmaster, but suffered from a weak throat which caused difficulty when taking the large classes of that period. He was looking for a different career at the same time as the SMS was looking for a new paid Secretary, and he impressed the recruitment committee with his understanding of meteorological problems and their relation to physical science. He was the editor of the JSMS, which began publication in 1864, and which contained many of his papers. Along with the compilation of climatological statistics for Scotland and the whole of the British Isles, Buchan began researches into the relation between the surface pressure pattern over a wide area and the wind direction over Scotland, which could bring periods of unusual warmth or cold. With the invention of the electric telegraph in the late 1830s, and the subsequent rapid deployment of telegraph lines, it had become possible for weather observations to be collected in ‘real time’ over land areas. Admiral FitzRoy, Director of the Met Office, organised the collection of daily weather observations from a network of telegraph stations, and from 1863 he used these as a basis to provide storm warnings, but did not construct charts of surface pressure. However, from 1863 the Paris Observatory under Le Verrier published daily charts showing the isobars of surface pressure over a limited area of Europe.

To follow the progress of storms over the whole of Europe, Buchan carried out a retrospective analysis for October to December 1863, having collected a large amount of data from 14 different sources. Daily charts for 18 days over the period were published in 1865 in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. These showed sea level isobars, the observed wind speed and direction, the difference of

Marjory Roy, Royal Meteorological Society

“There was no systematic acquisition of meteorological data for Scotland.”

Stevenson screen.

Alexander Buchan.

science of meteorology

temperature from average, and symbols of the weather. From these charts he deduced general rules, based on actual observations, on the relationship between the surface pressure and wind fields, the temperature distribution around a depression, and the pattern of rainfall.

Buchan was able to trace the movement and development of depressions over time, though this was difficult with only one chart per day. The winds around a depression in the northern hemisphere blew in an anticlockwise direction around the centre of low pressure, but with a component towards the centre. Since this did not lead to a rapid rise of pressure he concluded that the air must be rising within the depression and flowing away from it at a higher level. These analyses confirmed the earlier conclusions of Espy and Loomis in the USA, who had carried out similar synoptic studies there, and they contradicted Dove’s ‘Theory of Storms’, which had previously held sway.

Buchan followed this with a paper in the JSMS published in 1868, entitled On two storms which passed over the United States between the 13th and 22nd March 1859; with remarks on storms which occurred at the same time in N Atlantic, Europe and W Asia. In this, as well as land observations, he used logs from 53 ships at sea over the North Atlantic. Six storms were identified and their movement traced in the period 13th–29th March 1859. The paper states that 21 working charts were constructed, of which three were published; these show the tracks of the storms, one of which, having crossed America, divided, with one part dying out near the Azores while the other part went ENE across the Atlantic and gave a particularly severe storm over Northern Scotland. In the second edition (1868) of his Handy Book of Meteorology, described as the first textbook of modern meteorology, Buchan championed the use of charts of surface pressure to study individual storms and to chart the mean distribution of pressure. Included were the first global charts of mean surface pressure. Then, as more data

became available, in 1869 he published in the Proceedings and the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh maps of annual and monthly mean pressure and prevailing winds over the globe. He showed that the same relations occurred between the mean pressure field and the prevailing winds as for individual storms. The maps were refined and updated, using longer periods of observation, during the years following the Challenger Expedition of 1872–76, and Buchan compiled the Challenger report on atmospheric circulation (1889). These charts were included among 400 maps in volume 3 of Bartholomew’s Physical Atlas (1899), prepared by A J Herbertson and edited by Buchan.

In 1883 the SMS set up a manned weather observatory on the summit of Ben Nevis, and this provided hourly observations until it closed for financial reasons in October 1904. The observations were published in full in four volumes of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2017, digital data sets of the observations were created in a citizen science project and these provide a most valuable record of mountain weather in the UK. At the observatory, experiments relating to cloud condensation were carried out using the dust counter of John Aitken of Falkirk, who was a pioneer in cloud physics research.

With the amalgamation of the SMS with RMetS in January 1921, Scotland lost a natural forum for meetings to discuss meteorological developments, but in 1944 James Paton became the first lecturer in Meteorology within the physics department of Edinburgh University, and in June 1946 the RMetS set up a Scottish Centre; James Paton became its Meetings Secretary. The Scottish Centre has continued to the present day with regular meetings, usually in Edinburgh, and there is also now a sub centre at Inverness. In 2008, RMetS and RSGS jointly funded a memorial seat for Alexander Buchan to be placed in Kinnesswood, where he was born.

“The Scottish Meteorological Society set up a manned weather observatory on the summit of Ben Nevis.”

Meteorological chart of Europe, 4th and 5th December 1863.

Image by Hans from Pixabay.

Angry Weather

Dr Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The Grantham Institute for Climate Change

During the summer of 2018, people in France, the UK, Germany, India, North America, and many other places around the world not only experienced what climate change feels like but became aware that the very high temperatures they sought to avoid in the shade were not just weather but part of a changing climate. The following northern hemispheric summer of 2019 again saw heat records being broken throughout Europe.

Extreme heat was also a key driver of the bushfires that destroyed lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems in southeast Australia. As before, new studies undertaken by the team described in this book [Angry Weather] found that without human-induced climate change, the heat in Australia would have been at least a degree less intense and less than half as likely as in today’s climate. Climate change also made the weather conditions leading to the fires overall at least 30% more likely, which means that without climate change the devastation these fires wreaked would have been significantly less severe. This book – which looks at how weather and climate change are linked and how we as scientists can now characterize and quantify humanity’s role in extreme events – has become even more relevant and timely than I imagined it to be. Or, in the words of a German radio station, it “provides the arguments for the Fridays for Future movement.” Not all of them, certainly, but in this book I describe the birth of a new way of doing climate science. Not only in specialist journals and highly complex reports, but as and when and where people ask scientific questions and need scientific evidence.

Climate change is a fact. We’ve known this for a very long time, with experiments confirming the greenhouse effect conducted by a largely ignored scientist, Eunice Newton Foote, as early as 1856 and fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius 40 years later. We have observed rising global temperatures over the course of the 20th century, and the science advisory committee of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency warned of global warming in 1965.

At the very latest, since the 1990s we have been able to attribute these rising global temperatures to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. However, global mean temperature rise is not killing people and ecosystems directly. Thus the one degree of global mean temperature rise we have today is for most of us just a number. It is a powerful and important number, but since we do not experience it directly, this number only allows (and crucially, requires!) us as a global society to tackle climate change with our intellect, not fuelled by direct experience and resulting emotions. Being human, we find that a very hard task at the best of times.

It hasn’t exactly been the best of times, though, with powerful interests and a lot of money devoted to characterizing the laws of physics as a hoax. Published research from historians shows that leaders in the oil industry knew about

the consequences of continuing their business model (digging up fossil fuels to be burned) as early as the 1950s. Archived internal notes show that they did not doubt the scientific evidence but decided to publicly deny it to keep their businesses going. The United States demonstrates impressively just how successful they were in planting seeds of doubt.

Fast forward into the 21st century. Global greenhouse gas emissions are still on the rise (the current temporary dip due to a world in lockdown does not change this picture). Climate change has evolved from a vague future threat to an everyday experience, albeit one that may not yet be recognized as such by everyone. Global mean temperatures of a degree above preindustrial temperatures and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere above 400 parts per million manifest as rising sea levels and changes in the frequency and intensity of some extreme weather events.

These changes are not just making European summers uncomfortably hot. They threaten decades of development gains, and they pose a clear and present danger to the social and economic welfare of communities and countries around the world. While the global elite was busy ignoring or actively denying human-caused climate change, the problem worsened and devastating weather events proved the science to be correct. The price is being paid by those who always pay – people in developing countries, people who have to work outdoors, people who can’t afford insurance – in short, people who have profited the least from improved living standards in a fossilfuelled society. And of course the price will be paid most by those who were not alive in the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, when those with influence chose to ignore climate change. It is the people who have no responsibility for causing climate change who are now taking to the streets, the courtrooms, and hopefully soon all the circles where decisions are made.

“Climate change has evolved from a vague future threat to an everyday experience.”

This article was extracted with permission from the book Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms and the New Science of Climate Change, written by Fredi Otto, translated by Sarah Pybus, and published in September 2020 by Greystone Books. The hardback is available at a special offer to our readers; see the back page for details. The paperback will be published in May 2023 at £13.99.

Life at the extremes

Nick Middleton, Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford

When the British arrived in the Khasi Hills of north-east India in the 19th century, the grassy uplands reminded them of Scotland. But it’s a Scotland with paddy fields and leeches and rainfall that is second to none. The village of Mawsynram holds the record for being the wettest place on Earth, with annual average rainfall that totals an extraordinary 11,872mm, or nearly 39 feet.

As in the rest of India, Mawsynram receives most of its rain during the monsoon season. Moist air from the Bay of Bengal is forced to rise over the hills, cool and condense, delivering epic amounts of precipitation. The village is 1,400m above sea level and locals still wear tartan shawls, a hangover from the Raj, against the upland chill.

The cosmic intensity of rainfall in Mawsynram means villagers traditionally lay thick grass on the roofs of their houses to soundproof them from the deafening deluge. Many prefer to stay indoors as much as possible during the monsoon, having stocked up on basic foods, but those who must venture out to work wear specially extended hats woven from bamboo and reeds. These knups look like giant tortoise shells and are large enough to keep rain off the entire body right down to the knees.

Life in the world’s oldest and driest desert, the Atacama in South America, presents a different sort of challenge. Settlements here can go for a decade without any rain whatsoever. Many towns have their water supplies delivered by tanker, including Quillagua where they receive less than a millimetre of rain every year on average. On the coast, however, fog provides a regular, if small, input of moisture, and in the small town of Chungongo a series of large nets has been erected to catch the droplets of fog and channel them along drainpipes to a storage tank. One hundred fogcollecting nets are strung across the hillside above the town, each harvesting 170 litres of fog water a day.

The world’s highest temperatures have also been recorded in deserts, thanks to their clear skies and many hours of intense

sunshine. Ethiopia’s Danakil is one of the world’s least-known desert depressions and its few inhabitants, the Afar, have a fierce reputation. Most Afar men go about their work heavily armed, carrying kalashnikov rifles and long curved knives in their belts. One theory has it that their traditional lack of hospitality is born of their harsh terrain: the desert has few resources, so welcoming outsiders would mean less of everything to go round.

The Afar practise nomadic herding, an age-old adaptation to the desert landscape. Livestock are moved around the countryside in constant search for pastures new, and Afar families live an itinerant lifestyle. Their huts, woven matting draped over a skeleton of wooden stakes, are easily dismantled and loaded on to a camel for transport. Perhaps it is no surprise therefore that the mining town of Dallol, holder of the record highest average annual air temperature (34.5°C), is no longer inhabited.

Weather in the Danakil is baking hot all year round, but the town noted for its record low temperature is a place of seasonal extremes. Residents of Oymyakon, the coldest town on Earth, experience summer temperatures as high as +30°C, but conditions in winter are rather different. A small monument has been erected in the centre of town to commemorate the occasion in the 1920s when the lowest temperature of –71.2°C was recorded.

Minus 40 or 50 is commonplace during the winter months in Oymyakon. The searing cold bites through layers of clothing as if they weren’t there, so padded coats and animal-fur hats are the order of the day. Boots made of reindeer skin or horsehair come with thick felt soles to keep feet warm. Siberia is full of trees, so people live in log cabins – the windows are triple-glazed – and have no shortage of fuel. There’s no running water. Chunks of ice are hacked from the local river and stored outside, taken into the house and melted as and when necessary.

At such low temperatures, the body’s metabolism expends more energy to keep you warm. Foods that are rich in protein and carbohydrates, which involve greater energy expenditure to digest, a process known as thermogenesis, help to maintain body temperature. Meat, usually horse or reindeer, is eaten in large quantities, followed by filling puddings consisting of thick cream and jam. Of course, the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables also reflects the impossibility of cultivating them in severe sub-zero conditions.

“A series of large nets has been erected to catch the droplets of fog.”

Nick Middleton is the author of Going to Extremes: Mud, Sweat and Frozen Tears and Surviving Extremes: Ice, Jungle, Sand and Swamp

Lightning at Sant Pol de Mar, Barcelona, Spain; lightning strikes somewhere on the Earth’s surface approximately 44 times a second. © Enric Navarrete Bachs, RMetS WPOTY 2022 finalist

In the wee small hours: a story of COP15

Aran O’Carroll JD FRCGS, National Director, Environment, Royal Canadian Geographical Society

on clear and measurable targets, and the recognition shown in Sharm el-Sheikh to the critical intersections between the climate and nature crises.

In 2021, in advance of the original date of the nature Convention’s COP15 and the climate Convention’s COP26, geographical societies from around the world, including the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, National Geographic Society, and even the Russian and Chinese geographical societies, had come together to call on world leaders to redouble their efforts and recognize the intersections of the nature and climate crises.

It was the wee small hours. Bleary-eyed and exhausted, the 1,000 delegates once more stumbled into the dark confines of the Palais des congrès de Montréal. And then, in the hushed silence of baited breaths and the stillness of the city before dawn, they voted. One hundred and eighty-eight ‘yays’ were recorded as the clock ticked past 3am. The room burst into raucous cheers.

Of the 196 signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 188 countries confirmed their support for a remarkable deal to conserve and restore a third of the planet’s lands and waters by 2030. And in doing so, affirming and respecting the critical importance of Indigenous leadership in the effort. The United States and the Vatican, neither a signatory to the Convention, both signalled their active support.

Originally slated to be held in Kunming, China, in October 2021, the 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties on the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) was derailed by the global COVID-19 crisis and China’s stringent public health policies. It had to be rescheduled and relocated. Canada, the original signatory to the Convention at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and the City of Montréal, the hometown of the UN’s Secretariat to the Convention, quickly stepped forward with an offer to host the Convention, in December 2022.

A monument to 1970s ‘neo-brutalist’ architecture in Old Montréal, the Palais des congrès de Montréal’s bright colours were the venue for the winter Convention. Despite recent Chinese hostage-taking of Canadian diplomats, little attention was paid to the frosty state of China’s relations with Canada or the wider world. Nor was any notice taken of the fact that the congrès was built on the expropriated ruins of Montréal’s former Chinatown. Indeed China, the Chair, and Canada, the host, played nice and appeared to work constructively together to drive the Convention to a successful conclusion in dramatic overtime fashion – the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Ultimately coming together shortly after the world had gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to advance the UN Convention on Climate Change at COP27, the nature negotiations in Montréal appeared inspired and motivated by the begrudging progress emerging from the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention, the UNFCCC’s focus

“Nature and biodiversity are dying the death of a billion cuts. And humanity is paying the price for betraying its closest friend,” said Inger Andersen, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, and Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, as she implored the delegates in the opening plenary to strive hard to find solutions to the nature crisis.

In the lead-up to the Convention in Montréal, great frustrations rippled through the international conservation community as advance negotiations had failed to produce a consensus. Delegates at the opening of the Convention had been handed a draft text heavily obscured with lengthy sections of bracketed text. Optimism for a positive outcome in Montréal was in short supply. The Russian war in Ukraine cast a further pall on the global community.

Applying the analogy of the Cold War Doomsday Clock to the nature crisis, it would not be unreasonable to suggest we are minutes from ‘midnight’. Over one million species are now threatened with extinction, and the rates of critical habitat loss and the resultant endangerment of species are accelerating. We are only beginning to appreciate the significance of these same habitats to global climate regulation and the sequestration of greenhouse gases. For the survival of our planet, COP15 needs to be a turning point. One of the communities living at the intersection of the nature and climate change crises is the Nlakaʼpamux Nation from the Interior of British Columbia, Canada. Chief Byron Spinks, former Chief of the Nlakaʼpamux Nation, spoke quietly, powerfully, and profoundly at the Conference about how his ancestral territories had been destructively mined, logged, and now burned in a ‘heat dome’ that saw the entire village of Lytton burn to the ground in 20 minutes in 2021 climate-change-induced temperatures exceeding 52°C, and be subsequently inundated by historic flooding from a 2022 climate-change-induced ‘atmospheric river’.

Despite these grave injustices to the Nlakaʼpamux people and their traditional territories, Chief Byron Spinks came to Montréal with Canadian Geographic and partners to tell the story of their efforts to establish an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area and establish an Indigenous Guardianship programme to help conserve and restore their traditional territories. Their appeal to the Conference parties was deeply moving.

Standing in the warmth of an Innu shaputuan, or longhouse, temporarily erected on the shores of the mighty St Lawrence River in the Old Port of Montréal, I had the great pleasure to

“Over one million species are now threatened with extinction.”

meet old friends and colleagues, including the remarkable Canadian Geographic partner, Valérie Courtois of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, an Innu herself, of the Mashteutiatsh from north central Québec. Standing amidst Indigenous leaders from across the country now known as Canada, Valérie spoke passionately of the leadership of Indigenous communities as stewards of nature and vital agents in the fight against climate change. There were enthusiastic celebrations of the momentum behind Indigenous nations’ efforts, and the historic Canadian investments in conservation and Indigenous Guardianship announced at COP15, totalling over $800 million Canadian dollars.

Scotland’s leadership in rewilding or restoration – the first European country to make a restoration pledge under the global restoration initiative, the Bonn Convention –arguably helped incentivize Canada and others to adopt the Bonn Challenge during the COP15 negotiations. While Canada is a nation renowned for its globally rare intact wilderness, it has pressing restoration needs as well in the Interior of British Columbia, the native grasslands of the Prairies, Carolinian forests of central Canada, and the Acadian forests of Atlantic Canada, to name a few. Will COP15 and the many significant pledges that were made in the snowy streets of Old Montréal be the turning point nature needs? It remains to be seen. Now we must turn to action, remaining steadfast in our commitments as geographical societies to redouble our efforts to support, encourage, celebrate, and inspire efforts to achieve the lofty goals agreed to in the wee hours in the bowels of Montréal’s Palais on that snowy night before Christmas 2022.

“Now we must turn to action.”

Frozen, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. © Zhenhuan Zhou, RMetS WPOTY 2022 second place

Mapping the geographies of British rain

Professor Simon Naylor, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Glasgow

Much of the information about the nature of British weather in the 19th century came from voluntary scientific associations, which continued to be the case even after the establishment of the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade (later the Meteorological Office) in 1854. This was certainly true in relation to the study of British rain. In 1863, George Symons, a young clerk at the Meteorological Department, resigned his post to devote his life to the organisation of a network of volunteer rainfall observers, which he ran from his home in Camden, north London. At the time of his death in 1900, Symons’ rainfall organisation numbered around 3,500 rain gauge stations across the British Isles. The British Rainfall Organisation, as it became known, was taken over by H Sowerby Wallis, Symons’ understudy, and Hugh Robert Mill, the Scottish geographer. Mill ran it alone from 1903, when Wallis retired due to ill health. One of Mill’s last acts as Director in 1919 was to negotiate the merger between the British Rainfall Organisation and the Meteorological Office. Nineteenth-century meteorology experienced what the historian of statistics, Ian Hacking, has called an “avalanche of printed numbers.” Tables of daily, monthly and annual rainfall were sent to Symons and his colleagues, and rainfall archives quickly accumulated in London and Edinburgh. What to do with all these numbers? Organisers encouraged the application of basic statistical techniques, notably the calculation of the arithmetical mean, for rainfall series. Alexander Buchan, the Secretary of the Scottish Meteorological Society, noted the problems of calculating reliable rainfall averages, especially given the capriciousness of rain’s occurrence. Trustworthy averages could only be calculated on long runs of annual observations. How then to produce averages of rainfall at stations with short runs of observations; how to compare stations’ averages that had been generated from different numbers of years of observations; and how to distinguish errant returns from those that were the result of unusually heavy rain, or no rain at all? Sir William Napier Shaw, Director of the Meteorological Office, noted that 19th-century meteorologists were engaged in the graphic representation of accumulating observations. The answer to meteorology’s numbers problem was, in other words, the rainfall map.

As a pioneer in the application of cartography to meteorology, Buchan transferred rainfall averages onto maps of the British Isles and represented them using shadings that mapped mean annual rainfall. Some of his maps – notably those representing Scottish rainfall – incorporated shading to indicate elevation contours, making the maps more visually complex but more useful for the exploration of relations between altitude and precipitation. Like Buchan, Hugh Robert Mill promoted the mapping of rainfall data. As the Director of the British Rainfall Organisation, Mill developed what he called “cartometric hyetography,” which transformed a slow and tedious process of inspecting printed forms into a “simultaneous and almost automatic” process of visual inspection. For both Buchan and Mill, the mapping of rainfall visualised errors and brought numerical data to life. The mapping of rainfall also had a practical importance. Many of the maps produced by the British Rainfall Organisation had been produced as part of commissions for municipal or statutory authorities, for legal arbitrations, as evidence for Parliamentary Committees, for insurance disputes (investigation of floods and their impacts), and to supply information to reservoir builders and water boards. With Mill’s retirement as Director of the British Rainfall Organisation, Symons’ leasehold house in Camden was given to the Royal Meteorological Society along with an endowment fund. The fund was used to research and prepare a rainfall atlas, published in 1926 as the Rainfall Atlas of the British Isles, with an introduction by Mill. It featured two main sets of maps. There were the small-scale maps of annual rainfall for each individual year from 1868, expressed as a percentage of the average for the period 1881–1915. These maps revealed years of excess and low rain relative to the mean. The second set featured maps of average monthly rainfall. Writing in Nature, Ernest Gold, the Deputy Director of the Meteorological Office, praised the average monthly maps for their practical utility but complained that “they do not make quite the same appeal to the imagination: averages never do.”

FURTHER READING

E Gold (1927) An Atlas of Rainfall (Nature).

H R Mill (1908) Map-Studies of Rainfall (Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society).

Royal Meteorological Society (1926) Rainfall Atlas of the British Isles (London: Royal Meteorological Society).

“The mapping of rainfall visualised errors and brought numerical data to life.”

H R Mill’s map of average annual rainfall for the Forth Valley, published in 1915. Reproduced with the kind help of the National Meteorological Archive, Meteorological Office, Exeter.

Alexander Buchan’s meteorological maps of Scotland

Chris Fleet FRSGS, Map Curator, National Library of Scotland

Meteorology is inherently geographic, and it has been closely integrated with maps since it emerged as an applied science in the 19th century. Maps are essential for understanding and forecasting the weather, and they have continued to shape the growth and development of the discipline. The basic choropleth map – grouping and often tinting areas with a similar variable, such as rainfall or temperature – is ubiquitous and well-known today, thanks to the mass of easily available data and computer-based tools including GIS. It’s therefore easy to overlook how innovative these kinds of maps were in the 19th century, and how pioneering the work of Alexander Buchan was in both gathering meteorological data and presenting it.

Alexander Buchan was secretary of the Scottish Meteorological Society from 1860–1907, and amongst many other things, he coordinated the recording of weather data from the network of climatological stations across Scotland. These two maps synthesize the results of these observations relating to rainfall and temperature in Scotland over 25 years from 1866 to 1890. Buchan also pioneered the use of monthly weather maps to show seasonal variations over the year, which, as for Scotland, were much more distinctive and useful than annual averages. These two maps were published in John George Bartholomew’s magnificent Survey Atlas of Scotland (1895), Scotland’s landmark national atlas of the late 19th century. This brought together the work of other leading experts in the physical, geological and natural sciences, and it is fitting that Buchan’s meteorological work was also included.

Alexander Buchan, Monthly rainfall for 25 years from J G Bartholomew’s Survey Atlas of Scotland (1895). Image courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. View online at maps.nls.uk/view/78055201

Alexander Buchan, Monthly temperature for 25 years from J G Bartholomew’s Survey Atlas of Scotland (1895). Image courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. View online at maps.nls.uk/view/75236853

“It’s easy to overlook how innovative these kinds of maps were in the 19th century.”

The Little Book of Scottish Rain

Ron Butlin

Though Inuits might rejoice in having fifty words or more for snow, Scots can boast of getting on for seventy for rain. And such wonderful words they are! It is rare that writing a book is ever non-stop fun all the way through, but The Little Book of Scottish Rain was a pleasure to work on from start to finish. First there was the sheer joy of discovering new words, from the familiar dreich, drookit, smirr, haar and the like, to the truly exotic that name the all-too-familiar: gandiegow (a heavy rain), daggle (to rain in torrents), plype (sudden rain). Then there are the words describing the many, many varieties of rain, such as huther (intermittent rain), yillen (a shower with wind), scudder (a shower that is ice-cold). As I worked I relished the musicality of the harsh sounds, the clash of hard consonants, and took great pleasure in saying them aloud to myself, then to our dog, my wife and, after a few glasses, to my friends. The sound of these words really captures the imagination. Consider the cadence of watergow (a rainbow), its calmness perfectly suggesting the divine blessing that follows a storm; of smue, whose open-ended vowels evoke a dense drizzle, and fiss whose lingering ‘ss….’ conjures up a drizzle that is relentless. Unsurprisingly, many of the words come from the north of Scotland, from Orkney and Shetland in particular. Up there they have words for every possible stage in every possible kind of downpour: rogs (the lines of cloud portending rain), haggar (rain drifting down as a very wet caress), driv (vast quantities of falling rain). There’s even a special word, aflak, for a brief pause in a rainstorm!

The publisher asked me to make a selection of forty to fifty Scots words that spoke deeply to me about our rain and weather, then write a short verse on each. As a poet and novelist more often engaging with the darker side of things this was a real treat, a holiday almost. The artist Tim Kirby then added the most delightful illustrations. I hope our sense of being at play shines through, as in the verse for kaavie (driving rain):

“To be hatless in the driving rain is really most refreshing –the freezing water cools the brain, each ice-cold drop’s a blessing.”

Not quite a perfect rhyme, I agree, but it did feel so irresistible. I hope you can share in our enjoyment as you scan the selection here – and when next it’s dingin doun around you perhaps you’ll also share our belief that Scottish rain can be inspiring. For a short time at least!

“The sound of these words really captures the imagination.”

Unusual forecasts

Felicity Liggins, Education Outreach and External Training Manager, Met Office

We’re all used to the forecasts we see on the TV or online telling us what weather we can expect over the next few hours or days, but that is not the only type of forecasts the Met Office produces. Weather and climate change affect everything we do – from the food we put in our shopping baskets to how we safely transport goods around the UK to the safety of racing pigeons. Here are just some of the forecasts we’ve produced over the years for a whole variety of different customers.

Pet food

Analysis has shown that in hot weather, owners tend to give their pampered pets dry food like biscuits rather than wet food in jelly or gravy, which can dry out quickly and attract flies in the heat. Shoppers are also more likely to buy salad items, food for the BBQ or sunscreen when the temperature rises. The Met Office has helped the retail sector understand the trends in footfall, sales and product availability that are influenced by the weather, meaning businesses that build weather forecasts into their decision making could ensure they had the right stock available at the right time.

Bluetongue disease

Bluetongue is a notifiable disease that affects some wild animals and livestock including sheep, cattle and goats. Although it is not a risk to food safety, when outbreaks do occur, they impact the health, movement and trade of livestock. It is a disease traditionally associated with Africa and the southern Mediterranean, but with increasing temperatures it sometimes appears closer to home in mainland Europe. It is generally spread by infected midges, alongside poor animal hygiene practices. If outbreaks occur in northern Europe, it can affect livestock in the UK if the weather conditions are conducive and the midges are blown in our direction. Imported animals who are infected can also cause outbreaks.

During the last outbreak in the late 2000s, the Met Office provided forecasts of potential at-risk areas in the UK using our atmospheric dispersion model. This allowed the authorities and farming communities to take action to prevent widescale infection through vaccination and other health protection measures. The same atmospheric dispersion model can be used across a wide range of applications too, where we need to predict where particles might go – from volcanic ash to radioactive materials to pollutants from industrial incidents, such as the Buncefield explosion in 2005.

Transporting crisps

Strong winds and gusts are a risk to the stability of lorries, particularly when

empty or with a light load, such as crisps. So, the Met Office has produced forecasts for retail to help them decide when and via which routes it is best to safely transport light loads such as potato crisps. Such forecasts not only enable the movement of our favourite foodstuffs to continue to flow, they also reduce costs and carbon emissions as driving in higher winds increases a vehicle’s resistance to drive through the air in front of it (the ‘drag’), leading to an increased expenditure of fuel.

Racing pigeons

Racing pigeons is sport beloved by many across the UK and beyond, and weather plays a crucial part in a race’s success. Pigeons are not released if inclement weather is expected at the release site, or on the anticipated route home. Many pigeon racers are avid weather watchers, but we have also worked with the community to produce a bespoke forecast product to help keep the birds as safe as possible on their travels.

Space weather

The Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre is one of only three space weather prediction centres around the globe. Magnetic fields, radiation, particles and matter, which have been ejected from the Sun, can interact with our upper atmosphere and magnetic field to produce a variety of effects. These range from the beautiful displays of the aurora to significant impacts on our infrastructure, including power grid outages, disruption of satellite navigation and communication applications, and physical satellite damage. Thankfully such severe events are rare, but due to our dependency on a whole range of technologies that could be impacted, we now provide the UK government, responder communities, critical national infrastructure providers and the public with forecasts of space weather events.

“Strong winds and gusts are a risk to the stability of lorries.”

Space weather. © Met Office

The changing face of meteorology at the Met Office

Helen Roberts, Socio-meteorologist, Met Office

When I joined the Met Office 20 years ago as a trainee weather forecaster, the prerequisites were a strong background in physics and maths, and the in-house training gave us a good understanding of the dynamics of the atmosphere. My career took me to a variety of locations, working with a multitude of customers from numerous industry sectors.

The question we were aiming to answer, for all our customers, was “what is the forecast?” However, as the years progressed, so the question subtly changed. What people really want to know is what the weather will do, rather than what it will be. To some extent, this can be answered by incorporating data science with the physical sciences, and by providing information of the impacts of the weather, rather than just the weather per se. But even this does not give the full picture. It is actually all about making effective decisions. When we produce a weather forecast, we’re not doing it just for the sake of predicting a future state of the atmosphere; we’re doing it because weather impacts us. It determines when we put our washing out, whether we wear a coat, our hobbies, our businesses and their operations, and our safety. The Met Office’s purpose is “helping you make better decisions to stay safe and thrive.” This statement of intent puts people at the heart of our raison d’être

So, we need to use the science of people, something we have been rather slow to acknowledge. But there is now a growing recognition that the social and behavioural sciences are as important as the physical sciences that are more traditionally associated with weather and climate. Social and behavioural science can offer insight all the way through the forecast process. Our forecasters (operational meteorologists) have vast amounts of data at their fingertips. How do they decide which data to look at, how to interpret probabilistic data, and what to do when data sources are conflicting? Are there human biases in the process? This requires an understanding of decision science and cognition. Cognitive biases explain ways in which human behaviour differs from rationalism, often in common and predictable ways. Why don’t people take preparatory action, for example if they live in a flood risk area? This is called hyperbolic discounting, where people tend to prioritise immediate benefits over bigger future gains. Hick’s Law tells us that more options lead to harder decisions, so weather warning advisory action statements must be few, clear and easy. People tune out to things they are repeatedly exposed to; named banner blindness, this is the danger of overwarning. People are more likely to take an action when the effort is small, termed the spark effect; so in a weather warning, highlight the easy and free actions first. Social proof means people adapt their

behaviour based on what others do, so if people around them aren’t following an evacuation order, then they likely won’t either. And availability heuristic, whereby people favour recent and available information over past information, means someone who has been recently flooded is more likely to take heed of a flood warning.

Behavioural insights research shows that advice should be listed easiest and cheapest first, and be specific and actionable. It also tells us that in the case of heat warnings (as opposed to other weather parameters such as wind, snow, rain, fog, etc) people are more likely to act on behalf of someone else, so framing the advice in terms of helping vulnerable relatives and neighbours is most efficacious. This has the additional benefit that once people have taken this action, such as ensuring an elderly relative keeps their curtains closed during the day, drinks plenty of water, and doesn’t go outside during peak daytime heating, they are then more likely to take that advice on board themselves. Of course, social science is an incredibly broad area, covering a vast array of topics that are relevant and useful – in fact vital – to meteorology and other environmental sciences. We can use it to help us effect change to reduce carbon emissions and encourage other environmentally sustainable actions. It can help create effective leadership and community engagement in times of crisis, including natural disasters. In fact, I wrote a dissertation for my psychology MSc on the topic of mental ill-health and PTSD resulting from natural disasters, and how we might prepare for what could be a catastrophic mental health crisis resulting from more extreme weather events due to our changing climate.

I could go on, but perhaps I’ll leave you to think about additional ways in which social and behavioural science can augment the physical sciences. Suffice to say, this is a rapidly evolving area that combines my three great passions of weather, social science and communication, and I’m delighted to be able to call myself the UK’s first sociometeorologist.

“Social and behavioural science can offer insight all the way through the forecast process.”

Living for the chase

Dr Jana Houser, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Ohio State University

It is late May. The morning air is thick with moisture. I breathe in the smell of damp grass and clean air. A moderate breeze out of the southeast blows through my hair, scattering strands across my face and my shoulders. It’s going to be an exciting day for severe weather in the Great Plains. I can sense it. Some days just have that feeling. It is tangible, albeit not exactly scientifically explainable.

It’s 9:00am CDT. Time to check the models. I pore over the data. Satellite observations, radar data, surface observations, upper air profiles, numerical forecast output – collectively these tools inform me where the conditions will be most favourable for tornadic storms today and where storms may (or may not!) fire. Starting out in Norman, Oklahoma today, we’re looking at a local chase, targeting somewhere a little west of Oklahoma City, along the eastward advancing dryline – a favoured region of storm formation where dry, hot air originating from the high terrain across Central Mexico intersects warm, moist air streaming northward from the Gulf. Today we aren’t in a hurry. Sometimes, we would have been on the road by 10am. It’s now noon. I look up into the sky and see a horseshoe vortex, a small, rotating cloud tendril shaped like a U. A lucky charm perhaps? I’d like to think so. I climb into the driver’s seat of the rapid-scan, X-band Polarimetric, mobile radar truck (RaXPol) and we are off, headed northwest to get in position for convection initiation, and hopefully to ‘catch’ a tornado. Not all chasing is the same. Or, perhaps, more appropriately, not all chasing is done with the same intent. At least, not exactly. Yes, I do chase in part for the excitement. I chase because I am captivated by the dichotomy of an atmospheric phenomenon that is delicate and beautiful and yet can inflict massive destruction. I chase because I am drawn to the simultaneous power and fragility of the atmosphere. Chasing storms has been a dream of mine since childhood. While some kids were talking about being firemen or teachers or ballerinas, I was outside on my back deck pretending to be the TV meteorologist, watching the Weather Channel religiously.

But I also chase for the science. I take instrumentation out into the field and collect data on storms that are capable of producing tornadoes, and ideally, on tornadoes as they form, intensify, then ultimately decay. I am not out to sell video footage or to get dangerously close. I am seeking to answer questions such as: “Does the rotation that turns into a tornado begin in the cloud or at the ground?” “What is the source of the rotation that ultimately ends up in the tornado?” “Why does one storm produce a tornado while a neighbouring storm less than 50 miles away does not?” “Can we discern any subtle cues from the environment that will distinguish between an atmosphere conducive for tornadoes versus one that is not?” I want to explain it. I want to put a story together, to complete the puzzle. But the answers keep eluding me (and, let’s be honest, they have been eluding the meteorological community for decades!) It is so logistically challenging to be in the right place at the right time to collect the data you need. Numerical simulations are helpful, but they have to simplify the atmosphere. Tornadoes are small

and short-lived, making them very difficult to sample. And the Plains are big, and Mother Nature is fickle. Most chases end with no tornadoes.

Back to the moment. It’s 3:00pm CDT. The cap is breaking. That’s meteorological lingo meaning storms are starting to form. I can see the bubbly white cumulus congestus clouds on the satellite data, and visually off to my southwest. The first radar echoes are showing up. We find a nice, flat, open spot with a clear line of sight to our storm, and we start collecting mobile radar data.

The sky darkens. Daylight turns to an eerie, unnatural twilight with only a thin ribbon of light on the far western horizon. The clouds billow up vigorously, roiling on their ascent. The strong turning of the winds with height makes the updraft of this storm rotate. Some storms have spectacular structure as a result of these rotating updrafts, or mesocyclones – layers of clouds, striations, some even look like mother ships from an alien planet. This one, however, is just black. Featureless and mean. The cloud base starts to lower on the southwestern side of the storm. A wall cloud, the possible predecessor of a tornado, is forming as the updraft ingests rain-cooled air. It is still a bit far away but I can see tendrils of clouds descending from the wall cloud, briefly spinning and then evaporating as if moving to some strange cloud dance. Then I see it! A dust swirl on the ground! Tornado! Turning my eyes higher to the wall cloud, I don’t see evidence of a well-defined funnel, but debris is definitely being picked up at the surface. Our radar is scanning the storm, penetrating past what my eyes can visually see. It detects the strong rotation near the ground first as well. For about one-and-a-half minutes, that’s all there is! Then, over a brief 30-second interval, the rotation is rapidly drawn upward, and a full-fledged tornado is born! We watch in awe and wonder, as the tornado rapidly transforms into a large mile-wide wedge. It is approaching our location. The radar is detecting winds close to 300mph, a mere 100 feet or so above the ground. Thankfully, the tornado is wreaking havoc over mostly empty fields and shrubby grassland. This one is ferocious! It is time to make a decision. We need to bail. It takes at least five minutes to pack up the radar and hit the road again, and this thing is barrelling at us fast! Traditional chasing logic would have us move south. We are on a north-south oriented road. But this tornado and the storm that is producing it have turned to the right, and hard! That means that its motion is more easterly, and perhaps even south-easterly. We opt to head north, back to interstate 40, and then go east, toward Oklahoma City. This turns out to be a very wise strategy, as we likely would not have beaten the tornado across our south road option. That could have been catastrophic! Despite the fact that your eyes focus on the descending funnel cloud, the strongest rotation tends to be concentrated at the surface first, and then rapidly either extends upward, or simultaneously converges in the layer of air between the ground and the cloud base.

Our chase this day ends in a traffic jam, trying to get through Oklahoma City at rush hour, in the midst of a panicked public still reeling from an EF5 tornado that devastated Moore a mere 11 days earlier. That tornado that we sampled? It

“I am drawn to the simultaneous power and fragility of the atmosphere.”

became the widest on record, exceeding 2.6 miles from end to end! Thank heavens it dissipated before entering the more populated western suburbs of Oklahoma City. Sadly, several of our colleagues ended up losing their lives by deciding to go south on that road we could have very easily taken as well. The data we collected went on to inspire a study which confirmed that many, if not most, tornadoes forming from supercells, develop not from the cloud to the ground but from the bottom up. It was a day to remember, for sure. Forever. Chasing is equal parts skill and luck. You have to know what you’re doing. You need to make wise choices, and anticipate storm behaviour before it happens. But there are so many circumstances out of your control as well. Chasing is an unusual

dichotomy of hurry up and wait. Hurry up! Get to your target area! Wait for storms to form. Wait for the moisture to return. Wait for the winds to back. Then hurry again! Feverishly, try to catch up with a storm that knows no road geometry, crosses rivers easily, and moves with the power of the wind. Hope you make it to a place with good visibility just before the tornado forms. So many things can go wrong. So many things do go wrong. But, perhaps, that is what makes the chase all the more gratifying when you catch what you’re looking for! The old adage ‘you have to taste the bitter to enjoy the sweet’ definitely rings true. I keep chasing. Somehow, I can’t get enough. There are more tornadoes to see, questions to answer, and mysteries to unravel. And even if I knew everything, I would still pursue the chase.

“Tornadoes are small and short-lived, making them very difficult to sample.”

Photo by Justin Hobson on Shutterstock.

Weather Photographer of the Year 2022

We are delighted to share some of the fantastic winning and shortlisted photographs from the Royal Meteorological Society’s annual competition, on these pages, on our front cover, and on articles throughout the magazine. See www.rmets.org/2022-wpoty-winners for more information.

1. Rain Bubble, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. © Betel Tibebu | 2. In Search Of Water, Purulia, West Bengal. © Barun Rajgaria | 3. Winter’s Icy Grip, Kiruna, Sweden. © Felipe Martin Menzella | 4. Departing Storm over Bembridge Lifeboat Station, Isle of Wight, UK. © Jamie Russell | 5. Frosty Winter Sunrise Over the Gwda River, Pila, Poland. © Krzysztof Tollas | 6. Highway to Paradise, rni Kal, Slovenia. © Sara Jazbar | 7. Ghost Under the Cliff, Barcelona, Spain. © Emili Vilamala Benito | 8. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Taiwan. © Rossi Fang | 9. Thunder in Chongqing, China. © Luo Xing

An interview with Tristan Gooley

Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence

A natural navigator, Tristan Gooley is highly skilled at interpreting the signs that are all around us, whether in trees, leaves, birds, insects, stars, water or clouds. In his book, The Secret World of Weather, he explains that “a person sensitive to their landscape is granted powers of understanding denied to machines.” I asked him to share some insights. How did you first become interested in using natural signs for navigation?

I’ve always spent a lot of time outdoors, and anyone who does that forms a relationship with nature. From an early age I enjoyed shaping journeys, although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that! But I worked out that if you can safely get from A to B, you can do more interesting things than if you’re stuck at A. It dawned on me that navigation was the beautiful art that can help you do that, and I learned to use modern tools and traditional ones like sextants. In my twenties, I realised that the scale of my journeys didn’t determine how interesting they were. When I came home from a 1,000-kilometre expedition, I’d go for walks in the British countryside, and I found that these shorter journeys were sometimes more fascinating and philosophically more challenging. Then the penny dropped that the kit was getting in the way! So I decided to use the trees, birds and stars as my map and compass. To find my way I needed signs, and I realised that absolutely everything outdoors is a clue or a sign. What is that cloud telling me about direction and place? How is this ivy leaf going to show me where south is? The process of mental map-making became richer and more rewarding.

All my professional life, I’ve drawn inspiration by standing on the shoulders of the greats, whether they’re Pacific island navigators, Arab navigators, or Vikings.

How can we interpret a frosty landscape and find our bearings?

In the case of frost patterns, the simplest thing is a frost shadow. Because the sun is due south in the middle of the day – that’s when it’s highest in the sky and does most of the thawing – frost lasts longer on the north side of anything that casts a shadow. If a frost shadow has lasted all day, we can draw a line from the furthest point on the frost, through the top of the obstacle that has created the shade, and it’s likely to be a north–south line, heading south.

In The Secret World of Weather you talk about micro-climates, and how even very small areas have their own weather. Could you give us some examples?

This was one of the breakthroughs I made when I was preparing to write the book. I’d look at a weather forecast and see, for instance, that the wind was going to be 10mph and westerly. After walking outdoors for about ten minutes, I experienced many different winds, and none of them blowing at 10mph from the west! This is because, from the moment

the weather touches land, it creates a rich but complex and hyper-local set of phenomena.

For this reason, it’s common to have a rain shower on one side of a hill, and not on the other. The weather changes even as you walk around a tree. You could be walking in a line of people, stretched out for a couple of hundred metres, and the first and last people in that line will have very different weather experiences. Meteorologists do a fantastic job with weather forecasting, but if you ask them whether it will shower in your backyard tomorrow, they’ll laugh at you! They cannot cater to the individual, and we all live in our own world of weather – it really only stretches as far as our fingertips.

How much truth is there in traditional sayings, for example ‘if leaves show their undersides it will rain’, or ‘mares’ tails and mackerel scales make tall ships carry low sails’?

There’s some truth in a lot of them, and if nothing else, they sharpen our awareness. Seeing the underside of leaves is another way of saying that, if you feel a gust of wind, there’s probably a rain shower nearby. ‘Mares’ tails and mackerel scales’ are getting a bit more interesting in terms of meteorology. ‘Mares’ tails’ are cirrus clouds, which tell us there’s a lot of water vapour in the upper troposphere; and there are two types of mackerel sky, caused by cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds. Both tell us that change is on the way. Another nice expression is ‘clear moon, frost soon’. If we can see the moon clearly, there are no clouds and there must be low levels of moisture in the atmosphere. A clear moon is therefore telling us the air is fairly dry. At night, the ground is going to radiate heat quickly, and in winter that could mean a frost. However, it’s quite rare for one sign on its own to be dependable. They are all pieces of a jigsaw that we can start building to gain a more complete picture.

Are modern-day computerised forecasts more reliable than the old lore?

Forecasts for public consumption are fantastic at giving a broad picture. There have been so many improvements over the last decade in terms of gathering and processing data. I’m not saying it will never happen, but it’s rare that something big and nasty surprises anybody in a developed meteorological world.

However, for reasons already discussed, we can’t turn on the radio and hear someone saying, “It’s going to be weirdly cold in that frost pocket that you go past when you walk the dog later in the day!” That’s the cultural price we pay for technological progress. The available information about what’s going on 100 feet above our heads has never been better, but we’ve started to lose sight of what happens below that, on a more personal level.

Maasai and their livestock. © Alicia Davis

“I decided to use the trees, birds and stars as my map and compass.”

Do you think we’re spending less time observing the sky, compared with, say, 100 years ago?

It’s true that computer screens don’t help, but they have a lot of good points. The way I see it, we wake up every morning with, say, 1,000 attention units and it’s up to us how we spend them. We might have to use 600 of them on work, but there are still 400 left over. Do we give 100 to Netflix, or to noticing how the insects change when the sun comes out?

When I was younger, I used to tear around trying to get to the tops of mountains, and I wasn’t really noticing things. One of my flight instructors said to me, “Be sure to stop and smell the flowers,” and I didn’t even understand what he meant. That’s the difference between a youngster and someone in mid-life! I’ve also learned that there’s no point telling someone they should look at the sky more, but if you explain that they can tell if it’s going to rain tomorrow by the way the stars are twinkling, they might think, “I’ll try that because it sounds fun!”

The good news is that our brain architecture is still there; as a species, we’re extremely good at forming ideas and dealing with puzzling situations. Historically, these skills have helped us to survive. We’re all descended from nature’s puzzlesolvers!

The Secret World of Weather is published by Sceptre (2021). Tristan’s latest book, How to Read a Tree, will be published in April. See www. naturalnavigator. com for more information.

“The weather changes even as you walk around a tree.”

Mock mirage sunset over the Thames Estuary, Tankerton, Kent; a temperature inversion causes sunlight to refract differently, distorting how objects appear to viewers. © Brendan Conway, RMetS WPOTY 2022 finalist

The Polar Academy: growing in confidence

Craig Mathieson FRSGS, RSGS Explorer-in-Residence

As with most charities, trying to work through a global pandemic was extremely challenging. The fact we work with lots of young people with mental health issues made our job even more difficult, as we couldn’t physically be there for them for long periods of time. However, I made the decision right at the very start of the pandemic that the Polar Academy would not waiver in our pursuit to help the struggling children and families we work with and come out of the global challenge even stronger than before.

Therefore, instead of listening to all the frenzy of negative media comments and political double standards going on, we (Lorna Craig and I) worked the hardest two years of our lives. Every day we contacted businesses and individuals around the world for support, at the same time as continuing with the training of the children we were working with from Bell Baxter School in Cupar – albeit via the dreaded Zoom!

In the summer of 2021, whilst we still couldn’t take our team to Greenland due to the global flight ban, Scotland itself was slowly beginning to open up. We therefore decided to run an expedition within Scotland which would be just as challenging as the Arctic. The expedition was planned in three phases.

Phase 1: By Sea – Rowing a Scottish birlinn (same as a Viking longboat but with a central rudder) 60 miles through the Great Glen from Fort William to Inverness; five days travel and 60 miles covered.

Phase 2: By Land – Walking from Forres, following the Dava Way to the Glenmore Lodge, the place where it all began for these children two years before; two-and-a-half days travel and 40 miles covered.

Phase 3: By Air – Waiting for them at the Glenmore Lodge was a helicopter to fly them all home, generously supplied free of charge by one our fantastic Patrons; 20 minutes travel and 117 miles covered!

This was a perfect end to a very special expedition with extraordinary children.

As this was all going on, we had made the decision to double the size of the Polar Academy, now working with two schools at once. The schools chosen were Stranraer Academy and Bo’ness Academy. Again working through all the restrictions and ever-changing challenges, we fully prepared both teams to go to Greenland the following year.

Come 2022 and Greenland had opened its doors again. In late March of 2022 we set off across the Arctic ice, with a team of 30 individuals skiing and hauling their sledges through the spectacular landscape of East Greenland. It was fantastic to be back, especially to see all our Greenlandic friends who had been cut off from the rest of the world for so long. The expedition was of course a great success and we returned to Scotland with some very confident young people, all with plans for a positive future.

In August 2022 we returned to Greenland, this time as the first part of our new Greenlandic Youth Exchange Programme. Along with five pupils from Bell Baxter School we hiked through the mountains north of the settlement of Tasiilaq. On our return to Tasiilaq, we worked with the local youth centre on a shared art project, trying to involve as many

© Nicholas Doherty

local children from Tasiilaq as possible. It’s really important to me that we give back to any community we work with. Therefore, in September last year we arranged for a group of local girls from Tasiilaq to come over to Scotland. Not only was this tremendous fun for everyone involved but it really brought together our partnership with the community in Tasiilaq, all for the positive development of the children from both cultures.

Going forward, our plans for the future are extremely exciting. Various projects have begun which will again change the face of the Polar Academy. A couple of examples are:

• we have now partnered with Cambridge and Oxford Universities as well as the Scott Polar Research Institute with a yearon-year scientific project studying snow density, eDNA profiling, and LiDAR 3D studies of Arctic lichens.

• we are looking to expand yet again, this time into Scandinavia. This would involve both working with Scandinavian children and taking children from all over the UK to the Nordic regions.

All in all, through hard work, not only have we survived the pandemic which destroyed so many worthy and important charities, we have come out of it in a much stronger and focused way. None of this would be possible without the support of the businesses and individuals who are part of the Polar Academy family. If you would like to help then please get in touch.

Thank you, Craig.

“We hiked through the mountains north of the settlement of Tasiilaq.”

notes from the classroom

Weather, climate, and the Scottish education system

There is perhaps no other topic studied in any subject at any level in school that has a greater relevance to everyday life than the weather and climate. Geography is a subject promoting an understanding of the world around you. This topic more than any other allows you to step outside a building and immediately apply the theories learned to what you can see, no matter where in the country you are located.

Across the Broad General Education (BGE) phase of the Scottish curriculum (aged 5–14), there is a progression in understanding of the factors influencing weather and climate. The open nature of the course at this level allows teachers the freedom to investigate local conditions and compare them to the climatic conditions in other parts of the world. Inspiring curiosity and developing a connection with the world around you is fundamental to inspiring the geographers of the future, and studying the weather can be the medium to do this.

At National 5 Geography level (aged 15 or 16), the focus is on the weather and climate of the British Isles. Learners should be able to describe and explain the weather associated with different weather systems in the summer or in the winter, as well as discussing the impact these may have on people and the environment. Specific content covers:

• air masses (tropical / polar / Arctic and maritime / continental);

• factors affecting the temperature (latitude / altitude / distance from the sea);

• low pressure (depressions);

• high pressure (anticyclones);

• weather station circles (see Figure 1).

Higher Geography (aged 16 or 17) has a more global outlook, with the Atmosphere topic linking the tri-cellular model of atmospheric circulation to the broad latitudinal biomes found across the planet. This builds on the understanding of how rising and falling air influences rainfall patterns, as well as the influence of the Coriolis effect. The rainfall pattern in West Africa caused by the seasonal movement of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone is a case study, and requires learners to describe climate graphs and then offer an explanation for the pattern present. With this understanding it is possible to make multiple connections with other optional parts of the course, such as rural land degradation in the Sahel or the distribution of malaria across the globe. A local context is still present in the Hydrosphere unit, looking at the link between rainfall, land use and flood risk when explaining storm hydrographs (see Figure 2).

Many learners incorporate weather measurements into primary research for the Advanced Higher Geography folio (aged 17 or 18). Microclimate analysis is a specified skill, and being able to explain variation in rainfall, temperature and wind allows them to make use of their theoretical knowledge to explain patterns and correlations. Links can be made to river levels, urban footfall and rural land use. The advantage of working at this level is that the data-rich nature of studying the weather lends itself to the required graphical, cartographic and statistical analysis.

Throughout all levels, the ability to look outside the classroom window, and describe and explain the current conditions, emphasises the dynamic and relevant nature of our subject. With our changing climate, understanding the impact of extreme weather conditions becomes increasingly important, and introducing these concepts to the next generation is both a duty and a privilege clear to all Geography teachers.

Sustainability Education A Classroom Guide

Stephen Scoffham and Steve Rawlinson (Bloomsbury, April 2022)

Since 2016, Learning for Sustainability has been an entitlement for all learners and a General Teaching Council for Scotland requirement for all teachers, schools and educational leaders to demonstrate in their practice. This book, focused on learners aged 3–14, gives practical activities and clear rationale to help teachers to fulfil this responsibility. Organised around 12 areas of study, including health, food, social justice and sustainable living, activities are clearly laid out with a key idea behind each one. Key vocabulary, interesting facts and links to the UN Sustainable Development Goals are included in each section, as well as a sustainability discussion idea to get learners thinking for themselves. Sustainability Education is an essential handbook for new and established teachers to improve their knowledge of and practice in this critical and increasingly important part of their role.

Figure 2: storm hydrograph in the 2019 SQA

Higher Geography exam.

“There is a progression in understanding of the factors influencing weather and climate.”

Alastair McConnell, RSGS Education Committee

Figure 1: weather station circles in the 2022 SQA National 5 Geography exam.

Career pathways

Lisa Tomkins, Education

As the UK’s national weather service, the Met Office provides forecasts that we can all check out on our phones and TVs to help us plan our activities. Would we be wise to pull waterproofs onto a resistant toddler before heading out for a walk? Can we confidently pack a picnic hamper and blanket for a day trip into the countryside? Or would we be better curled up on a sofa, heeding national weather warnings while cradling a warm cuppa and reaching for a comforting chocolate biscuit.

But the purpose of the Met Office is not simply to help us plan our time; its core purpose is to help us stay safe and thrive. Met Office weather warnings are designed to let the general public, businesses, emergency responders and governments know of the potential impacts of severe weather up to seven days in advance, enabling response plans to be activated. In addition, a wide variety of forecasts are produced, aligned to different customer requirements, and we provide weather planning support worldwide to help countries plan their harvests, prepare for freak weather systems, and monitor their impact on climate change. The work of the Met Office consequently involves numerous teams, from research scientists and informatics specialists to training and communication experts.

To maintain and further develop the expertise needed for this work, the Met Office must also look to the future, helping develop the next generation of its workforce. To meet this need, our Education Outreach and Early Careers teams work closely with schools, colleges, universities and community groups across the UK, with the support of colleagues across the organisation. And this work starts with those of a surprisingly young age.

Back in 2018, Education and Employers published its Drawing the Future study, showing that by age seven, stereotypes are pretty much concreted in. It’s not that stereotypes can’t be challenged later in life, but efforts would need to be invested in first extinguishing those that have already formed. We need to encourage young people across all demographics of the UK to consider careers with the Met Office. So, much of our education outreach work involves providing opportunities for students to meet Met Office staff, to see people like themselves fulfilling Met Office roles. Girls can be made to feel that engineering jobs aren’t for them, for example. So, introducing them to people like Tess Brock in our Specialist Engineering Team can really help. These interactions provide students with information about different pathways into Met Office careers too.

Tess can explain to these young people that she started at the Met Office as a Level 2 Engineering Apprentice before moving on to a Level 3 programme, after which she was taken on as a permanent Technician within the Observations team. She describes how, during her apprenticeship, she worked with various engineering teams, providing experience of a wide range of engineering systems used within the Met Office to collect weather observations from across the country. And she has since been given the opportunity to continue her education by undertaking an Open University degree in Engineering while continuing in her job. Young people often

don’t realise that employers can support them while they are working to undertake additional training and education.

The weather observation instruments and sensors that Tess builds, tests, installs and upgrades, send information back to the Met Office headquarters, where it is fed into our highperformance numerical models and used by operational meteorologists to predict the weather, so it is important that they deliver reliable and credible data.

The Early Careers team offers a number of ways into careers at the Met Office. Some follow the apprenticeship route, like Tess; others join us for an industrial placement during a university sandwich year; and others, such as Nick Krol, get a taster of working at the Met Office over one of our summer placements before later returning as a successful job applicant.

From September, the option to join via our new graduate trainee scheme will also exist, as our Early Career programmes are constantly evolving.

Nick Krol did his summer placement with the Met Office back in 2015, following a Geography degree. Over the summer, he was based in the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services, where he was tasked with analysing an historical dataset on climate variations and extremes, using interpolation to fill in missing global data. It was this Hadley Centre placement that helped Nick realise that he wanted to do something with more immediate time pressure and impact, so he looked into forecasting, and when an opportunity later came up he applied to become an Operational Meteorologist. His initial year involved completing the Met Office’s Operational Meteorologist Foundation Course with on-the-job training at various military bases before he passed the course and was able to work independently. He is now a Senior Operational Meteorologist in the Joint Operational Meteorological and Oceanographic Centre team at the Armed Forces HQ in Northwood, just outside London. Here Nick’s work helps enable the UK and Allied armed forces to gain operational and tactical advantage during deployments.

Nick particularly enjoys the additional opportunities that become available as an Operational Meteorologist, and the skills that can be built along the way. For example, last year he provided forecasting for Wimbledon, getting the chance to work with colleagues from Meteo-France, the French national meteorological service, prior to which he had been able to participate in a tour to Gibraltar. This winter, he has assisted winter forecasting for the National Highways Agency.

Outreach Partner, Met Office

“We provide weather planning support worldwide.”

Nick Krol. © Met Office

Tess Brock. © Met Office

So, after learning about weather and climate and being introduced to Met Office staff through our Education Outreach programme, how can young people determine whether they might like to work at the Met Office? For Nick, undertaking work experience with us as a 15-year-old confirmed his wish to become a meteorologist, and he was then able to begin planning his education and career pathway. With this in mind, the Met Office is relaunching its work experience programme in July this year.

To enable all students who would like to participate to do so, no matter where in the UK they live, we are rolling out a virtual work experience programme, involving live webinars and a menu of online sessions and project work, with a proportion of students also being given access to mentoring. With no cap on the number of students participating, we can maximise the number and diversity of young people able to take part, enabling us to develop a larger and more diverse pool of future talent. After completing the virtual work experience, those who are most certain of their wish to pursue a career within the Met Office or broader Civil Service will then be able to apply for a limited number of more in-depth in-person work experience opportunities. Participating students will also be given application guidance and details of Early Careers opportunities.

So, back to that chocolate biscuit you were reaching out for while tucked into the sofa. You may not have considered how the Met Office helped transport that biscuit to your local shop, involving the expertise of people like Tess and Nick.

Moving foodstuffs around the UK and beyond is not a simple business, with firms needing to transport the right products to the right places at the right time, while maintaining quality. When transporting chocolate-covered biscuits between factory and shop, the last thing the businesses involved want is for them to melt on the journey due to hot weather, but transporting goods in climate-controlled vehicles all year round is not cost- or carbon-efficient. This is where the Met Office’s Business team comes in. Using data generated from the instruments installed and maintained by our engineering team, our operational meteorologists are able to provide the necessary forecasts which our Business team supplies to chocolate biscuit production and retail firms in the form of reports. They can then use these reports to decide what kind of transportation is needed to ensure the chocolate biscuits are on the shelf when we want them, and not stuck together in a chocolatey mass inside a lorry – providing you with the perfect chocolate-covered biscuit to accompany your cup of tea as you shelter from the winter weather outside.

Operational meteorologist: you work to produce and communicate forecasts used to help keep people safe and assist organisations in making their own business decisions.

Scientist in weather science or observations: you collaborate with other researchers to further our understanding across meteorological disciplines.

Senior software developer: you support and develop systems that provide real-time data to operational Numerical Weather Prediction, products and research.

Observations engineer: you ensure we can collect highquality observational data from land and sea and high up into our atmosphere.

Climate scientist: you maintain our vital datasets, contribute to the development of climate models and projections, and work with industry to create new climate services.

“We are rolling out a virtual work experience programme.”

Tornadic waterspout in Barcelona; a column of rotating air extends downwards from the cloud and touches the water surface. © Carlos Castillejo Balsera, RMetS WPOTY 2022 finalist

Weather and climate information for a successful global energy transition

Professor Dr Alberto Troccoli, Managing Director, World Energy & Meteorology Council

The global energy transition is an ongoing process that started about a decade ago and aims to shift the world’s energy systems away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy generation such as solar, wind, and hydro power. Given the energy sector is one of the main emitters of greenhouse gases, as it accounts for about 75% of total emissions, it must therefore also be a key actor in trying to avert the ever-worsening damages caused by the impacts of climate change, in line with the decarbonisation targets stipulated by the 2015 Paris Agreement, and successive objectives such as the net zero emission target.

As the world continues to move towards a more renewable energy future, the crucial role of weather and climate information in supporting the energy transition and its decarbonisation cannot be overstated. For example, the generation of solar and wind power is highly dependent on weather conditions, such as solar radiation and wind speeds. Accurate weather forecasting and climate modelling can and does help energy companies and utilities predict the amount of power that will be generated by these systems and plan accordingly. This allows them to better manage the integration of variable renewable energy sources into the grid, and reduce the need for fossil fuel-based power generation as a backup. In addition to helping optimize the operation of renewable energy systems, weather and climate data can also play an important role in the planning and development of new renewable energy projects. For example, wind and solar resource mapping can help identify the most suitable locations for wind and solar farms, while climate projections can help inform decisions about the type and size of renewable energy systems that should be installed. As part of the planning phase, weather and climate information is also key in assessing the resilience of energy systems, which need to be strengthened to ensure continuity of supply and to mitigate damages to infrastructure by withstanding extreme weather events, such as high winds and heavy rain. Weather and climate information, more generally referred to as weather and climate services, can also play an important role in the development of energy storage systems, which are critical to the success of the global energy transition. Energy storage systems, such as batteries and pumped hydro, can help smooth out the fluctuations in power generation from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, and ensure that there is always a reliable supply of power available. However, the performance and longevity of these storage systems can be affected by weather conditions, such as temperature and humidity. Accurate weather and climate information can therefore help energy companies and utilities design and operate these systems in a way that maximizes their efficiency and extends their lifespan.

Another very important area where weather and climate data can be applied to optimize the global energy transition is in the field of energy efficiency. Weather and climate information can be used to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, transportation systems, and industrial processes. For example, by incorporating weather data into building

energy models, architects and engineers can design buildings that are better insulated and more energy-efficient, which can help reduce the amount of energy needed to heat and cool them. Similarly, by incorporating weather and climate data into transportation systems, such as electric vehicles and public transportation, energy companies and governments can optimize the energy consumption of these systems, which can help reduce the overall energy demand.

In summary, the global energy transition is a complex and challenging process that requires, in addition to social and other technological advancements, the application of accurate weather and climate information to boost the chances of its success. And given the scale of the process, the wide international community in its various facets, therefore governments, research and business communities, all need to do their part. Importantly, from the weather and climate service side, activities have been growing and strengthening considerably in the past two decades, also with the support of programmes such as Copernicus in Europe, making this field sufficiently mature and ready to support the global energy transition.

FURTHER READING

2022 State of Climate Services: Energy (WMO, public.wmo. int/en/our-mandate/climate/state-of-climate-services-report)

Image by NOAA from Unsplash.

“Weather and climate data can be applied to optimize the global energy transition.”

Weather and climate services, and net zero energy transition

Richaihu Wu, World Meteorological Organization

In 2017, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) initiated a new programme to support countries and partners with user-driven climate services for the energy sector (mostly the electricity component of the sector), especially for increasing resilience, accelerating renewable energy deployment, and adopting energy efficiency measures. Since then, the world race to achieve net zero carbon emissions by the middle of the 21st century has increased the pace.

For the energy sector, achieving net zero emissions requires a rapid decarbonisation of the energy system (generation, infrastructure, transport, etc) with much of the replacement capacity being variable renewable energy. As a result, the energy sector has recently begun an epochal infrastructure, technological and societal transformation. In this context, weather and climate services for energy are indispensable enablers for an effective and timely energy transformation.

With an ever-growing annual global energy demand – which saw an increase of about 30% in the past ten years – expanding energy systems are increasingly exposed to the vagaries of weather and climate. Electrical distribution and transmission systems, including for traditional energy sources, are also severely affected by extreme weather and climate events. Improved decision making that considers weather and climate information can considerably increase the resilience of energy systems.

From an energy sector user perspective there are several areas served by weather and climate services:

• characterisation of past weather or climate events using historical data; it provides a baseline, or first order approximation, of the current risks and opportunities, and thus it is key to manage the energy production and distribution at present;

• nowcasting or short-term weather forecasts for load balancing by maximising the usable component of the generated power;

• sub-seasonal to seasonal climate forecasting for maintenance of infrastructure, and resource and risk management purposes;

• decadal climate forecasting for multi-year resource risk management; these forecasts effectively extend the seasonal forecast range to typically ten years ahead, thus allowing us to have a longer risk assessment horizon;

• multi-decadal climate projections for infrastructure risk assessment, planning and design purposes; this includes providing authoritative data on possible evolution of climate considering different emission scenarios, including those aligned with policies. With high-resolution, high-quality climate and weather information, energy sectors can save money and reduce errors in the renewable energy generation process. For example, using reanalysis data, the error in wind forecasts has been reduced by 3%–4%. Sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasts are used to reduce the risks involved in operating renewable energy systems and increase the investments in renewable energy. Weather and climate data are used to develop decision support tools to provide information on wind, solar and hydropower generation capacity and energy demand expected over the coming weeks and months, thus helping clean-energy companies to make better decisions and provide better services to their customers.

There is a strong need to further develop collaborative approaches between weather, climate and energy, which are still too fragmented. More effective weather and climate services will not only contribute to creating attractive market conditions to scale-up renewable energy infrastructure, but they will also promote clean energy system efficiency and climate resilience. Increased, sustained investments in such services, supported by recognition of the need for such services through enhanced policies, are required to achieve this.

WMO will soon launch a new document titled Integrated Weather and Climate Services in Support of Net Zero Energy Transition, which is compiled under the aegis of the WMO Study Group for Integrated Energy Services (SG-ENE). The SG-ENE, established in 2020, has as its main purpose to support the WMO members and relevant stakeholders to create and sustain services delivery for the energy sector, as well as to develop partnerships for WMO to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goal 7, Affordable and Clean Energy, and the Paris Agreement.

2022 State of Climate Services: Energy (WMO, public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/climate/state-of-climate-services-report)

“Expanding energy systems are increasingly exposed to the vagaries of weather and climate.”

Meteorology: a global issue on the global stage

Paterson

Like the ripples on the surface of a lake, the weather we experience each day is a combination of many waves originating from far and wide. Some are driven by slowly evolving disturbances, like the El Niño Southern Oscillation; others, like Rossby waves, shape the day-to-day kinks of the jet stream, steering and modulating high and low pressure systems. Accurately forecasting next week’s weather and water resources requires consistent global cooperation to monitor and model these factors so we can predict the future state of the lake’s ripples.

As such, international cooperation at a global scale has been a key part of meteorology and hydrology for over 150 years, with the creation of the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) in 1873. The IMO evolved into the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1950, and became the United Nations’ specialized agency for weather, climate and water in 1951. It has a membership of 193 Member States and Territories represented by the Directors of each country’s National Meteorological and Hydrological Service (NMHS). WMO, headquartered in Geneva, is the home of international cooperation on meteorological and hydrological science, standards, data exchange, services and NMHS development. The United Nations (UN), headquartered in New York, is the home of international cooperation more generally on a political level – on social, cultural, humanitarian, development, security and economic affairs. Many of these global issues have a weather, climate or water connection, and that is why WMO has a small UN Affairs office at UNHQ in New York.

Our role is to represent the scientific and technical work and priorities of WMO Members in the discourse at UNHQ. Our job is to be an authoritative voice and to show how weather, climate and water science and services can provide solutions to the global problems being discussed. So, what kind of global problems are discussed at the UN and how does the WMO help to address them?

Humanitarian crises are regularly discussed as part of the UN’s Economic and Social Council, including the current drought crisis in East Africa caused by four consecutive failed rainy seasons. Seasonal and medium range forecasts from national weather agencies can be used to warn the international community so they can prepare for such disasters. With adequate warning, humanitarians can trigger forecast-based financing, allowing food, water and droughtresistant seeds to be distributed long before the rains fail. This helps affected communities to better manage risks and minimize losses.

Questions of sustainable development are also agreed at UNHQ, like deciding how countries should collaborate to help cities to meet future demands from urbanization, growing populations, rising inequalities, environmental degradation and climate change, whilst harnessing benefits from scientific and technological advances. In these talks, WMO promotes greater collaboration on globally connected urban air quality observing networks to help monitor and manage air pollution. We also highlight connections with urban data strategies so emerging data collection methods, like citizen science and mobile phone data extraction, can be used to inform urbanscale weather or flood warning services.

In March 2023, the UN in New York will host a global UN Water Conference – the first of its kind in over 45 years –where governments will come together to agree actions to achieve access to safe water and sanitation for all. WMO is working to make sure conference outcomes include a commitment on the international exchange of hydrological data, in interoperable formats, to enable improved flood and drought forecasting so all countries can better manage their water resources.

The UN in New York is also the home of the UN Secretariat, including the Secretary-General (SG), António Guterres.

The WMO office supports the SG’s Climate Action Team and speechwriting unit with the latest evidence on how our climate is changing, to support the SG’s calls to world leaders to take urgent climate action.

Indeed, the close relationship between the WMO and UN SG’s offices laid the basis of Mr Guterres’ March 2022 announcement of a global goal to ensure every person on Earth is protected by early warning systems within five years. This call has led to an acceleration of commitments from countries to further enhance meteorological and hydrological early warning services to achieve global coverage by 2027, helping society to prepare and adapt for severe weather and climate shocks.

In conclusion, the meteorological and hydrological community provide vital support for international agreements on climate action, water, disaster risk reduction, food security and sustainable development. This is needed now more than ever before in view of the wide range of challenges we confront.

The global issues discussed at the UN in New York are wide and formidable. Through our small WMO New York team, we aim to ensure the voices of the weather, climate and water communities are part of those conversations, and provide reliable and scientific-based solutions to help tackle the world’s problems.

“Many of these global issues have a weather, climate or water connection.”

Laura

, WMO Representative to the United Nations in New York; Clare Nullis, WMO Media Officer

Solar halo over Adelaide Island, Antarctica; haloes occur when the light is refracted or reflected by ice crystals.

© Thomas Chitson, RMetS WPOTY 2022 finalist

Met Office science and technology

Felicity Liggins, Education Outreach and External Training Manager, Met Office

Since our foundation in 1854, the Met Office has pioneered the science of meteorology and its application. To this day, we continue to push the boundaries of science and technology, so that we can meet the demands of today and the future.

The early days of the Met Office built on Robert FitzRoy’s scientific ingenuity, but forecasting techniques took a great leap forward thanks to Met Office scientist Lewis Fry Richardson. In 1913, before the outbreak of WWI, Richardson was in charge of the Met Office’s Eskdalemuir Observatory in Scotland. While there, he started developing ideas on weather forecasting using mathematical methods. He believed the approach used at the time, where forecasters matched observations of current weather with patterns in past weather records to predict what might happen next, could be bettered by using a mathematical approach rather than past trends. When war broke out, Richardson left the Met Office to become an ambulance driver. However, he continued his work during this challenging time. He created a past-forecast for central Europe, taking weather observations made at the time and then applying mathematical principles to determine what the weather might be six hours ahead. To do this, he created a grid across the geographical area and solved equations to make his forecast. It wasn’t correct due to the limitations with the data, and it did take him more than six weeks to produce the forecast, but he wasn’t deterred.

Richardson rejoined the Met Office in 1920, and then just two years later published his now famous book, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process Richardson’s foresight was remarkable, and his approach of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) started to become a practical reality using electronic computers after World War II. The first experimental NWP forecast in the UK using a computer was in 1952, but it was not until 1965 that operational computer forecasts were produced.

Since then, advances in computing technology, and our scientific understanding, have continued to have a significant influence on our forecasting processes. In April 2022 we announced the latest evolution in our ability to forecast our weather and climate: a

multimillion-pound agreement with Microsoft for the provision of a new supercomputing capability, expected to be the world’s most advanced dedicated to weather and climate, plus it will operate on 100% renewable energy. We still use a grid as Lewis Fry Richardson did, but ours are now at far higher resolutions. In the same way a higher pixel count on a digital photograph gives a better picture of your subject, a higher resolution computer model can better resolve smallscale features such as convective storms which, although limited in geographic area, can be highly impactful weather events. A high-performing supercomputer also allows us to look out much further in time than the six hours of Richardson’s original prediction, with detailed forecasts up to seven days ahead, and other products extending the outlook to seasonal timescales.

A further evolution of Richardson’s approach is to run our computer model not just once, but many times to create ‘an ensemble’. As our atmosphere is a chaotic system, very small errors in the representation of its initial state in our model can lead to large errors in the forecast. This means that we can never create a perfect forecast system because we can never observe every detail of the atmosphere’s initial state. To test how these small differences in the initial conditions may affect the outcome of the forecast, our model is run multiple times creating an ensemble. By comparing these different forecasts, the forecaster can decide how likely a particular weather event will be. If the forecasts vary a lot then the forecaster knows that there is a lot of uncertainty about what the weather will actually do, but if the forecasts are all very similar they will have more confidence in predicting a particular event.

These advances in the science and technology underpinning our forecasting services enable us to produce detailed forecasts for the UK and beyond which can be used by many different customers, from governments to the military, from commercial organisations to civil protection agencies, from industry to people like you. Our aim is to help you stay safe and thrive, and our world-leading science and technology are at the heart of this vision, but we can’t do it without a whole range of people who are experts in weather science, operational meteorology, software, technology and engineering.

Opened in 1990, the climate research section of the Met Office, the Hadley Centre, was set up to explore whether we could predict the future changes in our climate, and the potential consequences of these changes. Met Office climate scientists seek to make predictions and projections about the potential future state of our climate and the impacts the changes may have, feeding in to the IPCC processes.

We offer a number of apprenticeships across our business at a variety of levels, and we will continue to grow the number we offer. Search ‘Met Office apprenticeships’ to find out more.

“Forecasting techniques took a great leap forward thanks to Met Office scientist Lewis Fry Richardson.”

How the Royal Meteorological Society is engaging industry with

Hannah Bloomfield, Matt Wright and Daniel Skinner, Royal Meteorological Society

Extreme weather made the headlines throughout 2022: from devastating floods in Pakistan and West Africa, to heatwaves across Asia and central Europe, and Hurricane Ian in the United States. Such extreme weather events cause billions of pounds of damage and large numbers of deaths and are set to become more frequent due to climate change. This may sound quite terrifying, but the good news is that industries are starting to respond to these new challenges and are working with organisations such as the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS, www.rmets.org) to upskill their teams in climate science. To help everyone meet ambitious net-zero targets, there needs to be collaboration across specialist sectors, and fast. This partnership between industry and the weather and climate community is critical to help adapt to our changing climate and mitigate further climate change.

As the professional body for weather and climate, RMetS aims to advance the understanding and awareness of the science of meteorology. With a membership base of 3,000, the Society also collaborates with science and communication partners, which include academics and industry specialists. One industry group that relies heavily on weather and climate information is the insurance sector.

Why does the insurance industry care about the weather?

Insurance is a safeguard against the risk of bad things happening, such as damage or theft. Asset insurance (eg, buildings and content insurance) contains several weatherrelated hazards, which is where RMetS can support the sector.

Across Europe, most of the risks our homes are exposed to occur in winter, such as extreme precipitation, high winds, snowfall, large hail, lightning and extreme cold. However, it is becoming more common to see heightened risks during summer weather, such as heatwaves, prolonged drought and even urban wildfires. In other parts of the world, you may also require specialist insurance against tropical cyclones, tornados, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions or earthquakes if you live in an area particularly prone to these events.

The risk to a particular structure is usually calculated based on a combination of three components:

• hazard: a potentially destructive physical phenomenon;

• exposure: the location, attributes and value of assets that could be affected by a threat;

• vulnerability: the likelihood that assets will be negatively impacted when exposed to a hazard.

Insurance companies model the risk that a set of assets is exposed to using catastrophe models. Computer programs mathematically represent the characteristics of very extreme events, such as the natural catastrophes described above, or other disasters including pandemics and cyber incidents. Within these models, there will be weather-dependent models of the physical hazards as well as data on the exposure and vulnerability of the assets (normally provided by the engineering community). Academic papers, data and state-

of-the-art research on the type, duration and frequency of extreme weather events are therefore critical to the insurance sector for accurate models.

Traditionally these catastrophe models focused on characterising rare but severe weather events based on historical weather information, which makes sense as you generally only purchase an insurance contract for the year ahead. However, with our ever-changing climate, this stationary view of hazards is no longer appropriate, as we regularly see record-breaking extreme weather events in our rapidly changing climate. A wealth of new science is now required by insurance companies on the impact of climate change on their hazards of interest.

As well as the potential risk to assets as objects, we must not forget that extreme weather can also negatively impact human health. The main influences here, such as extreme cold or heat, particularly affect elderly populations. In developing regions, climate change will also result in waterborne diseases like typhoid or cholera becoming more prevalent.

These extreme meteorological hazards rarely happen in isolation, and there is a growing body of meteorological research around compound weather events, ranging from extreme wind-flood events, often associated with big storms or hurricanes, to compound heatwave-drought-wildfire events, such as seen recently across California. This compound events research is important for the insurance sector as they tend to consider their hazards in isolation (eg, a single model for winds and a single model for flooding), but compounding between hazards has the potential to alter the losses experienced.

RMetS is working with academic experts and insurance practitioners to help tackle some of the key issues currently facing the insurance sector, providing access to the most upto-date learning and relevant academic research. We can also support the industry in encouraging better use of climate data for hazard modelling, and influence the academic research agenda to consider the key challenges for the insurance industry. And finally, we are looking to encourage new physical science graduates into the insurance sector. Throughout 2023, several events will be held to help with these challenges, including a Research Paper showcase, an Early Career focused networking event, and a Research Agenda setting meeting with key academics. More details on events and updates on this work will be available at www. rmets.org over the coming year.

Energy sector

In the past year, we have witnessed how weather and climate information is used extensively in the energy sector, and

Hannah Bloomfield is a Royal Meteorological Society Science Engagement Fellow and Research Associate at the University of Bristol, working for the UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment. Matt Wright is a Royal Meteorological Society Science Engagement Fellow at the University of Oxford. Daniel Skinner is a Royal Meteorological Society Science Engagement Fellow at the University of East Anglia.

“A wealth of new science is now required by insurance companies on the impact of climate change.”

with weather and climate science

how increasingly vital this information is as society shifts to generating more electricity from weather-dependent renewable sources. These uses range from energy traders using short-term forecasts to predict the next hour’s gas prices to energy producers analysing seasonal forecasts to predict consumer energy supply and demand a few months in advance and to plan new renewable and traditional power plants over the next 50 years. RMetS helps people in the energy sector enhance their work by accessing and using the latest weather and climate information advances and wants to help meteorologists within energy companies feel supported in their vital work through membership of the Society.

The Energy Special Interest Group (SIG) was founded in September 2022 drawn from government, academia and the private sector. RMetS acts as a bridge between weather/ climate academics and energy sector professionals by facilitating knowledge exchange, demystifying meteorological terminology and data, and providing networking opportunities. The SIG’s first event was a huge success, with over 200 attendees discussing how energy professionals use seasonal forecasts. The Society will build on this interest as we continue to engage with the energy sector.

Supporting youth and early careers

Over recent years, young people have become a key part of the discussion and influence around weather and climate. Their passion and enthusiasm are helping to drive policy and public opinion, which in turn also directly affects the changes to the insurance and energy sectors. Of course, these same young people form the future of these industries and are our future climate scientists and researchers. Engaging with them in a meaningful way at the start of their career and providing them with the support they need is essential to ensure future progress.

To this end, the Youth and Early Careers Special Interest Group was formed in October 2022 to represent students and young meteorologists within academia and professional practice. As well as hosting specific events and networking opportunities, the group is also acting as an advisory body to help guide the Society’s strategy and priorities in supporting this important group of members and potential members. Much of the group’s early work has centred on reviewing how we engage with young people. However, we hope to begin our public-facing activities with events and other projects in the coming months.

Want to get involved?

If any of these new special interest groups are of interest to you, there is

more information available on the RMetS website at www.rmets.org/specialinterest-groups. We’re always keen to involve new voices in these discussions, and engagement with the wider physical sciences is key to helping RMetS continue to support the advancement of climate science and support professionals working in sectors affected by weather and climate.

If you think a career in meteorology could be the right path for you, check out the resources available on the RMetS website at www.rmets.org/careers. And, if you want to become a member of RMetS, no matter what your background or level of interest, from enthusiast to academic or professional, we would love to hear from you: see www.rmets.org/membership for details.

“Young people have become a key part of the discussion and influence around weather and climate.”

Solitude, Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia. © Tamás Kusza, RMetS WPOTY 2022 finalist

The uncertain future of the Himalaya

Dr Shaktiman Singh, Lecturer, School of Geosciences, University of Aberdeen

Meteorological observations from mountainous regions form the basis to develop an understanding about glaciohydrological processes and the associated implications due to our changing climate. The Himalaya is the world’s highest mountain range, with enormous freshwater storage in the cryosphere, wetlands, and groundwater. Glacier and seasonal snow derived meltwater provide significant inputs to the major rivers in the region, especially during the drier season. This supply of water supports a growing population of around 1.3 billion. The fate of these water resources in the Himalaya depends on the changing climate. We can assess how this water source is changing by long-term observation of local meteorological variables that drive the exchange of energy and mass at the snow and glacier surface. The climate varies largely in different parts of the Himalaya, with the eastern side dominated by precipitation from south-east summer monsoon and the Westerlies (originating in the Mediterranean) on the western side. Because of this regional variability it is difficult to discern any general patterns for the Himalaya and therefore predict, with any degree of confidence, the impact of climate on this valuable water source.

The glaciers and seasonal snow cover are responding rapidly to ongoing climate warming, which is driving high snow ablation rates and accumulation processes, due to an increase in the proportion of liquid vs solid precipitation. Himalayan glaciers have lost mass at an accelerating rate in recent decades, resulting in a projected increase in annual and dry-season river streamflow until the 2050s (peak runoff), followed by an abrupt decrease as glaciers continue to shrink and disappear. The increasing contribution from cryosphere-derived runoff, coupled with more extreme precipitation events, is driving a rise in the magnitude and frequency of peak discharge events and natural hazards such as avalanches (snow-ice-rock mixtures), flash floods, landslides, and glacial lake outburst floods. However, due to a lack of continuous meteorological observations leading

to ambiguities related to future climate projections and the need for improved understanding of the glacio-hydrological response to climate change, the uncertainties associated with existing hazard prediction and projections have realworld implications. Although in-situ observations are crucial for reducing the level of uncertainty, recent developments in availability of freely available remotely sensed data and the reanalysis of meteorological data provide an opportunity to develop a more nuanced understanding of the changing climate.

The hostile nature of the Himalaya compounds the collection of data. The inaccessibility, terrain and extreme environmental conditions are the primary hindrance behind installation and efficient maintenance of meteorological stations, limiting data to only sporadic observations. Even with the records that are available, topography makes it difficult to extrapolate data across a wider area to interpret or predict long-term climate signals. The quality of the available data is an additional major concern due to the non-uniformity of the sensors and methods used. Another problem is data sharing, including for public consumption, by the government and non-government agencies, hindered by a contentious geopolitical situation in the region. It has restricted collaborations with international research groups, and hampered attempts to develop regionally acceptable policies and to resolve the lack of certainty in current projections of future water sources and supplies.

The Himalaya is particularly vulnerable to a changing climate because of the demands placed on it by the resident population, and its dependence on the ecosystem services, in a region that has sensitive physiographic features, important biodiversity and high endemism. The problems associated with meteorological observations make it difficult to develop a resilience framework and strategy for climate change adaptation. There is an urgent need to initiate a systematic approach to create long-term meteorological data across the Himalaya, with the involvement of local and national governments and non-government organisations like International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) indigenous marginalised communities. Some nationallevel initiatives are already being developed, for example the National Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem (NMSHE) of the Government of India, which facilitates networking of knowledge institutions and capacity building for young researchers. There is also an international commitment from countries outside the Himalayan region; for example, during COP26 in Glasgow, the UK announced a new support of £274 million to Climate Action for a Resilient Asia (CARA), a seven-year programme to strengthen climate change resilience in Asia. All these commitments and initiatives require a cross-boundary coordination and appropriate and strategic scientific research on the ground in Himalaya.

An automatic weather station installed near a debris-covered glacier in Western Himalaya.

“Himalayan glaciers have lost mass at an accelerating rate in recent decades.”

Mountain weather

Liz Bentley, Chief Executive, Royal Meteorological Society

Every year millions of people head up into the mountains to trek, ski, and enjoy the wonders of the mountain scenery. However, for some the experience isn’t so pleasant, as they venture onto the mountain unaware of the weather they may meet. Some people will underestimate the severity of mountain weather, be unaware of the mountain conditions, or leave decisions on the weather too late when on the mountainside. As a result, every year, even in the UK, people die on the mountains as a consequence of the weather.

Something as simple as cloud cover can hugely impact climbing to the top of a mountain. Mountain peaks are often shrouded in clouds. As you walk up into that cloud, visibility rapidly decreases, which can result in people getting lost. Clouds are formed by the condensation of water vapour in rising air. In the UK, the cloud base (the bottom of the clouds) can be below 1,000m, so low that much of the time the clouds cover the mountain tops. Cloud cover on the mountains is particularly common in the west of the UK, where the moist air blows in from the Atlantic. Some clouds can be supercooled; that is, the water remains a liquid even when the temperature is below freezing (0°C). These supercooled water droplets freeze when they hit solid objects such as fences and even people. The ice can build up into a thick layer, known as rime, which can cause as much difficulty for walkers as lying snow.

Rain and snow falling over mountains tends to be heavier and longer lasting than over nearby low-lying areas. The windward side of a mountain tends to be wetter than the leeward, more sheltered side of the mountain. This is because the air is forced to rise over the mountains, causing the air to cool as it rises and condensing the water vapour from a gas to liquid water droplets. If the temperature is low enough, the precipitation will fall as snow rather than rain, and above the snow line – the boundary between a snow-covered and snow-free surface – the snow will settle and provide long-lasting snow cover. Snow combined with strong winds can lead to blizzards and very poor visibility, known as a ‘whiteout’, which can be life-threatening on a mountain top. Warm clothing on the top of mountains is definitely needed.

The higher up the mountain we climb, the colder and windier it usually gets and the wind chill factor increases. The wind chill factor takes into account the wind speed and humidity to provide a ‘feels like’ temperature of how cold it feels on the human skin. On the Munros, Scottish mountains with tops above 3,000m, it can be 10°C cooler at the top of the mountain compared to the valley bottom below. In fact, air can cool by 6°C in every 1,000m of altitude and sometimes as much as 10°C, and that’s before you factor in the wind chill.

A recent article published in Review of Geophysics (doi.org/ 10.1029/2020RG000730) looks at how climate change is impacting mountain weather. The report states that mountains have been warming around 25% to 50% faster than the global mean since around 1950. It also says that there is increasing evidence that mountain precipitation, caused by rising air up mountain slopes, is not as enhanced as it was in the past. Although precipitation is generally increasing in many mountain regions, it is not increasing as fast as expected, given a warmer atmosphere. Finally, there has been a change in precipitation type, with snow increasingly falling more as rain over recent decades.

These changes in temperature and precipitation have been detrimental to snow, ice, and glaciers, with nearly all mountain glaciers receding worldwide. This has accelerated in many regions in the past two to three decades. There has also been an uphill migration of climate zones, causing many species and their associated habitats to move upslope with it. In many parts of the world, mountains provide freshwater supplies to approximately 1.6 billion people. As our climate changes, these once-reliable water supplies are disappearing. Finally, as snow is replaced by rain, we see more mountain flash-flooding events and associated hazards such as landslides, which are likely to become more frequent.

“Mountains have been warming around 25% to 50% faster than the global mean since around 1950.”

© Matthew James Turner, Royal Meteorological Society WPOTY entry 2022.

A meteorological life

Marjory Roy, RSGS member and Met Office retiree

I was born and bred in Edinburgh, but my parents came from two different parts of Scotland. My mother was from Angus and my father was from the southwest. I always say I’m a cross between an Aberdeen Angus and a Belted Galloway.

I’d always been involved in outdoor activities. My family were outdoors a lot of the time, and when my brother was at university he did a course in meteorology. Then when I was looking for a subject to write about in school, he said, why not do meteorology? So that was my first interest. When I was at university, one of the subjects you could take for your final honours was meteorology. Then, after I graduated, I did a Master of Science on atmospheric ozone, long before it was a topic that was of great interest and before they discovered the ozone hole.

When I left university, I was recruited to the Met Office and joined the climate research branch. I went on to spend three years doing the forecasting, before I joined the agricultural meteorology branch where I was seconded to the Grassland Research Institute. After about four years, I was eventually posted to Edinburgh to become Superintendent of Met Office Edinburgh, the climatological office for Scotland, responsible for the running of the climatological network in Scotland and the quality control of the data. Its enquiry section answered requests for weather information for Scotland, such as insurance claims and planning data.

When I first joined the Met Office, they were just really at the beginning stages of a numerical weather prediction, and of course it’s gone from strength to strength. There used to be more emphasis on short-period forecasting. Then, as they discovered that climate change was so important, the emphasis changed completely, and interest in the old data has become so much greater.

Geography, particularly the mapping side of geography, interacts tremendously with meteorology. One of the first things you do in

meteorology is you work with maps, you work with charts. You’re also very much aware of the effects of land and sea distribution and mountains on the weather. For example, off the coast of North America, particularly in the winter, the contrast between the cold of the land and the warmth of the sea is a breeding ground for depressions which will, to a large extent, cross the Atlantic.

My parents used to go to RSGS lectures, so I was always aware of the Society. I gave a talk to RSGS on mountain weather when I was still in charge of the Edinburgh Met Office, and several more talks on the Ben Nevis Observatory. I visited Antarctica with the RSGS group that went in connection with the centenary of the Scotia expedition. It was very interesting – we discovered a new uncharted rock in King Harkins Bay in South Georgia – but unfortunately that particular trip had to be cut short and we had to go back to Ushuaia because the weather was so bad. But two years later we all went again and we had absolutely brilliant weather down on the west side of Antarctica. I also went on the same ship later around Svalbard. It was really after the Scotia expedition that I was inspired to join RSGS, plus the fact it was a chance to meet up with some of the people that I met on the expedition.

I think RSGS does well to cover such an interesting variety of subjects. It’s quite good that you focus on issues that are perhaps a bit more controversial or about things that people are less aware of. I think you explore important subjects that people might not have considered. One of the things with young people is to get them involved with projects that will make a difference, especially with things like renewable energy. It’s important for young people to get involved with the positive side of what you can do. And for adults as well, we need to invest in these types of developments, because the climate change scenario provides a lot of possibilities as well as just the negativities.

“The mapping side of geography interacts tremendously with meteorology.”

Marjory Roy is the author of The Weathermen of Ben Nevis 1883–1904

Days of heavy rain brought by Storm Dennis in February 2020 led to water cascading down the dam wall of Wet Sleddale reservoir, Shap, Cumbria. © Andrew McCaren, RMetS WPOTY 2022 finalist.

Snow patches in Scotland

Liz

On 7th October 2022, Iain Cameron, a UK snow patch expert, posted on Twitter: “So there we have it. It is confirmed that Scotland is snow-free yet again. The last patch, the Sphinx, disappeared sometime in the last 24 hours. The Sphinx has now vanished four times in the last six years, having done so only five times in the last 300 years.”

Iain Cameron and a team of volunteers have been exploring the Highlands for over 15 years, keeping an accurate record of snow patches across Scotland. The Scottish snow patch reports are published annually in the Royal Meteorological Society’s journal Weather, and have supported climate scientists in understanding how our changing climate impacts our landscape.

The annual snow patch reports have been published in Weather since 1997. These important climatological articles were first published by the late Dr Adam Watson, who started observing and recording snow patches in the Scottish Cairngorms around the late 1930s. Adam was a renowned ecologist, conservationist and mountaineer and meticulously recorded snow patches for many decades. In the 1970s, Adam developed a scientific method of snow-patch assessment and began a regular survey of the north-east Highlands. He would start surveying the mountains for snow patches each year from July onwards, repeating the study each month until the first significant snowfall, typically falling in October. Adam would record their size and mark their locations on a map.

These snow patch reports provide an important climatological record and are invaluable to scientists in measuring the impacts of climate change and monitoring these changes over many decades.

A snow patch is a partially compacted area of snow that is persistent for longer than the normal seasonal snow cover. Snow patches can either be seasonal, usually melting in late summer, or perennial, persisting for more than two years. Snow patches are typically found in sheltered spots where both the temperature and orographic conditions are favourable for the snow to survive.

Scotland’s longest-lasting snow patches are typically found in the highest parts of the Cairngorm Mountains and the vicinity of the highest mountain in the UK, Ben Nevis.

Some years the snow disappears completely in the Scottish mountains, as was the case in 2022. The first year recording the disappearance of all snow was in 1933. It was 26 years later, in 1959, before it happened again. However, in recent decades the frequency of years when Scotland’s snow patches completely disappear is accelerating, with snow-free years happening in 1996, 2003, 2006, 2017 and 2022.

Snow patches are often given names such as the Sphinx, named after the nearby climbing route located on the slopes of Braeriach in the Cairngorms National Park. The Sphinx is one of the UK’s most persistent snow patches, as it has only disappeared completely on nine occasions in the last 300 years. And 2022 is the fourth time in six years that the Sphinx has melted away completely. The increase in the disappearance rate is due to climate change and rising temperatures that increase the likelihood of snow-free years.

Snow is an important part of Earth’s ecosystem. The surface

of our planet has around 18 million square miles covered in snow each winter. The white surface reflects sunlight, helping to cool the planet. As our climate warms the snow cover reduces and darker coloured land is exposed to the sunlight, absorbing the sunlight and causing the land to heat up more than it would if it were covered by snow. This amplifies the warming effect. We can model snow cover in future decades using climate projections and historical temperature, precipitation and snow cover data. A study published in 2019 highlighted a decline in snow cover in the Cairngorm Mountains between 1969 and 2005. The overall decline in snow cover is projected to continue and accelerate in the future.

To learn more about the Scottish snow patches and keep up-to-date with the latest research and advances in weather and climate, become a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, where among the many benefits you will have unlimited access to a portfolio of eight leading journals. See the inside front cover for details of a special offer for readers of The Geographer

“These snow patch reports provide an important climatological record.”

Bentley, Chief Executive, Royal Meteorological Society

Atilla Kish measures the depth of old snow at Observatory Gully on Ben Nevis, 20th September 2020. © Iain Cameron

Iain Cameron’s tweet, 7th October 2022. © Iain Cameron

Dunfermline: Scotland’s eighth city, with some thoughts from

Kenneth Maclean FRSGS, RSGS Collections Team

recreational park and suggest innovative educational and cultural establishments. Significantly, his visionary report played a landmark role in recognising town planning as an acknowledged discipline, including Geddesian mantras of ‘survey, diagnosis, plan’ and ‘conservative surgery’, whereby worthwhile buildings were preserved for current and future use. Although Geddes’s 1904 report was not acted upon, mainly because of expense, less ambitious ideas were realised ultimately for Pittencrieff Park.

On 3rd October 2022, King Charles III conferred city status on Dunfermline. It was a salutary event for this famous royal burgh, now the nation’s eighth city; an opportunity to recall its old and new functions, as medieval Scotland’s capital and pre-Reformation religious centre, a significant textile town, a major service hub for west Fife, and a dormitory settlement for Edinburgh.

From Dunfermline’s recorded origins in the 11th century, interacting geographical and historical influences have fostered its evolving townscapes. These include:

• an advantageous location on the coastal fringe of south-west Fife, relatively secure from the ‘Auld Enemy’. Pioneer planner Patrick Geddes highlighted location as the key to its development: “we have the intersection of the two main roads, not only of Fife, but of the kingdom … and we understand … how ‘the king sate in Dunfermlyne toun’ not merely ‘drinkin the bluide-red wine’ but shrewdly settled at the exact strategic centre of Scotland.”

• a favourable site affording a defensible position for a fortification or ‘dun’, traditionally linked with Malcolm Canmore’s Tower in Pittencrieff Glen. Dunfermline is a hilly, south-facing settlement which initially expanded southwards over east–west trending ridges formed by glacial deposition. Later 20th-century expansion, such as from Pitcorthie to Rosyth, developed on a series of raised beach levels ascending from the Forth. Structurally, Dunfermline and district is underlain by Carboniferous strata rising upwards from Calciferous sandstone (a building stone, hence ‘the Auld Grey Toun’) through limestone to coal measures that fuelled industrial growth.

• chance, exemplified by Malcolm Canmore’s choice of Dunfermline as royal seat; his marriage to princess Margaret, and the town’s evolution as a significant ecclesiastical locus with its Benedictine abbey, royal mausoleum, and St Margaret’s shrine, a popular pilgrimage site; and the decision of Dunfermline-born Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) to purchase Pittencrieff Estate and fund public buildings through the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust.

Patrick Geddes and Dunfermline

In 1903, Patrick Geddes was commissioned by the Carnegie Trust to transform Pittencrieff Estate into a

Geddes coined neologisms, including ‘palaeotechnic’ and ‘neotechnic’ which marked old and new phases in industrial development. The former was based on coal and steam, “typified by waste of resources, smoke- and soot-covered cities, blighted landscapes, and stunted human lives.” The latter involved electricity and oil as potentially cleaner motive power, a return to nature, and the planning of cities. From Carnegie’s birth in 1835 to the present, Dunfermline transitioned between these stages.

Palaeotechnic Dunfermline

Throughout Dunfermline’s Victorian palaeotechnic era, textiles and coal mining were significant employers. Linen production dominated, especially world-renowned damaskpatterned tableware. Between 1700 and 1900, the industry evolved from cottage-based handicraft production to powerbased looms with factories sited on level land north and south of the medieval city core. Alongside related population growth, from 8,577 in 1851 to 25,250 in 1901, there emerged a densely populated townscape of mills (eg, the Pilmuir Works), dyeworks, bleach fields (eg, Abbey Park) and tall lums, intermingled with overcrowded, poor-quality housing, insanitary and lacking effective water supplies. Similar problems characterised the colliery rows in and around Dunfermline. Coal mining was initiated by the Abbey monks, and by the mid-19th century, pits such as at Wellwood and Townhill were exploiting deeper coal-bearing strata. By 1900, an expanded rail system had enhanced Dunfermline’s nodality, both within Fife and beyond, especially with the opening of the Forth Bridge in 1890, allowing quicker access to Edinburgh than the historic Queensferry passage. For many, conditions in Dunfermline were challenging, especially at times of economic depression, not least the ‘hungry twenties and thirties’. These years saw loss of markets, recession in coal-mining, and the rapid decline of the linen industry, albeit ameliorated from 1924 with silk manufacturing, including parachute production.

Neotechnic Dunfermline

Dunfermline’s historic mills and factories are disappearing; pit head machinery and bings are gone. Remaining buildings, however, not only constitute a valuable industrial heritage, but have been converted to commercial units or flats. Such relic landscapes are a form of sustainability of which Geddes approved: sustainability which, ideally, should characterise the planning of contemporary cities in the neotechnic era. In what ways has Dunfermline met Geddesian neotechnic notions?

Firstly, Dunfermline still benefits from Carnegie’s philanthropy, with assets, such as the library and art gallery, public baths and swimming pool (modernised within the Carnegie Leisure Centre), theatre and parks. The redesigned Pittencrieff Park with its formal gardens and Glen is a tangible tribute to Geddes’s awareness of nature’s

“In 1903, Patrick Geddes was commissioned by the Carnegie Trust to transform Pittencrieff Estate.”

Patrick Geddes

advantageous impact.

Secondly, mirroring nationwide spatial and structural changes in employment, new footloose industries (eg, electronics and light engineering) developed on peripheral industrial estates, as at Pitreavie, but, generally, Dunfermline’s employment scene is dominated by the service sector – education, council, health and retail work. Significant employers include Sky UK, CR Smith, Lloyds, Nationwide, and, since 2011, online retailer Amazon with its very extensive warehousing facility, well placed to facilitate fast delivery of goods. Geddes could not have envisaged the digital era, well exemplified by Amazon, but his neotechnic thinking involved ongoing adoption of new technology and cleaner energy.

Thirdly, housing quality improved. Municipal housing schemes were built, for instance at Townhill in the 1920s, and at Abbeyview after WW2; and private housing developed, such as on former farmland at Pitcorthie, from the 1960s. With rapid 21st-century population growth, from 39,229 (2001 Census) to 54,640 (2022 estimate), Dunfermline’s housing and retail parks continue to encroach greenfield space, especially east of the city, notably in the ever-expanding suburb of Duloch, flanked by the M90 motorway. Duloch’s growth reflects, firstly, Dunfermline’s nodality, enabling people travelling from Fife to work in south Fife and Edinburgh, thanks to the proximity of the M90, the Forth Bridge, Queensferry Crossing and nearby railway stations in Dunfermline and Inverkeithing; and, secondly, cheaper housing compared to the capital. Fourthly, basic to neotechnic thought was environmental education. For Geddes, promoting environmental awareness should begin at infancy, progressing throughout formal schooling. Doubtless he thoroughly approved of a series of innovative rail-based school excursions in the Forth Valley for Dunfermline’s school children from 1897 to 1900, led by Geddesian acolytes such as AJ Herbertson and financed by industrialist Henry Beveridge of St Leonard’s Linen Works. Such innovative fieldwork taught youngsters to observe, record and interpret Geddes’s interrelated triad of ‘place-folk-work’; a curricular methodology followed by adherents, notably Norman Johnson, headteacher in the 1930s–40s at McLean School and Commercial School, Dunfermline. For Geddes, such environmental education was the crucial element of a ‘true’ education; the basis of lifelong participation by folk in the re-planning of society on sustainable lines.

In Geddes’s 1904 report, he suggested that Dunfermline should have three books: one on its past, covering history and geography; one on its present, a social survey; and a third on its future, the city’s ‘book of hope’; not to be considered separately but synthesized. Noting that Dunfermline would expand, he accepted that it “cannot become a Glasgow or Edinburgh.” Rather, the hope for its successful future lay in continued fostering of civic pride, grounded in an eclectic environmental and historical awareness, and a recognition that “town planning is not merely place planning, nor even work planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk planning” – a civic challenge for the city authorities, community councils and citizens of Scotland’s eighth and latest city, surely a status of which Geddes would highly approve.

“Dunfermline still benefits from Carnegie’s philanthropy.”

Pittencrieff Park. Image from iStock.

Scotland’s weather and climate 1783–85: a time like no other

Professor Alastair Dawson and Dr Martin Kirkbride, University of Dundee

Reconstructing past weather using archived instrumental records and weather diaries has a significant role in providing an accurate understanding of natural climatic variability in pre-industrial times. The first reliable mercury thermometer was invented by Daniel Fahrenheit in 1714, and by the 1780s several daily instrumental records were kept in Scotland, mainly on lowland estates and in the New Town of Edinburgh. A few of these have been analysed in detail, but other valuable weather records undoubtedly remain to be studied.

The value of historical weather records is that they can be used to construct very highresolution time series of past weather from daily data. When combined with similar data from across Europe, they enable the reconstruction of regional weather patterns over wide areas. These can show the trajectory and intensity of specific cyclones associated with disastrous gales, or persistent blocking anticyclones which caused prolonged periods of intense winter cold or summer heatwaves, as exemplified by the pioneering work of Hubert Lamb, John Kington and others.

The explosion of scientific inquiry that accompanied the Scottish Enlightenment coincided with some notable climatic events within the socalled Little Ice Age. Foremost among these was a period of severe winters and hot summers following the enormous eruptions of the Laki fissure in Iceland, commencing in June 1783. Our understanding of this event exemplifies the scientific debate about the influence that major volcanic eruptions have had on the Earth’s climate.

The start of June 1783 was, for most Scots, beautiful and warm – not a cloud in the sky. People could forget their hardships for a few days. Those who were outdoors could savour the warmth of the sun. Of course, life was tough, hunger was never far away, and it was always a struggle to put food on the table, but the balmy weather could at least provide some respite. For many, there was the talk of a new life in the New World. The American War of Independence had ended and there had been a recent upsurge in the numbers of Scots boarding the emigration ships. But the weather and climate were about to change.

On 8th June, a volcanic eruption started along the Laki fissure in Iceland. In the following days, clouds of ash and sulphurous gas darkened the Icelandic skies. Apart from the volumes of ash entering the atmosphere, the amounts of sulphurous gas were exceptional: the most recent figures

place the amount of sulphur dioxide produced over the whole eruption period as around 122 megatons. In Iceland the effects were devastating, with the loss of most of the island’s cattle, ponies and sheep, as well as a fifth of the population. A committee was appointed in Copenhagen to devise means for relief for Iceland, and a plan was even debated of evacuating the population and resettling them in Denmark.

Across Scotland, 8th June 1783 was much like any other day. No one had any idea that a huge volcanic eruption had taken place in Iceland. Around a week later, there were indications in Scotland that something unusual had happened. In Edinburgh, Dr Pursell wrote in his diary that the sky had started to turn very dark. A few days later, he and other observers started to document a haze that had descended over the country. The anticyclone that had been in place throughout the summer of 1783 was big; in fact it covered most of Europe. As the sulphurous haze spread across central Europe, large numbers of people experienced a range of respiratory illnesses. The estimates of the number who died from the effects of the haze are wide-ranging, some suggesting a figure as high as 20,000 people in England alone. Almost nothing is known of the effects of such large quantities of sulphate gases in Scotland’s atmosphere, but there are faint clues. One of these is from the diary of Janet Burnet near Inverurie, who describes how the leaves of her crops during July turned yellow and withered. Another clue is how the year 1783 is known in Gaelic as the bliadhne na sneachda buidhe or the year of the yellow snow, a reference to sulphurous atmospheric precipitation.

The eruptions of Laki continued intermittently until February 1784 but were most intense during June and July 1783. Across Scotland there were numerous thunder and lightning storms. For example, the Scots Magazine reports how “on Wednesday, July 2nd the thunder was general, more or less, over almost all England and Scotland, for a course of near 600 miles. In Dumfriesshire it was heard about two o’clock in the afternoon, and continued till eight, with awful flashes of lightning, accompanied with amazing quantities of rain. In Alloa, the storm was uncommonly alarming in the evening. The lightning struck a woman, her daughter, a young boy, and a dog. The girl was scorched all over the body.” Similar lightning storms took place throughout July, although

“Large numbers of people experienced a range of respiratory illnesses.”

Weather diary entry for January 1784 by John Alvus, Chamberlain to the Duke of Buccleuch, Dalkeith, with various descriptions of snowfalls and snow depth.

diminishing in frequency and intensity during August. During 1783, people in Shetland were struggling to find food following a famine a year earlier. The crops had failed, much of the livestock had been used for food, while many people survived by eating whelks, limpets and a plentiful supply of herring. Matters were to deteriorate across much of Scotland as the winter of 1783–84 approached. It was to prove to be one of the coldest winters ever experienced in recent Scottish history. It was stormy also, with Peterhead and Wick just two of many harbours that were destroyed along the coast of eastern Scotland. Many descriptions tell of coastlines strewn with shipwrecks and vessels driven ashore.

The following winter of 1784–85 was no better. The Scots Magazine summarised, “this winter-season, from the first fall of snow on Oct 7th 1784 (till the start of April)… lasted 177 days, and, if about twelve days towards the end of January be excepted, the whole of this period was frosty or snowy, or both.” Temperatures in Edinburgh fell below freezing for approximately 120 days. Shetland continued to suffer, with ships loaded with oatmeal sent there from ports as far away as Newcastle. On one of the ships, 858 bushels of barley and six tonnes of oatmeal had been paid for by public subscription.

It was not until the summer of 1785 that people could seek some relief from the weather extremes. Numerous reports describe it as moderately warm and followed by a mild winter, damp conditions with little frost and snow. Scotland was beginning to emerge from a period of exceptional hardship. But the spectre of famine and hunger was going to take a long time to fade; indeed, the hunger faced by the poor throughout the latter decades of the 18th century never really went away. It has always been recognised that the exceptionally severe winters of 1783–84 and 1784–85 brought devastating effects on the people of Scotland. But it has never been understood why two such dramatically cold winters took place one after the other. One view is that they simply represented part of natural climatic variability, and the pattern of pressure systems which drew in the cold continental air was unrelated to the Laki eruptions. The alternative view, one which is generally supported by computer modelling, is that they were a direct consequence of the Laki eruptions. Perhaps we will never know for sure.

“Temperatures in Edinburgh fell below freezing for approximately 120 days.”

The diaries of Janet Burnet, near Inverurie, and Patrick Fea of the Isle of Sanday, Orkney, are among the earliest daily accounts of Scotland’s weather for the 18th century. Image by Jonny Glos from Unsplash.

"Solid blocks of ice flying around": the hazards of living at the

Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence

According to the Scottish meteorologist Alexander Buchan, in the late 1800s the fast-developing science of weather forecasting had a pressing need “to ascertain the course which storms follow, and the causes by which that course is determined, so that we may forecast… not only the certain approach of a storm, but the particular course that storm will take.”

With this aim in mind, the French astronomer Urbain le Verrier was publishing daily recordings of temperature, wind speed and atmospheric pressure from locations across Europe; but these were taken at sea level, and it was suggested that observations made simultaneously at different altitudes within a short geographical distance could reveal a great deal about changing conditions in higher sections of the atmosphere. What was needed, then, was a mountain that rose from sea level and had enough space at the summit for an observatory. In Britain, Ben Nevis fitted the bill exactly.

In 1880, while sufficient funds for the Ben Nevis Observatory were being sought by the Scottish Meteorological Society, a man named Clement Lindley Wragge made an extraordinary offer. He would ascend Ben Nevis every day from June until the end of October, taking readings from instruments which he would place at precise intervals all the way up to the summit, while his wife took simultaneous readings at sea level in Fort William.

Wragge’s daily routine involved setting off on horseback at 5.30am and riding up as far as Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe (the ‘Halfway Lochan’), where he left his horse and continued on foot. In his report, published in Nature in March 1883, he revealed that in blizzard conditions his hands “often became so numbed and swollen, and my paper so saturated that I had the utmost difficulty in… setting instruments and entering my observations.” In addition, his horse had a habit of wandering off, which meant that he had to run between instrument stations to reach them by the allotted time.

Although Wragge hired assistants, after two years of dedicated effort he must have been relieved to hear that a public appeal had raised enough money for a permanentlystaffed observatory to be constructed on the summit of Ben Nevis. This was officially opened on 17th October 1883, and shortly afterwards three resident meteorologists – the Superintendent, Robert Traill Omond, and his assistants Angus Rankin and John Duncan – prepared to face their first winter in one of the most inhospitable places in Britain. Six months’ worth of fuel and food had been brought up by pack ponies; enough, it was hoped, to last until fresh supplies could reach them in the spring. Despite their isolation, a specially-installed telegraph cable allowed them to send regular reports to the weather station in Fort William, and to exchange news with the outside world.

The meteorologists’ official duties involved taking hourly

readings around the clock from an array of instruments that were housed outdoors in Stevenson screens. During violent storms they had to rope themselves together for safety. One note in their logbook observes, “As soon as Mr Omond went outside… he was lifted off his feet and blown backwards against Mr Rankin who was knocked over. No observations for two hours.” Other entries are more succinct: “Notebook for observations torn in two and blown away.” “Rain gauge not found, probably blown over the North Cliff.” “Solid blocks of ice flying around.”

Snowdrifts often obliterated the instruments, but according to Robert Mossman, a subsequent assistant, a phenomenon of freezing rain known as ‘silver thaw’ caused the greatest havoc. He wrote, “A prolonged fall of silver thaw occasions considerable inconvenience to the observers; the rain freezes on their coats, gloves, and even on their faces.” Mossman also reported on the ‘great frost’ of 1895, which began in December 1894 and lasted for 54 days, bringing temperatures of 1.8° Fahrenheit (–16.7° Celsius). Thankfully the living quarters had a stove, but a special request for a bottle of whisky to be sent up was unfulfilled, which seems a trifle harsh in the circumstances.

In May 1895, a soon-to-be-famous figure in the field of polar exploration joined the Ben Nevis team: William Speirs Bruce. Freshly returned from an expedition to the Antarctic on board a Dundee whaling ship, Bruce was keen to be off again to the polar regions, and he believed that the extreme conditions on Ben Nevis would give him valuable experience. (He did indeed put it to excellent use when he led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition of 1902–04, and set up the first weather station in the Antarctic.)

During his time at the observatory, Bruce tried out a pair of skis that had been sent to him by his friend, WG Burn Murdoch. They had come from Norway, and Burn Murdoch claimed that they were the first skis ever imported into Scotland, but they nearly caused the untimely demise of their wearer. Experimenting on an icy slope near the summit, Bruce was alarmed to find himself shooting towards a precipice, beyond which lay a drop of some 500 feet. He quickly fell to the ground, dug his fingers into the ice, and managed to stop in the nick of time.

In summer, the well-worn pony track tempted increasing numbers of people to walk up Ben Nevis, and an enterprising Fort William hotelier named Robert Whyte set up a small hostelry next to the observatory, offering refreshments. The observatory staff complained that the visitors hindered their work, but in June 1895 they gave a warm welcome to the geologist Archibald Geikie, who had been surveying parts of

“He would ascend Ben Nevis every day from June until the end of October.”

Ben Nevis Observatory covered in rime.

Ben Nevis Observatory

the west coast and took the opportunity to spend a night on the Ben.

Geikie recalled that, on arriving at the summit, he was surprised to find William Speirs Bruce lying flat on a sheet of snow. Far from suffering another mishap with his skis, Bruce was, in fact, studying the hundreds of insects that had been carried up the mountain by warm air currents and were now chilling out, quite literally, on the snowfields at the top. Many of the specimens he collected are now housed in the National Museum of Scotland.

Clear weather blessed Geikie’s visit, and the following morning, with icicles hanging from the observatory windows, he admired the breathtaking spectacle of a cloud inversion. The tops of the highest mountains protruded from a vast sea of white mist, and with his geologist’s eye he saw “a phantom representation of how the Highlands would appear as a great archipelago, during a time of serious submergence… I descended again to the lower earth after an experience at the summit which would ever remain vivid in memory.”

As for the meteorologists’ original hope, that the observatory would help to predict the arrival of storms, it seems that definite progress was made. In 1890, Alexander Buchan wrote that “to this important inquiry Ben Nevis contributes invaluable data, with its observations of sudden, rapid, and often short-continued changes of temperature and humidity, many of which are strictly limited to the upper region of the mountain.”

Despite the meteorologists’ diligent work, insufficient funds forced the Ben Nevis Observatory to close in October 1904. The weather station that Bruce set up in the Antarctic fared much better, however. By the end of his expedition he had staffed the hut, which he named Omond House after Robert Traill Omond, with two of his own men (including Robert Mossman) and three Argentinian meteorologists. Now named Orcadas Base, it still maintains an unbroken record of observations.

Alexander Buchan was Secretary of the Scottish Meteorological Society for 47 years. He was an early member of RSGS, and edited Volume III (Atlas of Meteorology) of Bartholomew’s Physical Atlas (1899).

Clement Wragge moved to Australia in 1883 to continue his meteorological work. He is credited with starting the practice of naming cyclones after human and mythological figures.

William Speirs Bruce received the RSGS Gold Medal in 1904, and Robert Mossman was awarded the RSGS Silver Medal in 1905. Sir Archibald Geikie received the RSGS Livingstone Medal in 1905. WG Burn Murdoch was a Fellow of RSGS, later Council Member and Vice-President.

FURTHER READING

Geoffrey N Swinney (2002) William Speirs Bruce, the Ben Nevis Observatory, and Antarctic Meteorology (Scottish Geographical Magazine)

Alexander Buchan (1890) The Meteorology of Ben Nevis (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh)

Alexander Buchan & Robert Traill Omond (1902) The Meteorology of the Ben Nevis Observatories, Part II (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh)

Clement L Wragge (March 1883) The Ben Nevis Observatory (Nature)

Sir Archibald Geikie (1924) A Long Life’s Work: an Autobiography

“Snowdrifts often obliterated the instruments.”

Meteorologists, L to R: Angus Rankin, Robert Traill Omond, Robert Mossman.

Ben Nevis Observatory viewed from the northeast, showing instruments.

Ben Nevis Observatory viewed from the south in 10–12 feet of snow.

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