Weather and Natural Phenomena

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Beaufort wind force scale

The Beaufort scale was devised in 1805.

The 'conditions on land' were copied from an old reference book. Note that it confidently states that you don't get hurricane force winds except in tropical revolving storms, and even force 11 is seldom found in England. Global warming seems to be proving that wrong. But I find the descriptions vivid, and you can use them today to estimate wind speed. I've altered the descriptions to suit the modern ones (which only happen for force 8 and above). The old descriptions had force 11 as Storm rather than Violent storm, for example. Also the wind speed for hurricane used to be 75m.p.h, but now it's 73 m.p.h.

I have rightly been brought to book for the previous statement about global warning by a correspondent: "Hurricane force winds are common in N Scotland and I don't think this owes much to global warming. It's the reason traditional croft house roofs are constructed of solid planks or sarking with every single slate nailed and probably clipped as well, whereas southern roofs are often a lattice of lightwight battens with only a few slates nailed, relying on the weight to hold them in place. I recall winds over 120mph on the north coast in about 1990. It was impossible to stand up outside. I had to crawl over the ground to fetch in the peats with debris ricocheting like bullets! But not one slate shifted, whereas a Surrey bungalow would have been in pieces in the Pentland Firth. Historical wind records would be interesting to see, but I'm inclined to think that these building standards were only maintained in such a poor region because centuries of experience proved them necessary."

Wikipedia has slightly different and Americanised descriptions, including references to 'swaying skyscrapers' (force 7), 'damage to circus tents' (force 9) and 'structural damage to mobile homes and poorly constructed sheds and barns' (force 12). Rather sniffy, that last description one feels! But then America does know what seriously strong winds are.

The 'conditions at sea' were copied from a booklet given out on a Channel ferry. It also said "Wave heights quoted are approximately those that may be expected in the open sea. In enclosed waters the waves will be smaller and steeper. Fetch, depth, swell, heavy rain and tide will also affect their height, and there will also usually be a time lag between any increase in the wind and the consequent increase in the sea." Wikipedia's descriptions are similar, but don't have the sea horses! The height of the waves are obviously converted from metric, but since this is supposed to be a website about Imperial units, I insist on using m.p.h (miles per hour) and feet.

There is a specific hurricane scale. From the BBC:

Waves

World Meteorological Organization sea state code:

I like the "Phenomenal"!

Character of the sea swell:

The direction from which the swell is coming should be recorded. Unless, presumably, it's confused....

Temperature

To convert between different systems of measuring temperature, use this convertor below, which gives an answer rounded to 2 decimal places.

The old way of measuring temperature in Britain was Fahrenheit. Even when Celsius became the official way of measuring temperature, for example in weather forecasts, the forecasters still gave the Fahrenheit as well for many years. Even today, they sometimes give Fahrenheit to emphasise a particular extreme temperature.

From the brilliant xkcd website:

The BBC programme QI (which stands for Quite Interesting) has pointed out that British people tend to use Celsius when talking about cold temperatures ("It was minus four last night.") but Fahrenheit for hot temperatures ("The temperature must be in the 90s today.") It is quite true. This could be because a temperature of 25° is ambiguous. 25°C is a hot day in Britain (so we use Fahrenheit) and 25°F is a cold day (so we use Celsius). It is also true that you can detect 10°F difference of temperature. A temperature of 70°F is distinctly cooler than 80°F. The jump from 20°F to 25°C seems too small. On the other hand, it is definitely gratifying to high-light below freezing as negative, and so Celsius. Body temperature is more impressive as Fahrenheit ("I have a temperature of over a hundred!") Britain has other cases of mixed units. In volume, the British drink pints of beer and milk, yet all other liquids are sold by litre (fruit juice, wine, water, petrol, etc.) We measure small lengths in millimetres, but large distances in miles. We weigh our food in kilograms and ourselves in stone and pounds. Either we are very stupid, or very clever!

Not really about weather, but we are talking about temperature...

I tend to assume that 100° F is a serious temperature or fever.
I must admit that body temperature is the only thing that I find hard to do in metric. It all seems a bit fiddly, with decimal points involved.

Remember not to take the temperature after exercise, or after eating or drinking anything, especially a hot drink!

Another non-weather temperature conversion - cookers (or stoves) use one of three different systems for oven temperatures.

The Celsius figure is approximate. The Fahrenheit is old-fashioned. The Regulo is still there on some new gas stoves, I am pleased to see!

The second method takes more steps, but has a pleasing symmetry. It comes from the completely useless piece of information: - 40°C = - 40°F.

A correspondent has added these pleasing palindromes (reversals): 16°C = 61°F and 28°C = 82°F

Accurate conversion is all very well, but sometimes we hear a temperature and want to convert into the other system quickly, without having to multiply or divide by nine. Also, the answer tends to have decimals in, whereas most of us just want to know whether tomorrow's weather forecast is hot or cool! So here is a very rough approximation, within 5 deg C. I give the accurate value for the freezing point of water, because I am a gardener, so I think that frosts are important!

Frivolous items about the weather

There is a story (true or not, I don't know) that Innuit and other Northern people have a large number of words for snow. This is considered surprising, but when you think of it, the British have a lot of words for rain:

I've left out "raw" because I'm not quite sure how much rain is associated with it. It's more connected with wind (a "lazy" wind - see above) and cold. But there's definitely some drizzle connected with it. Cold drizzle (or even fog, see below) stinging your cold face...

After an article on the BBC website on this topic, I've divided out common terms (defined as those I've heard of!) above, and dialect and other nation terms below. I have given a rough indication of location, but this will be vague - Scottish terms might spread south, for example. I'm guessing some of the meanings - please let me know if I've got any wrong.

It has been pointed out that almost any expression of the form "it's ***** it down" is understood to mean that it's raining. I'm not sure whether some of the above expressions fall into that category.

I have not included hail or snow in this list as they are definitely frozen in the air, so different. However, Dictionary Corner in Radio Times gave the following Scottish terms for snow: "feefle" meaning to swirl, and "flindrikin" for a light snow shower. A "flother" and a "figgerin" are single flakes that usually promise more to come. To "nester", "driffle" and "skift" all mean to begin to snow. An "unbrak" is the beginning of a thaw, and "snaw-brue" is melted snow. Regional English has "heller" for a bitterly cold winter's day. "Crump" means to walk on compacted snow, and "niveous" is a snow covered landscape (from Latin niveus meaning snow-white).

If you can think of other more, do let me know! Some of the above have already been suggested by correspondents.

Other weather doesn't seem to attract the same vividness of lanuage from the Brits. There is "a bit of a blow" (probably a gale), "white stuff" (snow), "rain with lumps in" (either hail or sleet), "what is that mysterious round yellow thing in the sky?" (acidic comment during a poor summer).

Comment overheard at an event during the wet summer of 2012: "The main difference between summer and winter in this country is the temperature of the rain."

"How do you know it's raining cats and dogs?" - "Poodles in the road!"

Military expression: "If it ain't raining, it ain't training."

In the Fens: "February fills the dykes." A dyke is a ditch dug round the outside of a field to drain it. Many Cambridge colleges by the river - the Backs - have dykes round their land. Winter is supposed to be the wet time, when the aquifers (under-ground water supplies) refill.

There was a horrific smog in 1952 which lasted 4 days and caused the deaths of thousands. It led directly to the Clean Air Acts which cleaned up the atmosphere. These fogs really were yellow. There were smogs in the late 1950s when I lived in South London. We had to wrap scarves round our mouths when we went outside, and I remember a smog so thick that standing on the pavement (sidewalk), I couldn't see the kerb of the pavement on the other side of a narrow road.
A correspondent wrote: "In what I believe was the last really bad episode of Smog, my father picked me up from school to go with him to drive to visit my grandmother who was dying. On the way home, the smog was so thick he had me lean out of the passenger window to watch the kerb as he could not see where the road went. The journey was quite frightening and we drove in and out of numerous bus stops! The next morning in school, I noticed that the left sleeve of my blazer was black instead of navy blue. A friend who rode his scooter home from work that same day reported later that his camel-colored duffle coat was completely black on the front when he arrived home! This certainly confirms the presence of a lot of smoke in the fog."
T.S. Eliot wrote about London smog in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

I have already described Wales as a unit of area (as in "a giant iceberg as big as Wales"). However, I have also heard of it as a unit of rainfall. Some rain forest was described as being "three times as wet as Wales".

This came frm a BBC article: "It's looking a bit black over Bill's mother's" is often heard in the English Midlands when dark clouds appear on the horizon, heralding rain. But who is Bill? Some believe "Bill" refers to William Shakespeare, whose mother Mary Arden lived in Stratford-Upon-Avon. However, the smart money is on Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and king of Prussia, abdicating at the end of World War One. Germany's foreign policy at that time echoed Wilhelm's changeable and blustering character, according to the Open University. Black Country poet Brendan Hawthorne said: "If there was stormy weather coming from the East they would say it's black over Bill's mother's." This has a wider scope than this (for a saying I'd never heard of!) "Learn to speak Fen" by Michael Rouse gives the expression as "It looks dark over Will's Mother's". Fenland is north and east of Cambridge.

For those unacquainted with the British climate, we don't have really heavy rain storms. We don't have monsoons, we don't have hurricanes, we don't have typhoons, we aren't a rain forest. We even have droughts sometimes (the sort of droughts where we are not allowed to water the lawn with hosepipes rather than real shortages of water). But it can rain at any time of year and it is frequently cloudy. Britain is a green place and we love our gardens. Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Lake District (Cumberland in England) get perhaps more than their fair share. Wherever there is a local mountain, then you are told (as if you've never heard it before) that "If you can see that mountain, then it's about to rain. If you can't, then it's already raining." In Dublin, I heard a lovely description of one of their public gardens "Planted by man, watered by God".

Having mentioned British droughts, there were a couple of dry winters leading up to the Spring on 2012, and water levels in reservoirs were low, so some of the British water companies declared a drought and we weren't allowed to use hosepipes to water the garden. The British weather promptly, almost patriotically, proceeded to give us the wettest Spring since records began, continuing on into July. Increasingly acidic comments were made about "the wettest drought since records began" and "Can we use hosepipes to help remove floodwater from our houses?" Some people even started to use 'droughting' to mean heavy rain (but I don't think that will last, so I haven't included it in the list).

The Misery Index was suggested in correspondence to the Times (some time ago) as a classification of the discomfort endured during a wet English summer. In this index, the balmy air and blue sky of the Mediterranean are indicated as 100. Values below 30 call for immediate emigration to escape from the grey skies and continuous rain in Britain.

The English do not 'do' snow. Scotland has frequent snow, and even manages ski slopes. But parts of England can have winters with no snow at all, and snow that lasts more than 24 hours in Southern England can cause all sorts of chaos. In 1991 there was a fall of snow and the train service (at that time called British Rail) said "we are having particular problems with the type of snow". It was soft and powdery, and not deep enough for snow ploughs. It found its way into electrical systems and caused short circuits and traction motor damage. This was gleefully reported as "the wrong kind of snow". The British, who think that there is only one type of snow, now use the phrase to mean a lame excuse. Silly us.

And to finish off - from the Met Office:

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service's Glossary

This is American rather than British, so it's further down the page. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 'do' hurricanes - see National Hurricane Center (told you they were American...)

They also 'do' the National Weather Service. Their website has a glossary of weather terms that they use. For example: "a blizzard is a storm which contains large amounts of snow or blowing snow, with winds in excess of 35 mph (16km/h) and visibility of less than 1/4 mile for an extended period of time (at least 3 hours)." By the way, the Oxford English Dictionary says that one meaning of blizzard is "A sharp blow or knock; a shot" and that may be the original meaning.

Earthquake

It may seem strange to put this on a weather page, but the descriptions are rather like the Beaufort Scale, so I thought they belonged on the same page. The Mercalli intensity scale is a scale used for measuring the intensity of an earthquake. The Richter magnitude is mostly obsolete, although frequently quoted.

Rictus scale

This is a joke suggested by Tom Weller.

Native American full moon names

The moon shouldn't really be here either, and these are native American rather than British, but I like them, so here they are!

These names date back to the northern and eastern United States native Americans of a few hundred years ago. These names were applied to the whole month. There were some variations but generally, the same ones were used throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior. European settlers created names of their own.

I've heard Harvest Moon and Hunters Moon used in England. They are often reddish - I was told that this was caused by the dust from the fields which were now free of crops. There is also a bomber's moon. This happens at any time of year. It means a bright full moon which the German bombers of World War II could use to bomb Britain, so it was something that people were frightened of.

© Jo Edkins 2009 - Return to units index