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Another year has passed and with it, more weather records have fallen. Recent reports from the UK Met Office and the Copernicus Climate Change Service show that 2020 was the UK’s third warmest year since 1884 as well as Europe’s warmest on record.
Met Office and Met Éireann, along with partner KNMI, have revealed the list of storm names for 2020-21.
First introduced by the Met Office and Met Éireann (the meteorological service in the Republic of Ireland) in 2015, the Name our Storms campaign has helped raise awareness of the potential impacts of severe weather in Britain and Ireland before it hits. In 2019, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), the Dutch national weather forecasting service, joined the collaboration.
The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), in association with AccuWeather, has announced the 26 finalists for this year’s ‘Weather Photographer of the Year 2020’, which will now be put to a public vote. To see the shortlisted images and vote for your favourite, visit photocrowd.com/wpotyvote. The vote is open from 21 August and closes 25 September at midnight (BST).
Photo credit: Rainbow in Lockdown Street by Ollie Bevan-Thomas
The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) is calling on photographers of all ages and abilities to enter its annual photography competition, ‘Weather Photographer of the Year 2020’ and ‘Young Weather Photographer of the Year 2020’ in association with AccuWeather, a global weather and leading digital media company. Now in its fifth year, this popular competition attracts entries from around the world.
Over the past week, the European Space Agency released data that provides a welcome positive in amidst the challenge of COVID-19. Data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite has shown a reduction in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) over both Italy and China, as each country has brought in stringent measures to tackle the pandemic.
The State of the Climate Report 2019 has been released by the World Meteorological Organization, and it makes for sober reading.
The report confirms that 2019 was the second warmest year in the instrumental record. The global average temperature was 1.1 °C above estimated pre-industrial averages, second only to the record set in 2016.
The UN’s Climate Change Conference began on Monday in Madrid, Spain, under the Presidency of the Government of Chile. It will include the 25th Conference of Parties (COP25), the 15th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol and the 2nd session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement. The aim of the meetings is to ensure that the various conventions and agreements are being implemented.
There are several online courses which you can take to learn more about weather and climate: on the FutureLearn platform, there is the RMetS/ University of Reading Come Rain or Shine introduction to weather, as well as the University of Exeter’s Climate Change: the Science course, both of which are running at the moment.
The Open University runs a couple of courses Watching the Weather (free) and Science: the Weather which has an associated fee. The COMET/ MetEd programme in the USA runs many online courses, some general, some very specific.
The clear up operation is continuing after Typhoon Hagibis hit Japan on 12th October with wind speeds up to 225 km/ hr and torrential rain, leaving at least 74 dead and tens of thousands of people displaced. In the town of Hakone, 939.5 mm of rain fell in just 24 hours.
