"Keith(Southend)" wrote in message
...
| While I was sitting here surfing the 15 minute radar and satellite
| animations, I was just thinking how much information we have at our
| fingertips. Never before have I been able to predict a snow shower with
| such accuracy or even have a better feel for detail when the forecast
| warns for snow in the East or SE. For years I used to look east and just
| hope, but have absolutely no idea if it was going to snow or not.
|
| Then we have all this model data, sometimes we drown in it, but I hope
| this data never gets abused to the point were we don't get a look in.
|
| How ever did we survive without the internet, eh?

I studied for a Physics/Meteorology degree at the University of Reading in
the 1970s. This was then - as it still is now - one of the premier
Meteorology Departments in the world. I can still remember the thrill of
standing by the massive MuFax machine watching the latest charts gradually
appear. We gave presentations with hand-plotted charts (anyone else on this
group go there and remember the weekly "current weather discssion". Do they
still have something similar now and, if not, when did it cease?) and
submitted programs for the mainframe computer which were done on punched
cards and we got printed output the next day.

The information I can get in a few minutes on my home computer via the
Internet would have been beyond the wildest dreams of us university students
then.

And the winters *were* colder too. We had two winters of the four I was
there comparable in severity to the current "cold spell" (it will have to
run a couple more weeks yet before those who can remember more than 20 years
back will call it a "winter") during which Whiteknights Lake froze and
walking around the campus on the ice covered concrete paths was an exercise
in balance and co-ordination.

Some people on this group have been rabbiting on about global warming or
otherwise, but they need to remember that the temperature difference between
a mild and cold winter at these latitudes is considerably more than the
current global warming signal is claimed to be. One interesting take on
this by one poster in this group is that warming at high latitudes in the
Arctic could disrupt the polar vortex and hence our usual westerly flow so
there is nothing to say that global warming could not cause an increase in
the number of episodes such as now without any need to invoke the "Atlantic
Conveyor" shutdown.
--
- Yokel -

"Yokel" posts via a spam-trap account which is not read.