Learning about weather

I have just completed a FREE! ‘Learn About Weather‘ course, and slightly to my surprise I think I have learned some things about the weather!

Learning

Being an autodidact in the fields of Weather and Climate, I have been taught by an idiot. So ‘attending’ online courses is a genuine pleasure.

All I have to do is to listen – and re-listen – and then answer the questions. Someone else has selected the topics they feel are most important and determined the order of presentation.

Taking a course on-line allows me to expose my ignorance to no-one but myself and the course-bot. And in this low-stress environment it is possible to remember the sheer pleasure of just learning stuff.

Previously I have used the FutureLearn platform, for courses on Global Warming, Soil, and Programming in Python. These courses have been relatively non-technical and excellent introductions to subjects of which I have little knowledge. I have also used the Coursera platform for a much more thorough course on Global Warming.

So what did I learn? Well several things about about why Global Circulation Cells are the size they are, the names of the clouds, and how tornadoes start to spin. But perhaps the best bit was finally getting my head around ‘weather fronts’.

Fronts: Warm and Cold

I had never understood the terms ‘warm front’ and ‘cold front’ on weather forecasts. I had looked at the charts with the isobars and thought that somehow the presence or absence of ‘a front’ could be deduced by the shapes of the lines. I was wrong. Allow me to try to explain my new insight.

Air Mixing

Air in the atmosphere doesn’t mix like air in a room. Air in a room generally mixes quite thoroughly and quite quickly. If someone sprays perfume in one corner of the room, the perfume spreads through the air quickly.

But on a global scale, air doesn’t mix quickly. Air moves around as ‘big blobs’ and mixing takes place only where the blobs meet. These areas of mixing between air in different blobs are called ‘fronts’

In the ‘mixing region’ between the two blobs, the warm – generally wet – air meets the cold air and the water vapour condenses to make clouds and rain. So fronts are rain-forming regions.

Type of front

However it is unusual for two blobs of air to sit still. In general one ‘blob’ of air is ‘advancing’ and the other is ‘retreating’.

This insight was achieved just after the First World War and so the interfaces between the blobs were referred to as ‘fronts’ after the name for the interface between fighting armies. 

• If the warm air is advancing, then the front is called a warm front, and
• if the cold air is advancing, then the front is called a cold front.

Surprisingly cold fronts and warm fronts are quite different in character.

Warm Fronts 

When a blob of warm air advances, because it tends to be less dense than the cold air, it rises above the cold air.

Thus the mixing region extends ahead of the location on the ground where the temperature of the air will change.

The course told me the slope of the mixing region was shallow, as low as 1 in 150. So as the warm air advances, there is a region of low, rain-forming cloud that can extend for hundreds of kilometres ahead of it.

So on the ground, what we experience is hours of steady rain, and then the rain stops as the temperature rises.

Cold Fronts 

When a blob of cold air advances, because it tends to be more dense than the warm air, it slides below it. But sliding under an air mass is harder than gliding above it – I think this is because of friction with the ground.

As a result there is a steep mixing region which extends a little bit ahead, and a short distance behind the location on the ground where the temperature of the air changes.

So as the cold air advances, there is a region of intense rain just before and for a short time after.

So on the ground what we experience are stronger, but much shorter, rain events at just about the same time as the temperature falls. There generally follows some clearer air – at least for a short while.

Data

I had assumed that because of the messy nature of reality compared to theory, real weather data would look nothing like what the simple models above might lead me to expect. I was wrong!

As I was learning about warm and cold fronts last weekend (10 March 2019) by chance I looked at my weather station data and there – in a single day – was evidence for what I was learning – a warm front passing over at about 6:00 a.m. and then a cold front passing over at about 7:00 p.m.

• You can look at the data from March 10th and zoom in using this link to Weather Underground.

This is the general overview of the air temperature, humidity, wind speed, rainfall and air pressure data. The left-hand side represents midnight on Saturday/Sunday and the right-hand side represents midnight on Sunday/Monday.

The warm front approaches overnight and reaches Teddington at around 6:00 a.m.:

• Notice the steady rainfall from midnight onwards, and then as the rain eases off, the temperature rises by about 3 °C within half an hour.

The cold front reaches Teddington at around 7:00 p.m.:

• There is no rain in advance of the front, but just as the rain falls – the temperature falls by an astonishing 5 °C!

Of course there is a lot of other stuff going on. I don’t understand how these frontal changes relate to the pressure changes and the sudden rise and fall of the winds as the fronts pass.

But I do feel I have managed to link what I learned on the course to something I have seen in the real world. And that is always a good feeling.

P.S. Here’s what the Met Office have to say about fronts…