Last Friday evening Tim Newberry, lately a Meteorologist at RAF Coningsby, gave 45 members of the Louth Group a very interesting illustrated talk about, ‘Understanding the Weather including Climate Change’. Tim presented a complex topic in a way that was easy to understand and to my surprise easy to remember. I know that at least three of us who had attended looked up at the sky the next morning and identified the long streamers of cirrus clouds high up in the troposphere.
The history of formal weather forecasting in the UK dates from 1805 when Captain Fitzroy RN founded the Meteorological office using local observations to attempt predictions. Currently the task is carried out by one of the most powerful computers in the world which is capable of making 215 billion calculations every day.
We were encouraged to make our own weather forecasts based on some knowledge of air pressure and cloud formations. Finally, we were pleased to learn that some folklore expressions such as the one about the red sky and the shepherd were reasonably reliable.
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