Blue-sky-thinking?

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Colin Phillips

At the Start
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Do you remember a couple of months back, when we were just getting over the banking scandals and in the middle of the expenses scandals, right out of the blue the Met. Office announced we were in for a barbecue summer.

Well, I don't know about you, but I haven't been overcome with the fumes of burning burgers.

As I type the rain is falling steadily and it has been all day, I'm sure I can hear the feckin' grass growing!

I am sure I am going to be charged of spying a conspiracy when there is a perfectly logical explanation, and of after-timing, but I did announce at the time of that announcement that it was very strange that the Met. Office was making a long-range forecast when in the past such things had fallen into disrepute.

Gordon Brown and his cohorts wouldn't have thought up an idea like that, shirley!!??!!
 
Perfectly logical explanation yeah ?

Met Office are crap.

I think we ought to take a leave out of Saddam Husseins book (now he knew how to treat weather forecasters who got it wrong - which must have been difficult in Iraq).

I'll spare you the explanation of the jet stream and its effect of the Azores high, but this'll be in for about 3 - 4 weeks now. Third shite summer in a row. I'm getting depressed with it all in honesty
 
Colin Phillips said:
Do you remember a couple of months back, when we were just getting over the banking scandals and in the middle of the expenses scandals, right out of the blue the Met. Office announced we were in for a barbecue summer.
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In fairness, I don't recall it being presented quite in those terms. The excellent weather was forecast for the short term and the gamble was duly landed but they heavily qualified the notion of an extended hot spell. The Met Office is very reluctant to commit to anything beyond three days.

Warbler, don't spare us the details of the jet stream. I know the Met Office are more willing than before to have the BBC forecasters illustrate its path so any more enlightenment would be helpful. I was under the impression it doesn't take much for the path of the jet stream to change course. Last week it was south of the UK, meaning unsettled weather to the north of it (ie right over us) but it could change quite easily to give a decent spell in the not too distant future.

Up here the weather has been more along the lines of changeable than simply sh*te. We've had some lovely days.
 
Well, DO, my recollection is that it was in exactly those terms.

Otherwise why would I have been so surprised at them making a long-term forecast.

Perhaps you had a different version up there in northern wastelands.;)
 
Haven't heard El Niño mentioned lately.

The jet stream is currently right over the middle of the UK, which is further north than it was this time last week but they don't seem confident that it will continue to move north.
 
Warbler

Please DO spare us a post on the jetstream. I have a feeling that it would be more than i could bear :)

Cant complain about rain if u live in bloody wales can you? Thought you were down the pits all day anyway? At least the rain drowns out that bloody singing
 
clivex said:
Please DO spare us a post on the jetstream. I have a feeling that it would be more than i could bear :)
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If you think it might send you over the edge Clive, there's nothing more I'd rather talk about. :D but it centres on how the jet-stream controls the location of the Azores high (to the best of my knowledge). Our agririan forefathers half understood this as they'd spotted the pattern, but chose to blame it on St Swithin
 
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clivex said:
Warbler

Please DO spare us a post on the jetstream. I have a feeling that it would be more than i could bear :)

Cant complain about rain if u live in bloody wales can you? Thought you were down the pits all day anyway? At least the rain drowns out that bloody singing
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I've said this before Clive..you are definately a Bernard Manning fan :)..you use a lot of his material...am I right?
 
Lol...wellill put record straight...always laughed at that tape where he simply insults everyone..penshioners included

he delivered a line superbly but much of the race stuff sounds old and dated and abit too much to take frankly

But rather him than the manic and clueless timing of russel Brand or the astonishingly unfunny vic reeves

billy connolly would easily be the greatest comedian for me. Dave Allen is forgotten now perhaps but also a master. richard pryor too
 
clivex said:
Lol...wellill put record straight...always laughed at that tape where he simply insults everyone..penshioners included

he delivered a line superbly but much of the race stuff sounds old and dated and abit too much to take frankly

But rather him than the manic and clueless timing of russel Brand or the astonishingly unfunny vic reeves

billy connolly would easily be the greatest comedian for me. Dave Allen is forgotten now perhaps but also a master. richard pryor too
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i knew it:)..some of that material has stuck with me for 25 years

we had a tape of him at our local club that got passed round a lot

i did like him..he didn't care what people thought of him

i like a lot of the older comedians..probably due to me being old:D..Ken Dodd - Frankie Howard..true pro's

I was a "Big Night Out" fan though..and the Pythons of course
 
Wandering off-track (probably blown there by the south-southwesterlies we're enjoying, 'twixt sunshine and showers) - Dave Allen was terrific! Mother and I always made a point of watching his shows, they were witty,observational, and so bang on the button. I like Billy C a lot for the same reasons - he sees the ridiculous in everything, which I love, although fewer fecks wouldn't hurt - although his line is that once he started to chuck them in, people laughed a lot more.

I watched Lee Mack's show a couple of nights ago. Sagged a bit in the middle, quite physical as well - throws himself around a bit - and plenty of embarrassing his front-row members by taking their specs, hats, tee-shirt logos, etc. to fool around with. Much of it harking back to the old observational comedy routes, but sadly, undone by far too many fecks and, regrettably, the fashion for cnut to be inserted into every fifth joke. I'm not an anti-swearing prude - God knows I use some blue words on occasion, mostly to myself! - but I fail to see how adding them into most jokes makes them any funnier. If your material's good, if your presentation's good, then the stuff works in any case.
 
The Met Office here and in the UK both issued very qualified predictions of a good summer, saying that it was too early to say, early indications, blah blah blah.

It was the media wot hyped it up, with headlines like:

"We're in for a scorcher say Met"
 
They didn't get it that wrong. Considering the article was written at the end of April and the forecast was for June July and August, the got it pretty much OK in June. didn't we get 30C a couple of times?

July has been OK up here - a mix of decent weather and showers but no long-term persistent rain.

We'll see what happens in August. The forecast up here for the next fortnight (care of Metcheck) isn't good. It might be better down south. If you get a good August the forecasters will be more right than wrong.
 
didn't we get 30C a couple of times?
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Scotland was getting higher temperatures than almost anywhere else in Europe, certainly in western Europe, at the time. Northern Ireland was also doing well.

But Ayr was freezing the weekend I was there for a wedding, in late June, and here in Belgium it has been grey, cool and wet for much of the time.

The main meetings of the flat season in Ireland have been run on ground ranging between soft and heavy. The one time they had a chance of better ground, for the Derby meeting, they watered it and then it rained anyway.
 
Desert Orchid said:
the got it pretty much OK in June. didn't we get 30C a couple of times?
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Nothing remarkable in that, you'd be entitled to expect that during a Summer as its nothing more than a par score and hardly a heatwave (it might be in Scotland) but then we're talking about borderline tundra.

You can look longingly at high pressure systems out in the Atlantic and they can give pleasent enough days at about 25c but the serious hot weather comes from a stationary system over North Africa called the Azores high. This is largely immobile and sucks in warm air that just heats up, and the more it sucks in, the more it continues to heat up. If this is able to force its way northwards then it sits on top of us and pushes the Atlantic weather systems to north of the UK. To a large extent it's controlled by the jet stream. If the jet streams comes to far south it surprsses the azores high and it takes up residence over Sourthern France and North Africa where it's impact is even more pronounced due to their more southern lying latitiude (as indeed 100's died in southern France last year, and there was an outbreak of fires too). The Azores system requires that it is built up though, a bit like a crescendo to a symphony. Even if the jet stream finally released us from its clutches it wouldn't follow that the Azores high would automatically follow it and head north in burst of sudden heatwave. The air of over us won't have been warmed enough to encourage it to join in, and this needs to be built up. We'd be in unstable air which could go either way. Its slow moving system, and there's no guarantee that the Azores high would impose primacy over the occluded Atlantic fronts, unless it had reached a critical mass through the cumulative build up of hot air. A series of Atlantic fronts could easily disrupt it and provide changable and unsettled periods of weather instead as it needs high lead times to settle and develop its strength through drawing in more and more hot air before it is able to exert primacy over Atlantic systems and start pushing them to more inhospitable northern latitudes like Iceland, Norway and Scotland.

The pattern is normally settled around St Swithins day hence our forefathers who relied more on knowing the weather patterns than we for making a living noted. Admittedly they didn't know of the existance of the jet stream, nor how it impacted on the Azores high, but had noticed a pattern develop that at a certain time in the year, bad weather begat a month of further bad weather, as what had happened is that the Jet stream had pushed the Azores high too far south, and as it settled over the Mediterranean instead and it tended to stay there. This is basically all they were observing with their 40 day rhyme

We normally get an Indian summer on the back of it, but personally I'd rather have temperatures of 30C + in the proper Summer months than ones of 18-20 in mid Septemeber and early October.

Another shite Summer, 3 in a row now.

When you write your christmas present lists out for santa this year, be sure to put the Azores High on them please
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