Category Archives: weather

Fog droplets

17 Friday Jan 2025

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Our weather is currently see-sawing between days of bright blue skies and days of heavy grey gloom. Today, we have the former and it’s a delight to be out, soak up the vitamin D, and feel the warmth of the winter sun but, yesterday, the fog was so thick all day that the fog horn was blaring in the Bristol Channel and you could barely see more than 20 feet in front of you. Still, even fog brings with it small scenes of exquisite beauty …

The structures of cobwebs were highlighted by their covering of water droplets.

This was purely accidental: I love how the large water droplet in the centre is reflecting an Ivy leaf.

Ivy berries dripped with beads of water

Mosses growing in a gap in a wall looked like miniature sculptures with the sparkling coatings of water

Solar halo

28 Thursday Mar 2024

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Something completely different today, something I haven’t seen for a while due to the frequent lack of sun, something I’m sure many of you have seen in your skies. This is a solar halo, also known simply as halo or circular halo or 22° halo (because it has an apparent radius of approximately 22° around the sun, or the moon, in which case it would be a lunar halo, obviously). These haloes occur when light is refracted and reflected by ice crystals in the atmosphere. (Wikipedia has a more technical mathematical explanation, particularly of the 22° aspect of this phenomenon, if you’re so inclined.)

240328 solar halo

A cool cloud

24 Tuesday Jan 2023

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I had no idea what type of cloud this was but, luckily, one of my fellow local birders is much more knowledgeable about such things. Peter wrote: ‘I think they’re fall streaks from a contrail where ice crystals drop out of the cloud and get drifted by the winds aloft. Normally seen dropping from cirrus or other high-level clouds.’

230124 cloud (1)

As the cloud drifted overhead, it came to look more and more like a magnificent gigantic feather. (The photo below was taken with my phone, which is why the colours look a bit different from the photo above.)

230124 cloud (2)

Leaves as lungs

07 Monday Nov 2022

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I’m not actually a fan of mud. It clings to my shoes, leads to more frequent clothes washing, makes pathways impassable, occasionally causes me to slip and slide and fall over on my backside. But, when I noticed a patch of fallen leaves lying in mud, I rather liked how they looked, how the mud helped to highlight the veins. And, when I got home and looked more closely at my photographs, this one leaf looked to me like a lung. And so I manipulated the image, cropping the photo then flipping it horizontally and pasting the two parts together. Et voilà!

221107 muddy leaves

The big wet

19 Tuesday Jan 2021

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We’re half way through Storm Christoph – it drenched much of the country last night and is forecast to blast us again later today and all of tomorrow. It’s times like these I am thankful I live in a town that’s mostly built on a clifftop, though even here the heavy rainfall has caused surface flooding on the already sodden ground. I can enjoy the reflections but my thoughts are with those much less fortunate.

210119 big wet (3)

Freezing

09 Saturday Jan 2021

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We’ve been experiencing sub-zero overnight temperatures over the past week or so and, some days, when the cloud or fog is particularly thick and dense, the daytime temperatures have also been very low. Still, I was surprised to see, on Thursday’s walk, when freezing fog had rolled in off the Bristol Channel, that the west lake at Cosmeston had partly frozen over. The birds looked a little confused by the conditions as well.

210109 freezing

309/366 Seedheads, 4

04 Wednesday Nov 2020

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If you thought I’d exaggerated about how wet last month was, it’s official – Derek, the Welsh BBC weatherman, yesterday tweeted that ‘October was wetter than average in Wales with 208mm of rain’. Temperatures and sunshine were also below normal, and, having just returned from a long local walk, I can tell you it’s very squelchy out there. Still, the wet has its compensations as today’s seedheads testify.

201104 seedhead (1)201104 seedhead (2)201104 seedhead (3)201104 seedhead (4)