How F*cking cold is it?

Fortunately, about as cold as it gets. Go UK! - A brief article on weather.

That’s right, it’s not as cold in the UK as it is in Berlin. That place is freezing right now, along with a lot of Europe. It is still bloody cold here though, especially in the wind. SO where does the cold/warm air come from & why is it so relatively mild in the UK? I only have a pass degree in Marine Navigation & Meteorolgy from Plymouth Universitry so I’m hardly qualified to write about it. Here’s what I learned at college in between trying to buy drugs.

Wind arrives in 2 basic moods, warm or cold. These fronts are roughly where we like to join an isobaric related line to demarcate between a messy & gradually rotating process, a Tropical Revolving Storm. It helps if you try to imagine it as a massive, flat helter skelter made of warm & cold air. Cold air is having a sweet, frictionless fun ride down the warm air helter skelter.

By the time these systems reach the UK they are well developed & the temperatue difference is rarely dramatic, so sadly warm & cold fronts don’t always mean hot or cold days. TRS’s are not really the harbingers of cold weather and windy days are often warmer then still days.

When we don’t have a nice TRS to complain about (rain), it’s because they are tracking further north than us. The TRS tracks up the Irish sea & F*cks off to Greenland, or just heads straight North to see the Arctic Monkeys.

A great time to surf is on the back of a TRS. When it has passed & blown itself into little fluffy clouds the groundswell waves arrive. Ours are propagated over 2–3000 miles. Hopefully by then the rain & wind has dissipated & if you are really lucky, the wind has swung around to a nice Northerly & the faces can clean up nicely.

So don’t fear the cold, it is a mild time to be in the sea & if the sun was ever going to come out, It will come out over the sea.

Groundswell creating storms are created by the rotation of the earth & the speed of rising air across the center of it, the equator. This central inertia allows a massive weather phenomonom to be created making massive towers of air at different temperatures. As the earth spins, the rotating effect (like you see in water going down a plughole) causes this equatorial powerhouse to spin faster & faster, sucking up air like a high speed Dyson, or Hoover.

It’s lovely energy is barely dissipated by movement so the system evolves as it tracks north or south. By the way, the bit right on the equator where all that hot air is generated is call the doldrums, where there’s little wind right on the equator, though there are jetstreams high above. Ahhhh.

Over the Atlantic this spinning TRS (Tropical Revolving Storm) often tracks north east & becomes more powerful generating massive amounts of energy, partriculaly into the ocean. Which makes waves. Which can travel all the way around the earth with only a tiny energy loss. Which is totally cool, right?