What a lovely day to be on sabbatical! It seems that the weather is set fair for a few more days too, which is nice. You don’t often see a satellite image with not a cloud in the sky over Ireland.
It’s cute that the Met Éireann weather map gives a red temperature warning when it’s just 23 °C.
Mind you, it has felt very warm today. So much so that I had a short nap this afternoon. I think of this as training for what I hope will be the regular siesta…
So here we are, then. We’ve arrived at the half-term Study Break at Maynooth University. Six weeks of Semester 2 down, six to go. There are no lectures, labs or tutorials next week. It’s not actually a holiday, but the lack of teaching duties will enable me to catch up quite a few things I’ve let slip during term. It will also give me the chance to regroup and prepare for final assault on the second half of term.
The spell of freezing weather we’ve had recently has morphed into something a little warmer and a lot wetter. The light dusting of snow we had yesterday has dissolved in the torrential rain stotting against the windows as I write this piece. I’m waiting for a lull in the downpour so I can make a quick dash to the shops before returning to the comfort of my house for the rest of the day. The weather is coming in from the West today, and I spy a little gap heading my way:
Next Friday, March 17th, is of course, St Patrick’s Day, a national holiday in Ireland. I certainly hope the weather is better for the traditional parades on that day!
I’m glad of the arrival of this break, as I’ve been running on empty for the last several days, the fatigue exacerbated by a flare-up of the arthritis in my knees. On Thursday I had to kneel down next to one of the machines in the computer lab to fix something and I had considerable difficulty getting up again. Doctors say that there’s no reliable evidence that arthritis pain correlates with the weather, but in my case it does seem to come on when the weather changes, especially when it suddenly becomes cold or damp. I’ll be due for another steroid shot soon, which should help, and hopefully the weather will improve over the next few weeks. Possibly.
Anyway, the second half of term should be a lot easier than the first. For one thing, we have another break coming up three weeks in. Good Friday is on April 7th, so that is a holiday, as is the following week. Moreover, I usually only give lectures in Computational Physics for 9 of the 12 teaching weeks in the Semester, after which the students will be working on the mini-projects which form part of the assessment for this module.
P.S. It was on 11th March 2020 that the World Health Organization officially announced the Covid-19 pandemic and it was just before the corresponding Study Break that year that the University was closed and we went into lockdown. Can that really have been three years ago?
All of a sudden winter is here. Until now the temperature has stayed in double figures but it was much colder yesterday and this morning we had a hard frost. It has barely been above freezing at any point today. It was -2 °C at 7.30pm when I got home from work.
I now wish I’d bought some food for the birds at the weekend as the feeders are empty and I think my little avian visitors need some fuel. At least there are lots of berries around. A wood pigeon visits my garden regularly to feast on them and as a result is now as round as a football and probably too fat to fly.
On the subject of birds, this little chap appeared outside my office window last week. The distinctive red colour on the body doesn’t show up at all in the phone picture but, when combined with the black cap on its head, made me think it was a bullfinch. Bullfinches spend the winter here so maybe I’ll see this one again.
I suddenly thought today that it might be an idea to put some bird feeders in the space outside my office window. It’s enclosed by walls on all sides but open above. It would be a very safe space for birds to feed and it would be nice to encourage a few more avian visitors.
Follow @telescoperIt was calm and rather mild this morning as I walked into work, although the news on the radio this morning was filled with news about the rapidly approaching Storm Lorenzo. Lorenzo is a huge storm and was only downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm when it was about 500km from the Irish coast so it could be even more serious than Storm Ophelia, which caused chaos a couple of years ago.
This is how the storm looked in the early hours of this morning:
And this is the projection for later today. The prevailing wind right now is westerly, but this will veer to south-westerly as the storm moves along its (roughly) north-easterly path:
Here is an infra-red image taken this morning showing the outer belts of cloud already over Ireland.
Quite a few events have been called off in anticipation of the arrival of Storm Lorenzo this evening, with heavy rain and gale force winds forecast across the country. There are signs, however, that the low pressure region at the heart of the storm is filling more rapidly than expected, so it might not be as severe as feared, although there remains a significant risk of localized flooding and wind damage, especially in the West. I plan to sit it out at home this evening with a glass or two of wine for company…
Taking the opportunity of the Irish Bank Holiday Monday to spend a long weekend in a rather chilly Cardiff, I find that Wales is once again under the influence of a Pembrokeshire Dangler:
The Northerly airflow that is responsible for this phenomenon (which I first encountered last year) is causing a bit of a cold snap here in Cardiff, and has even brought snow to parts of Wales, but hopefully the Pembrokeshire Dangler will not interfere with my flight back to Ireland.
As it happens I did a lecture today about vector fields as part of my module on vector calculus. Whenever I did similar lectures in the past I used the day’s weather map as an illustration, so this morning I downloaded what turned out to be a particularly dramatic example. The curl of the velocity field around the weather system off the west coast of Ireland this morning was definitely non-zero…
Storm Callum turned out to be not as damaging as feared. Apparently it was rather windy in Maynooth overnight, but I slept right through it.
From my viewpoint in sunny snow-free Cardiff I can only assume that all this talk of The Beast From The East means that Nikolai Valuev is about to make a comeback to the boxing ring.
Standing a mighty seven foot tall, Valuev is the heaviest and tallest man ever to have been a world boxing champion. He retired from the ring on 2009, but I think he’d still be capable of surviving a few inches of snow…
They say there’s a first time for everything, and it turned out yesterday was the first occasion on which I encountered a Pembrokeshire Dangler:
It’s still there today. The Northerly airflow that is responsible for this phenomenon is causing a very cold snap here in Cardiff, but hopefully the Pembrokeshire Dangler will not hang around much longer.
A while before 6am this morning I was woken up by the sound of fairly distant thunder to the West of my flat. I left the windows open – they’ve been open all the time in this hot weather – and dozed while rumblings continued. Just after six there was a terrifically bright flash and an instantaneous bang that set car alarms off in my street; lightning must have struck a building very close. Then the rain arrived. I got up to close the windows against the torrential downpour, at which point I noticed that water was coming in through the ceiling. A further inspection revealed another leak in the cupboard where the boiler lives and another which had water dripping from a light fitting. A frantic half hour with buckets and mops followed, but I had to leave to get to work so I just left buckets under the drips and off I went into the deluge to get soaked.
Here is the map of UK rain at 07:45 am, with Brighton in the thick of it:
I made it up to campus (wet and late); it’s still raining but hopefully will settle down soon. This is certainly turning into a summer of extremes!
We had a spectacular thunderstorm over Brighton last night. I do love a good thunderstorm. Although I enjoyed the show, I didn’t get much sleep. Judging by the following graphic from BBC Weather, I’m not the only one…
In the Dark 