Archive for Weather

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Sydney, Ten Days in

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on February 14, 2024 by telescoper

Taking a few moments over breakfast to post about life in Sydney. This morning is cooler than it has been for a while and it’s all a bit rainy. It was very warm (by my standards) earlier in the week (up to 31°C) and very humid, culminating in thunderstorms but those were some way off in the distance so didn’t affect us greatly. Since then it’s been in the mid-20s with a mixture of clouds, light rain, and sunshine. You have to be careful here, though, as it is perfectly possible to get sunburn when it’s cloudy. I’m definitely glad I brought my hat.

Preparing for Fresher’s Fair
Fresher’s Fair

Other than the weather, the main thing at the University is that it’s Orientation Week, when the new students arrive. Campus has been much busier this week than it was last week, as you can see from the pictures above; I wanted to stand in the same spot for the second picture but there were too many people. Lectures start next week, for both new and returning students, so it should get even busier.

I’ve managed to book tickets for two different performances at the Opera, The Magic Flute and La Traviata. These weren’t cheap but I couldn’t resist seeing the Sydney Opera House from the inside. I’m also planning a trip to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, were there is a special exhibition of art by Wassily Kandinsky which I must see. I’m also going to travel around a bit to give a few talks in the Sydney area.

My diary is filling up, so the second half of this visit will be rather busier than the first, but it should all be interesting!

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Two weeks to go..

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical, Maynooth with tags , on December 10, 2023 by telescoper

It’s Sunday 10th December, which means I am about to embark on the penultimate week of this stint in Barcelona. I’ve got quite a few things to finish in the next fortnight, and the inevitable glut of telecons to get through, but I also plan to take a little time off to visit a couple of cultural attractions I haven’t got round to yet. I’ll be spending Christmas and New Year elsewhere and returning to Barcelona in 2024 but these will be the last two weeks I spend this nice apartment. For various reasons I don’t yet know precisely when I’ll be coming back after the break so I’ll have to find another place to live when I do. That will be during off season though so I’m not worried. I toyed with the idea of keeping this place on, but thought better of it. It is quite expensive, and I can’t really afford to pay weeks in rent to keep an empty apartment. Since I will be returning, I can leave some of my things with friends here, which leaves plenty of space in my luggage for goodies to be consumed during the holiday.

The entrance to La Rambla from La Plaza de Cataluña

The weather here has changed a bit recently, getting much warmer. It feels a bit strange to be going round in shirt sleeves on 10th December but it was warm enough for that. It’s done my arthritis a power of good anyway. I picked up a bit of a cold last week which has now vanished too. It wasn’t anything serious but generated enough brain fog to make concentration difficult for a couple of days. The unusually warm spell is of course worrying for other reasons, as is the fact that there has been virtually no rain in Barcelona all the time I’ve been here. Drought restrictions are still in place. It seems the weather is a very different story in Ireland!

Here in Barcelona teaching carries on until Thursday 21st December, which is the end of term. Back in Maynooth, teaching term officially continues until Friday 22nd, though I don’t think there will be many students in classes on that day, just three days before Christmas, which also happens to be the day I fly out from Barcelona…

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September Heatwave

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags on September 4, 2023 by telescoper

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…

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Into the Study Break

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , on March 11, 2023 by telescoper

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?

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Colder Times

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , , on November 22, 2021 by telescoper

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.

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The Calm Before Lorenzo

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on October 3, 2019 by telescoper

It 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…

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Another Pembrokeshire Dangler

Posted in Cardiff with tags , , on October 29, 2018 by telescoper

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.

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Vector Calculus Weather

Posted in mathematics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on October 12, 2018 by telescoper

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.

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The Beast From The East

Posted in Sport with tags , , , on February 27, 2018 by telescoper

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…

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The Pembrokeshire Dangler

Posted in Cardiff with tags , , on November 29, 2017 by telescoper

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.

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