Back on-line now after a week in Melbourne at the Australian Institute of Physics conference. I have lots of good stuff to blog about, including optomechanics (using light to cause vibrations), physics education (lots on this), the Large Hadron Collider and complicated models of things that might not even exist, but I’ll do this one on climate […]
Continue readingTag: weather
Windy Hamilton
With our low-pressure-area-the-size-of-Australia still very much in residence, I’m beginning to forget what a still, sunny day is like. I have to say that in my experience (six years) Hamilton is a pretty wind-free place. It’s certainly a lot quieter than where I lived near Portsmouth in the UK, which would be frequently blasted by […]
Continue readingClimate data (yes, again)
I don’t usually rant too much on my blog – it’s not my style, but the news yesterday about a legal challenge to NIWA’s temperature data is just too provoking. Yes, I know it has been well-blogged about already by other Scibloggers, but for good reason. There deserves to be some sensible scientific comment made. […]
Continue readingCold and humid
Saturday was one of those days that the Waikato winter is famous for. Cold and damp – by damp I mean humid as well as raining – in fact the kind of weather that reminds you that you are living in an area that used to be one massive swamp. The sort of dampness that […]
Continue readingFallstreak cloud
Those of you who check out the NZ metservice website frequently, may remember last week’s ‘photo-of-the-week’: It’s of fallstreak cloud, and this example was spotted by my mother-in-law, Barbara Seccombe, off the coast from New Plymouth recently. (Photo credit to my father-in-law, Wally Seccombe, used with permission). It’s not something you see everyday, so I asked my brother […]
Continue readingWild weather in Waikato
Well, those of you living in the central North Island will probably have some idea already of what I’m going to say, but, for those of you who don’t, I’ll start by saying that the weather here has been rather predictable this week. We’ve had three tropical-style days in a row, with a fourth shaping […]
Continue readingBack to the long-neglected blog
Well, I’m back in at work now after three weeks and four and a half thousand kilometres. Pleased to discover that in my absence the house hadn’t burnt down, there had been no floods and Christmas presents hadn’t been stolen. So it’s now back to trawling through three weeks’ worth of emails, catching up with […]
Continue readingThe We(s)t Coast
Back online briefly – blogging is a bit tricky from campsites – not all of them have wireless broadband connections yet – particularly on the West Coast. For those non-New Zealanders, ‘West Coast’ refers to the west coast of the South Island, which I have now driven the length of. Or as much as is […]
Continue readingThe final frontier
New Zealand is, hopefully, just a few days away from becoming a space-nation. The private company Rocket Lab (what a great name – I like names that describe what a business actually does) aims to put up its Atea-1 rocket from Great Mercury Island sometime around November 30th. The payload will reach an altitude of […]
Continue readingI hate thunderstorms
The speed of sound in air is about 330 metres per second (which means it takes three seconds to go one kilometre). So count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder, divide by three, and you have approximately your range from the lightning in kilometres. (Divide by five for miles). So, the lightning that […]
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