The Great British Weather

Just took a look at weather history for wind direction in March 2018 and 2017 and it was all over the place...varying day by day almost at times.

bit of an airport operations nerd

Same here! Possibly not something to be proud of. Have flight radar on my phone to check on anything unusual so know the patterns fairly well. Or thought I did. Like you say if it typically varies on more of a day-to-day basis - or that's what I thought - turns out it's the time of year and in April and May it's quite common to have longer periods of northeasterly winds:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/wea.301

This study also concluded that "years with a low frequency of northeasterly winds in May are slightly more likely to precede a warmer summer than usual". So if it carries on like this next month it probably won't be a scorcher.

Good digging.

I'm a little bit deeper into the hole I think. I've got a scanner on my desk and listen to ATC all day while I work :D

I think this is the first time I have admitted this. I also use my scanner to intercept voice and video signals from the ISS when it passes over.

I probably need help.

It's basically down to which pressure system is winning between the scandinavian low and azores high. If the scandinavian low is larger or more west than average then it'll dominate the UK's weather and pull in air from the arctic. Usually in the UK the icelandic low is dominant over winter and the azores high over summer and they all kinda scrap it out in spring/autumn. A dominant icelandic/azores pressure system will give us a SW prevailing wind and it's only a dominant scandinavian system that gives us a NE prevailing wind so that's why it's a bit rarer.

pic borrowed from the OU.

Ha! You are officially worse than me :P

Everyone else is probably thinking that we're planespotters but for me it's more about wanting to know what's going on, if that makes sense. Finding out the plane that kept buzzing round in circles high above our place was a spy plane probably didn't help!

Is is interesting? I imagine most of it is very routine?

Thanks. I know very little about how weather works but it seems interesting, all these patterns behind the apparent chaos.

You might know about this already but it's weather related so I'll post it here. You can use a shortwave radio and some software to download weather charts over RadioFax:
http://www.blackcatsystems.com/software/multimode/fax.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_VcK1283Y0

Not sure how much it's still used in the age of satellite internet but it's for ships to get charts when they're in the middle of the ocean.

I did not know that. That is awesome. Thanks for the tip. I've got everything I need to do that too. I'll post some results here when I have a chance to give it a go!

I've stumbled across those transmissions before but didn't bother looking up what they were.

With an SDR setup you can pull images direct from weather satellites

That's what I've been doing with the International Space Station. It's quite tricky, it moves pretty quickly and is only above the horizon frim 1 to 10 minutes at a time.

Other than antenna direction problems, you have to account for Doppler shift of the transmission frequencies. I'm starting to get the hang of it but it's not easy at first.

by this time last year hadn't we had a month of 20c + and cloudless skies forever

amber rain warning for se today

1.5m of hail fell in mexic0

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/freak-summer-hailstorm-buries-cars-in-mexicos-guadalajara

aye carunder!

hail.

coat.

Oh joy:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/uk-weather-london-set-to-swelter-in-recordbreaking-heat-up-to-37c-a4195211.html

Could mean more grass fires and quite possibly other fires.

At least @mmccarthy is safe now.

ha!

I'm not so sure about that. He may well have moved into a house that has heating.

It’s a lot less dry than last year but yeah, not great.

Looking at highs of 18 degrees this week!

Thankfully I've not needed to switch it on yet, so who knows if it's functional!

Well, it's there, so that makes a slight possibility that you're not safe.

(Just to give Pete sleepless nights. :) )

cant sleep, but there is a fantastic electrical storm happening now......flashy, flashy boom boom!

Storm was providing mucho entertainment down on the south coast at midnight. Was very welcome too. Temp then was 29 degrees. Cooled it down to a positively balmy 27.5.

Are you near brighton? there was a single thunderclap that shook the building and made something in the solid walls creak a bit.

No. Southampton - which is a suburb of Southampton University - the big ugly bit at the arse end of the M3. Come to think of it, there is an arse at both ends.