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on weather.

(Feb 2006 : this page is now part of an archived web site. I have been unable, or too lazy, to update this web site for 18 months)

 

rog's weather page - weather map image I'm writing this on the evening of April 28th 2004. It's a cold evening and the sky is swathed in black cloud, although there are now only a few drops of rain. A couple of hours ago it was chucking it down.

This is an appropriate moment to be writing about 'weather'; there has certainly been lots of it this week. At the weekend temperatures were up to July levels; on Monday the sky became hazier and it was still warm but muggier. By tuesday temperatures were falling and the sky was grey with cloud. In parts of the country rain was torrential. Today it has been cold, dark, wet, and now increasingly windy. For weather watchers, this week has been a good one.

Everyone knows how 'the weather' and 'the traffic' provide the British with two failsafe topics of conversation that can always be used when meeting strangers or to fill in those awkward silences in conversation. Just today I was making a coffee at work, and the new cleaner, and ex-Navy man came into the kitchen. We immediately started bemoaning the weather, and within minutes were engaged in an in depth discussion of the state of England's reservoirs (a parlous one apparently).

The state of the weather is, of course, mirrored by the state of the garden. The last couple of years of watching my own garden has bought this home to me. I've thought about buying a complete weather centre; a quick look on the web and I discovered that there are all sorts of high tech gadgetry equipment if you want to pay the money. These weather stations, however, smack too much of 'gadgetry' for it's own sake, and I see my garden as an escape from all that sort of thing, so I have so far only purchased a cheap and basic rain gauge. I have been recording rainfall in my garden since February this year.

I have also become a close follower of the various weather web sites. This started, as I suspect it does with most weather watchers, with regular checking of the BBC online weather forecast. Then a colleague at work mentioned weather.co.uk, which attempts a ten day forecast and an hour by hour forecast for a specified post code. Ambitious. More recently I have been exploring the Met-Office , which is the father of them all, and a repository of masses of historical data. On recent wet days I have taken much enjoyment from watching the passage of rainfall bands on the Met Offices rainfall radar page.

Finally, I discovered that IPL, a Bath based I.T company, have a weather station and associated web site. This is contains highly detailed information - down to the level of time of max temperature, highest wind speed etc for each day - going back a few years. I noticed that the rainfall levels measured by my simple gauge were always significantly higher than the levels they record just two miles away. So who is right? What I need to do to answer that is find some other detailed rainfall data fro Bath with which to compare my figures.

I have, on the odd occasion, attempted to engage Deborah in a conversation about weather watching and associated patterns and statistics. But I might as well be talking about cricket averages, for it does nothing for her. Indeed, to her it is just another rather sad and very male obsession. When I try to explain that it is important to find 'order out of chaos', she tends to leave the room.