Just How Hot Was Summer 1976 in the UK & Ireland?
When it comes to summers in the UK, there is perhaps none spoken of more often than 1976. The famous ‘long hot summer’. Many that lived through it speak of relentless hot days, a seriously parched landscape, and severe restrictions on water usage. To this day, it’s often referred to as a benchmark summer, the […]
Claros v3 – Validation and Long-Range Model Comparisons
What Makes Claros v3 Unique This new version of MetSwift’s in house long-range model takes an innovative approach to finding predictive skill at lead times of 1 to at least 24 months. As opposed to the computationally expensive task of simulating the evolution over time of countless parameters, Claros leverages a combination of statistical and […]
Sweatier Summers – An Uncomfortable Climate Trend
This builds upon a shorter post I published back in August 2024, to further explore the connection between ‘specific’ and ‘relative humidity’, and how the combined effect of relative humidity and temperature can be represented using the ‘heat index’. An Escalating Status Across the world, air temperatures have been trending upward since the mid-20th century. […]
MetSwift’s Claros Model on: Glastonbury Festival 2025
As inevitable as the sunrise, 2025’s Northern Hemisphere festival season has arrived. Of the music and performing arts festivals, Glastonbury is held in high regard, remaining to this day the largest greenfield festival in the world. While renowned for the Pyramid Stage, top-tier performances, and embracing the hippy lifestyle, it’s also well known for tempestuous […]
Weather’s Effect on Noise Pollution
You’re probably familiar with the effect of solid structures like buildings and trees on sound propagation. A distant dog barking within a forest has a more muffled, distorted sound compared to one barking at the far end of a flat playing field. But what about the role of weather? Perhaps you’ve noticed the more subdued […]
The Global Reach of MetSwift’s Predictive Wildfire Model
Having explored some standout predicted wildfire risks in the contiguous US in my last blog, this time we’re casting our eyes well beyond, even to the far side of the planet. Early to Mid-March in Central-Eastern South America First off, we’re looking mainly at southern and eastern Brazil. Here in early to mid-March, the predicted […]
Exploring MetSwift’s Predictive Wildfire Risk Model
Following on from the introduction of MetSwift’s predictive wildfire risk model in my last blog post, let’s look at some of its predictions for 2025 in the contiguous US. Specifically, a few weeks and regions where notably higher risk is predicted on top of an already relatively high climatology. First up, early June in the […]
South California Wildfires: Sadly On-Trend
Wildfires. Uncontrolled infernos that can span tens, hundreds, or even thousands of square kilometres. Fuelled by anything remotely flammable that they connect with, be it forests, croplands, or buildings, to name a few. In the US alone, individual wildfire seasons have inflicted damages up to $30 billion (inflation-adjusted to 2024 USD). At the time of […]
2024 Arctic Sea Ice Melting Season: Surprisingly Strong?
The 2024 Arctic sea ice melting season is very likely at an end, with both of the main coverage measures – extent and area – trending upward during the past week. According to NSIDC, 2024’s sea ice extent minimum was likely set on 11th September, at 4.28 million square km, which is 7th lowest in […]
The 2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season – What’s Going On?
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season is proving to be one of the least well predicted of the 21st Century to date. Not in terms of how active tropical cyclones are behaving – the NHC are going a fantastic job there as usual – but how active the season is overall. What follows here is a […]