Monday 17 November 2014

Baroclinicity

Good news - the Met Office has declared that this will be the wettest winter yet. The prolonged dry spell that will surely follow this bold forecast will be most welcome, especially after last year's (mysteriously unforecast) downpours.
To quote Old Nige's Weather Lore - 'If the Met men call it wet, Dry is what you'll likely get' and again 'If the Met men call it dry, Be sure to keep your brolly by.'
 The impending winter deluges are, we are assured, down to the Jet Stream (a meteorological phenomenon we never used to hear of until a few years ago). It's unusually vigorous and unusually far North, they say, though on last night's weather report it was pictured looping way down to the South and petering out. The situation, we are warned by a Met Office boffin, calls for a new word to be introduced into weather forecasts (as they whimsically persist in calling them): Baroclinicity. Well, I'm all for learning new words, but I don't think I'll bother with this one. Maybe I'll just take an extra shot of whatever I'm drinking every time I hear the word...

8 comments:

  1. There's the good old Anglo-Saxon "attery" for a spell of stormy weather. "Yowdendrift", an old Scottish term for wind-driven snow, sounds pretty good too. I'm not sure ye boffins are coming up with anything that hasn't been tried before and perhaps more elegantly too. For more, see http://climate.umn.edu/weathertalk/jargon.htm

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  2. Thanks Mark - a feast of weather words there - and no sign of baroclinicity. I like 'blirty'...

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  3. The new jargon-du-jour over here is polar vortex. I never heard of it through sixty years, but now it threatens me weekly. Nobody seems to understand exactly how it works, but it's very scary and even serves as a kind of secular warning to bad children who don't do their part to save the planet.

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  4. Yes indeed Peter - and there's a strong subtext of It's All Our Fault over here too. Things will surely improve when the Met Office fires up its latest superdoopercomputer, hem hem...

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  5. Just promise me, Nige, that I will never see you pen sentences like "Low baroclinicity levels combined with an uncommonly severe polar vortex and an unexpected Isentropic lift made this a particularly poor year for Grizzled Skippers and Adonis Blues."

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  6. You can count on me, Peter!

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  7. Excellent lore, Nige. I've added a couple more for the winter months:

    "If the Met Men say 'Ice storm', 'Tis sure to be pleasantly warm";
    and
    "If the Met Men say 'no snow', Tobogganing you'll go"

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