31 August: Named storms

On this date in 1954 Hurricane Carol, the first major named storm, hit New England, killing 70. 10 facts about named storms in the UK.

1. The Met Office in the UK has been naming storms since 2015. The practice has been around since the 1950s in America.

2. In order to be given a name, a storm must be big and liable to cause a lot of damage. If it doesn’t merit an amber or red warning, it doesn’t get a name.

3. If you’ve ever wondered why some UK storms have rather unusual names, it’s because the Met Office works in partnership with Met Éireann in Ireland and KNMI, the Dutch National Weather Forecasting Service, with all three contributing names.

4. The convention is usually for the storms to get named in alphabetical order, alternating between male and female names. That said, if a significant enough storm originates elsewhere, in Spain, for example, it will keep the name it was given there, even if it doesn’t fit the UK system. Storm Jorge is one example.

5. A list of storm names for the coming year is published in September, covering the period up to the end of August the following year.

6. In 2023-24, some storms were named after heroes who helped others during previous severe storms.

7. So who decides which names get included on the list? The general public are invited to submit names and the most popular suggestions get used. (Which begs the question why Stormy McStormface has never been used!)

8. There are some names which are automatically ruled out. Names beginning with Q, U, X, Y, or Z will never be used, because there simply aren’t enough of them. Names that are too difficult to pronounce will be ruled out as well, as will brand names or those that could be considered controversial or political.

9. If you want to suggest a name for a storm, email nameourstorms@metoffice.gov.uk or use the online form.

10. Reasons given for names which appear on recent lists include: Fionnuala: "My daughter's name... Good strong name! What you'd expect from a storm"; Wubbo a tribute to Wubbo Ockels, the first Dutchman to fly through space; Stevie: inspired by a girl named after the Stevie Nicks song Dreams, which includes the line: “Thunder only happens when it’s raining”; Oscar: after a Cat described as “a good boy, but crazy when he gets the zoomies”; and Dave: “My beloved husband who can snore three times louder than any storm!”

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

23 March: Wind

Today is World Meteorological Day. Since I prepare these posts several weeks in advance, I’m writing this while sheltering from Storm Eowyn, which prompted me to find ten facts about wind.

1. Wind is the movement of air from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure. The reason wind even exists is the fact that the Sun heats the surface of the Earth unevenly. As air heats up, it rises, causing a void underneath into which cooler air will move.

2. "Anemos" is the Greek word for wind. This gives us the words anemology (the study of wind), anemious (a plant which grows in windy conditions) and anemometer (an instrument for measuring wind).

3. In Greek mythology, the anemoi were four wind gods, causing wind from the four compass points (They were called Boreas, Notus, Eurus, and Zephyrus). Other wind gods include: Vayu the Vedic and Hindu God of Wind; Njörðr (Norse wind god); Stribog (Slavic god of winds, sky and air); Fūjin (Japanese wind god); and Venti (Roman wind gods).

4. The word Kamikaze actually translates as “divine wind”. The term was first used for a series of typhoons that saved Japan from two Mongol fleets under Kublai Khan in 1274 and 1281. In England, the wind that thwarted the Spanish Armada was dubbed “Protestant Wind”.

5. Wind power now provides four per cent of the world’s energy. It’s not a new idea, though. The first house in the world to have its Electricity supplied by wind power was in Kincardineshire, Scotland in 1887; and the ancient Sinhalese of Anuradhapura and Sri Lanka used monsoon winds to power furnaces as early as 300 BCE. A Windmill was used to power an organ in the first century.

6. The convention for describing the direction of the wind is to call it by the direction it comes from. Therefore, a westerly or western wind is blowing from west to east.

7. The windiest place in the world is Antarctica, but the highest verified gust of wind was in Barrow Island, Australia on 10 April, 1996. The gust was 253 miles/408 kilometers per hour. The strongest observed winds on a planet in the Solar System are on Neptune and Saturn.

8. Trade winds are steady winds flowing toward the equator, named after the 16th-century Portuguese ships which travelled east to west to trade goods. Jet streams are powerful winds blowing about ten kilometres above the earth; they were discovered by World War II fighter pilots who found their speed reduced when they flew against these winds.

9. Wind chill is the sensation of cold produced by the wind on exposed skin as the air motion speeds up the rate of heat transfer from the body to the surrounding atmosphere. Its values are always lower than the measured air temperature.

10. When there are high winds, the advice is always to keep pets indoors, but sailors of old had a superstition that storms were the result of someone shutting a Cat up indoors on shore. They also believed that the ship’s cat could start storms through magic stored in its tail, so you’d better not treat it badly. If a ship's cat fell or was thrown overboard, it was believed it would summon a terrible storm to sink the ship. If the ship survived, it would be cursed with nine years of bad luck.

See also: Fog, Rain, Snow, Hail, Lightning, Ice, Rainbows, The Beaufort Scale.

Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)

Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.

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29 June: Mud

Today is International Mud Day. Ten things you never knew about mud:

1. Mud is defined as a liquid or semi-liquid mixture of water and any combination of different kinds of soil (loam, silt, and Clay).

2. Sedimentary rock such as shale or mudstone is basically ancient mud which has hardened.

3. In ancient times, people built houses out of mud, or turned the stuff into bricks. The Egyptians would place a mixture of mud and straw into a rectangular mould and leave it to dry in the sun.

4. Worms, Frogs, Snails, clams, and Crayfish are among the animals which make their homes in mud.

5. Bigger animals like Hippopotamuses, Pigs, Rhinoceros, water buffalo and Elephants use it as sunscreen. They bathe in mud and let it dry on their skin.

6. Mississippi mud pie is a chocolate based dessert pie, and “mud” is generally a chocolate or cornstarch-based sludge popular with children. Neither contain any actual mud.

7. Children like to play in mud, which may be a nightmare for parents but it’s actually quite beneficial. Mycobacterium vaccae found in mud increase human serotonin levels, which is why kids enjoy playing in it so much. Meanwhile playing in mud can strengthen a child’s immune system.

8. Some American towns, including Albuquerque and Gillette, Wyoming, hold a yearly event in which participants play volleyball in a giant mud pit.

9. The word mud has existed in the English language since the 1400s. While on the subject of words, “bedrabble” means to make dirty with rain or mud; “belute” means to splatter with mud; daggle means to drag in mud; and “plodge” means to wade through mud.

10. The phrase “as clear as mud” dates back to 1804, and the toast “Here’s mud in your eye” first appeared in 1927.

The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.

The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

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21 July: Hail

On this date in 2021 hailstones the size of golf balls hit Essex. 10 things you might not know about hail:

1. Hail is formed in thunder clouds where there can be winds blowing upwards. The temperature in these upper reaches of clouds can be below freezing, so raindrops forced upwards by the updrafts into this zone will freeze into hailstones.

2. This can happen several times as the hailstone catches the upward wind again on its way down. One source described hailstones in a cloud as being like balls in a lottery machine. The process is repeated until the ball of ice is too heavy for the wind to blow it back up and that’s when it falls to earth. Hence, the stronger the wind in the cloud, the bigger the hailstones. According to the US National Weather Service, upward wind speeds of 64 mph will support a hailstone as large as a golf ball, while a Grapefruit-sized stone needs a 98-mph updraft.

3. In order for hail to form the temperature of the top of the cumulonimbus cloud must be colder than -20C.

4. If you cut a large hailstone in half it has rings, like an Onion or a tree trunk, so you can tell how many times it bounced to the top of the cloud. Some rings are milky White while others are clear. Clear layers form when the hailstone is in a part of the cloud where the air temperature is just below freezing so the water slowly freezes over the hailstone and air bubbles can escape. Opaque layers of ice form when the air temperature is well below freezing and a water droplet freezes immediately upon colliding with the hailstone, trapping the air bubbles.

5. An ice crystal with a diameter of more than 5 mm (0.20 in) is considered a hailstone.

6. They can get a lot bigger than that. The largest hailstone in the UK fell in Horsham, West Sussex, on 5 September 1958 and weighed 142g. In the US an even bigger one fell in Vivian, South Dakota on 23 July 2010. It weighed 0.88kg and was 20cm in diameter, about the size of a volleyball.

7. Needless to say, hailstones that big can cause a lot of damage as they can fall at speeds ranging from 44 to 72 mph and some monsters might even reach 100mph. This can damage buildings, vehicles parked outside, crops and can even kill people. 250 people in India were killed by falling hail in 1888.

8. Mountain ranges and high elevations in mid latitudes get the most hail. In North America, hail is most common in the area where Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming meet, This is known as "Hail Alley". Central Oklahoma has reported the most 1-inch-plus hail events in the U.S. since 2015, with over 2,200. In Europe, southern and western Germany, northern and eastern France and northern Italy get the most hailstorms, but the world prize goes to Kericho, Kenya, which experiences hailstorms, on average, on 50 days annually. Kericho reached the world record for 132 days of hail in one year.

9. In the UK, we get hail in summer. Hail in winter is more likely to be graupel, which is softer than hail and forms when supercooled water droplets add a layer of ice or rime to falling snowflakes.

10. In the Middle Ages, church bells would be rung in an attempt to prevent hail and preserve the crops.

Character birthday

Dorothy Mayfield, Ultra Grav’s mother.

22 April: April Showers Day

Today is April Showers Day. Here are 10 facts about 10 facts about rain:

1. What is the difference between rain and drizzle? The size of the droplets. To be classed as drizzle, droplets must be less than 0.5mm in diameter; that’s larger than the droplets in the clouds, but smaller than regular raindrops.
2. The Oxford English Dictionary contains 462 words for which the definition contains the word “rain”, including to drouk (drench with heavy rain) and mizzle (light rain with small drops).
3. Ask someone to draw a raindrop and they’ll probably produce a teardrop shape. However, raindrops are not that shape at all. They start out spherical, but as they fall, air resistance causes the bottom of the drop to flatten so that they are more like the shape of a jelly bean or hamburger bun.
4. How long does it take a raindrop to fall? It’s hard to say as it depends on the height of the clouds and the size of the raindrops, but the average speed of a falling raindrop is 14mph, so assuming a cloud base height of around 2,500 feet, a raindrop would take just over 2 minutes to reach the ground. Drizzle or mizzle, however, might take 7 minutes to hit the ground.
5. Or it might not ever hit the ground at all. In some hot, dry places they get what’s known as “phantom rain” where drops start to fall from a cloud but evaporate before they hit the ground.
6. Botswana is a hot, dry place. In fact, rain is so precious there that their currency is the pula, which is the word for rain in the local language.
7. The wettest place in the world isn’t in England. The wettest place in the world is Mawsynram in the Maghalaya State of India. It gets an average of 11,971 mm rainfall each year. The UK's average annual rainfall, in comparison, is 1154 mm. The place which gets the least precipitation is Antarctica, where they get just 165mm of rain and Snow in a year.
8. The wettest day recorded in Britain was 5 December 2015 when Honister Pass in Cumbria recorded 341.4 mm of rain in a single day, during Storm Desmond.
9. That aroma you get after a shower of rain is called Petrichor. It’s not the smell of the rain itself, as Water has no smell, but rather the oil that bubbles up from the earth when it gets wet after a dry spell.
10. On Venus, it rains sulphuric acid or methane. There’s even a planet 5,000 light years away where it rains liquid Iron.

Character birthday

Bagatelle, aka Wanda Frost, a member of Combat Team Omega. Her power is probability altering. She is thought to be a former nurse, but is known to have worked in the sex industry.

22 October: 10 Facts about Fog

Today is the first day of the month of fog in the French Revolutionary Calendar. So here are ten facts about fog:

1. First of all, what is fog? Fog is tiny droplets of Water and/or ice crystals suspended in the air near the ground when the dew point and air temperature difference is less than 4 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 Celsius). If it formed in the sky it would be called a stratus cloud. Which brings us to the question, what’s the difference between fog and mist? According to the Met Office, if you can see for more than 1,000 metres it's mist, but if the visibility drops below 1,000 metres it's fog.
2. Fog contains around 0.5 ml of water per cubic metre. If you filled an Olympic sized swimming pool with fog and condensed the water, you’d get just 1.25 litres of water (or slightly more than 2 pints).
3. Grand Banks, an area of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland is said to be the foggiest place in the world. It’s where the cold Labrador Current from the north and the much warmer Gulf Stream from the south meet, causing fog. The area has more than 200 days of fog every year.
4. There is such a thing as a fog bow which is like a Rainbow but happens when sunlight falls on fog. They are fainter and slightly harder to see than rainbows, because the water droplets are smaller, but you are more likely to see the complete circle. You might even see your distorted shadow inside it. This is called The Brocken Spectre.
5. During WWII weather reports had to be censored so that enemy Submarines couldn’t find out about the weather conditions. Even commentators of sporting events weren’t allowed to mention the weather. One Chicago radio announcer managed to cover a whole football game, in which the fog was so thick he couldn’t even see the field, without mentioning the fog or the weather once. Fog can actually be useful in warfare as George Washington discovered in 1776 when, fighting a losing battle against the British, he was able to use a heavy fog to get his men away from the scene unseen and avoid heavy casualties. It can also be a nuisance as the RAF in Britain found in WWII. They worked out a system whereby fog could be burned off runways by pumping petrol down the edges and setting Fire to it. Over 450,000 litres of fuel an hour could be burned in this way and the glow from the flames could be seen 100km away.
6. I couldn’t find a date for this but in the UK, a Football match was cancelled once due to fog and everyone went home apart from one of the goalkeepers, a player called Sam Bartram, who didn’t hear the announcement. He stayed at his post in goal for 15 minutes until a policeman came and told him the game was off.
7. It’s possible to catch fog and turn it into drinking water. This is regularly done in the Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the driest places in the world. It once went 173 months without rain but there is often fog from the coast, which the locals call camanchaca, meaning 'creeping fog.' People catch it in large nets with 1mm holes which catch the droplets and collects them in a gutter. An average size fog catcher of 40 m3 can capture up to 66 litres of water a day.
8. They not only get enough water from this to drink, but there’s enough left over to make Beer. There’s a brewery there which makes 24,000 litres a year of its signature beer Atrapaniebla (meaning "Fog Catcher"). In San Francisco, another place known for its fog, there is a type of vodka made from San Francisco fog. And in Italy there is a wine growing area that is frequently covered in thick fog. While they don’t actually use the fog to make the Wine, the fog does mean the Grapes ripen later in the year. The wine from this area is named after the Italian word for fog, 'nebbia'.
9. In London, before the Clean Air Act, they’d get a type of fog called a “pea souper” which was yellow and so thick you couldn’t see the ground. Needless to say this type of fog was full of toxic chemicals and a pea souper in 1952 killed 4,000 people in five days. Thanks to the Clean Air Act, these fogs are a thing of the past. There hasn’t been a pea souper in London since 1962.
10. Fog affects how fast we think we are driving. In normal conditions, we are able to judge speed using clues such as trees or buildings in our peripheral vision. It’s all to do with contrast, which is greatly reduced when it’s foggy, so drivers tend to think they are driving more slowly than they really are and may drive faster as a result, just when they should be slowing down.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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15 June: Lightning

It is on this date in 1752 that Benjamin Franklin may have carried out his lightning kite experiment. It's also National Electricity Day - so here are some facts about lightning.

1. There are around 3,000,000 flashes every day, or about 44 strikes every second. The place on Earth which gets the most lightning is Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, where large thunderstorms occur on as many as 160 nights a year, with an average of 28 lightning strikes per minute lasting up to 10 hours at a time. That means as many as 40,000 lightning strikes in a single night. This unusual weather is caused by warm winds from the Caribbean Sea meeting cool ones from the Andes.
2. Lightning is caused by an imbalance of electrical charges between clouds and the ground, or within the clouds themselves. Drops of Water or particles of ice or Snow in a storm cloud collide, producing a negative charge in the cloud while objects on the ground become positively charged. Lightning is basically nature trying to remedy the imbalance. That said, a positive chagre at the top of a storm cloud can cause lightning as well, about 5% of the time. So called "positive lightning" is stronger and more dangerous. It can even travel up to 10 miles from the cloud it originated in and strike, literally, out of the Blue.
3. A lightning bolt can contain up to one billion volts of electricity. It's also extremely hot - it can heat the air around it to temperatures five times hotter than the Sun’s surface. It's this heat which causes thunder, as the air around the lightning flash expands. When lightning strikes rock or sand, it can fuse the minerals within into a tube called a fulgurite or "lightning fossil". It's also the reason that a tree struck by lightning can blow apart - the water inside the tree vapourises and expands.
4. While it can be extremely bad for trees, lightning is actually vital for plants in general. They rely on a process called nitrogen fixation in order to absorb nitrogen from the air. Bacteria and algae help with this, but the extreme heat of a lightning strike creates nitrogen oxides which fall as nitorgen rich rain. Some scientists believe there would be no life on Earth at all if not for lightning.
5. About 2,000 people are killed by lightning every year. The chances of being struck by lightning in your lifetime is around one in 5,000. Nine out of ten victims of a lightning strike survive, although they may suffer life changing injuries including a unique skin rash called red Lichtenberg figures, branching, tree-like patterns caused by high voltage electrical discharges passing along the skin. A person struck by lightning doesn't retain the charge, so should you come across someone who's been struck, it's safe to help them.
6. An irrational fear of lightning is known as astraphobia (sometimes also called brontophobia, keraunophobia, or tonitrophobia) and is the third most common phobia in America behind fear of heights and fear of animals.
7. Lightning travels at 270,000 mph, not at the speed of light (although the flash it generates does). Lightning would therefore take 55 minutes to reach the Moon, or could get from London to Bristol in 1.5 seconds.
8. When you see a bolt of lightning, it may seem that it travels down from the cloud to the Earth, but in fact, it's doing the opposite - the positive charge from whatever it is striking travels up to meet the negative charge from the cloud. While the flash may make it look like a thick bolt, the actual width of a lightning bolt is only about 2-3 cm.
9. Because lightning is so frequent, humans have learned to protect their tall buildings and structures from it using lightning conductors. The average house may not have a specific lightning conductor but will be grounded by metal in the structure, gutters and plumbing. Therefore, the safest place to be during a thunderstorm is indoors. That said, a garden shed, bus shelter or other building without plumbing or wiring wouldn't be. A car is safe but not because of the rubber tyres. Rubber tyres, or, indeed, Shoes, offer little or no protection. It is the metal sides of a car that conduct the lightning safely to the ground. It would be inadvisable to touch the metal sides of a car during a storm. In France, up until the late 18th century, people believed that church bells repelled lightning. Bells would often have the words "fulgura frango" inscribed on them, meaning "I chase lightning". If there was a thunderstorm, bell ringers would rush to the church to ring the bells and chase the lightning away. However, a high tower with large metal objects was actually the worst place to be. Between 1753 and 1786 in France, 103 bell-ringers were struck by lightning and killed, so the custom was eventually banned.
10. So how can you reduce your chances of getting hit by lightning? If you see lightning, count the number of seconds which go by before the thunder. Divide this number by five and this is how many miles away the storm is. If you prefer to work with kilometres, divide by three. If that time is 30 seconds or less, the thunderstorm is within six miles (ten kilometers) of you, and you need to get indoors and not come out until at least 30 minutes after the last clap of thunder. If you can't get indoors, avoid being the tallest thing around, or sheltering under the tallest thing around. Indoors, as we know, the plumbing and electrical systems will conduct the lightning, which means it would be a bad idea to take a shower, do laundry or even wash your hands in the middle of a storm. Most of the people who suffer lightning related injuries in the home do so while talking on a landline phone, as the reception systems and wiring conducts lightning.

The Raiders Trilogy

Book One

Book Three

Book Two

   

Power Blaster is a superhero who lives in a dimension not unlike our own, in the mega-nation of Innovia. No-one knows who he is or where his powers come from. 
After saving the life of the President several times, Power Blaster learns that a test of a nuclear warhead to defend the planet against asteroid strikes will have devastating consequences for his world and sets out to prevent it.

Power Blaster's actions lead to an unexpected result - a wormhole opens between his dimension and our own. Anyone in the vicinity is pulled through. People from diverse backgrounds and cultures must co-operate to survive and learn to live with the powers travel through the wormhole has bestowed on some of them.

A stable wormhole is established between the two dimensions. Power Blaster is determined to bring Desi Troyes, the person responsible for the bomb, to justice. Help comes from some rather unexpected sources. Meanwhile, Shanna Douglas sets out on a mission of her own, to find out if there is a cure for the life altering condition the wormhole gave her friend, Benedict Cole. Little does she know that she will stumble upon the secret of Power Blaster's mysterious origins.

24 August: The Shipping Forecast

Today, the British institution known as the Shipping Forecast celebrates its anniversary.

1. What is it? Basically, it's a weather report and forecast for the seas around the British Isles. The Met Office produces it, and it is broadcast four times a day (0520, 1754, 2101 and 0048) on BBC Radio 4.
2. Why Radio 4? Because it is broadcast on longwave and can therefore be clearly received at sea all around the British Isles regardless of weather conditions. Before Radio 4 existed, it was broadcast in the BBC National Programme until the Second World War, and after that on the BBC Light Programme (which became Radio 2). In November 1978, Radio 4 took over Radio 2's longwave frequency and with it, the Shipping Forecast.
3. It started in 1867 as a series of messages sent by telegraph to harbour towns to warn them when a storm was coming. Since 1859, when the steam clipper Royal Charter was wrecked in a strong storm off Anglesey and many people died, there had been efforts to communicate storm warnings to shipping, pioneered by Robert FitzRoy who was the captain of Charles Darwin's Beagle and later became an admiral. It wasn't a success at first, and FitzRoy became depressed and frustrated. This coupled with his own financial troubles and poor health, drove him to suicide. He didn't live to see his efforts bear fruit, but he does have a sea area named after him.
4. There are 31 sea areas. Many of them are named after coastal features like estuaries (eg. Forth, Tyne, Thames), islands (eg. Wight, Lundy and Hebrides), towns (eg. Dover, Plymouth) and sandbanks (eg. Forties, Dogger and Bailey). German Bight is an indentation on the Northern European shoreline. Rockall and Fastnet are both named after islets. Malin is named after Malin Head, the northernmost point of Ireland. Biscay is named after the Bay of Biscay, and Trafalgar after Cape Trafalgar.
5. The sea areas have changed a little since the early days. Forties, Humber, Dogger, Thames, Wight, Shannon and Hebrides are the only names from the original list still included. Minches was absorbed into Hebrides in 1983; North and South Utsire were added in 1984;and, in 2002, Finisterre became FitzRoy, after the admiral mentioned above. Finisterre comes from the Latin meaning “the end of the earth”, dating back to when people thought the world was flat and any ship going beyond Finisterre would sail off the end of the Earth. The re-naming didn't go down well with the listening public - there was an outcry but the decision was implemented anyway.
6. A piece of music is played before the 0048 broadcast. The piece is called Sailing By and it was written by Ronald Binge in 1962. The purpose of the music is to ensure the Shipping Forecast starts at exactly the same time each night, even if the programming on Radio 4 is running late.
7. There are strict rules about the Shipping Forecast. It can only be 350 words long (although the 0048 edition has 380 because it includes Trafalgar) and takes nine or ten minutes to read. That's why it sounds so cryptic to anyone who has never done a sailing course. For example, "In the English Channel, there are strong winds, followed by a stronger wind in less than twelve hours time with some light rain, but good visibility" is reduced to "Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, four or five, increasing six soon, rain or slight drizzle, good". It always begins with the words "And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at xxxx today." (although some announcers use the date instead of "today". The numbers refer to the Beaufort Scale of wind strength. Imminent means within 6 hours, soon between 6 and 12, and later means after 12 hours. Good, moderate and poor refer to visibility; veering means the wind is changing in a clockwise direction; backing means anti-clockwise. The forecast works clockwise around the 31 areas, from the North of Britain.
8. The forecast is surprisingly popular, listened to regularly by hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom don't even need to know what the weather is going to be like at sea. Strictly speaking, ships don't need it so much these days as they all have forecasting technology on board, but they still listen to check their instruments are working properly. Why do people on land, who often don't even understand the jargon, listen, though? Many people say the soothing voice of the announcer saying familiar words helps them fall asleep, a bit like a bedtime story for grownups. It has been described as being like poetry, or a lullaby; or that it reminds us Brits that we are an island nation with a proud seafaring past; or that it transports you to an exotic faraway place, or makes a person feel safe tucked up in bed while mariners are out there coping with the storms. You realise just how popular it is when a plan to change the broadcast time in 1995, by just 12 minutes, caused such an outcry that there were debates in Parliament about it and the plan was scrapped.
9. It's such an institution that it has been mentioned in dozens of songs, films and TV shows. Blur, Wire, Radiohead, The Prodigy and Jethro Tull have all recorded songs which reference the Shipping Forecast and some of its areas. On TV, in Keeping Up Appearances, Hyacinth phones the Met Office for the shipping forecast before visiting a yacht which is moored on the Thames; and Howard and Hilda in Ever Decreasing Circles use the need to get home in time for it as an excuse to leave a party. In the film and book, Kes, the protagonist calls out "German Bight" as the teacher is calling the register, and calls the name of a classmate, "Fisher" - because German Bight follows Fisher in the forecast. An extract of the Shipping Forecast featured in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London and it even trumps Cricket! During an Ashes match in 2011, moments before the final wicket fell and England won, it was time for the Shipping Forecast - so the live broadcast of the cricket was cut. By the time the cricket broadcast resumed, the match was over.
10. The forecast was taken off air during both world wars, and it was temporarily taken off air for two years in 1993 - causing an outcry, needless to say. Otherwise, it has been on at the same times every day except in 2014, when something went horribly wrong, and even though there was someone reading the forecast, it wasn't broadcast. Thousands of complaints ensued. It has only been broadcast on TV once, in 1993 as part of the Arena Radio Night, when BBC Radio 4 and BBC 2 set up a simultaneous broadcast. Other than that, it's only on TV as a recording used during the closing credits of Rick Stein's Rick Stein’s Seafood Lover’s Guide. There's even a Twitter feed, but that hasn't been updated since 2014. In the 1983 children’s cartoon The Adventures of Portland Bill, many of the characters are named after features in the Shipping Forecast.

NEW!!

Over the Rainbow

'We're not in Trinity anymore,' says Leonard Marx, quoting a line from an old Innovian  movie. The moon is different; the planes flying overhead are different. Nobody has any idea where they are or if it's possible to get home. 

In this strange new world, people from the highly technical Innovia and the less advanced Classica must co-operate in order to survive. In addition, travel through the inter-dimensional wormhole has given some people unusual and unexpected powers.

Innovia mourns the loss of its superhero, Power Blaster, last seen carrying a nuclear bomb to the upper atmosphere away from the inhabited Bird Island. They don't believe he could possibly have survived.  Power Blaster has survived, but is close to death and stranded in the new dimension. He is nursed back to health by a Classican woman, Elena. She has no idea who he is, only that she is falling in love with the handsome stranger.  

Shanna sets out to discover what happened to Nathan Tate, who didn't return from his hiking holiday, not knowing her life is about to be turned inside out and upside down. 

Meanwhile, Desi Troyes, the man responsible for the catastrophe, is at large on the new world, plotting how he can transfer his plans for world domination to the planet he now finds himself on - Earth. 

Available from Amazon and Amazon Kindle

4 July: Tornadoes

In 1643 on this date the first recorded tornado in US hit Essex County, Massachusetts. Here are ten facts about tornadoes.

1. A tornado is a violently rotating column of air which by definition must be in contact with the cloud above and the ground below. A tornado over Water is called a waterspout.
2. The word tornado comes from the Spanish word tronada, which means "thunderstorm". They are also colloquially referred to as "twisters".
3. They happen when a warm front meets a cold front, forming a rotating thunderstorm. While the geography of some parts of the USA make it most likely to be hit by tornadoes (The United States averages around 1200 tornadoes each year, more than any other country) they can happen anywhere except Antarctica. There have even been tornadoes in the UK.
4. Tornado Alley is an area of the US which stretches from western Texas to North Dakota. Here, dry polar air from Canada meets the warm moist tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico. The state which experiences the most tornadoes is Texas which averages 125 a year. Oklahoma gets 57 and Kansas and Florida tie for third place with 55. Oklahoma City holds the record for having been hit by 100 tornadoes. After the US, the country which suffers the most tornadoes is Bangladesh. The ones there are pretty deadly, too. In 1989 the deadliest tornado ever recorded in the world killed around 1300 people there.
5. The deadliest tornado in America was the Tri-State Tornado, which occurred on 18 March 1925. It travelled through parts of Missouri, Illinois and Indiana in 1925 left a path of destruction over 219 miles (352 kilometres) long and killed 695 people. It holds records for longest path length (219 miles, 352 km), longest duration (about 3.5 hours), and fastest forward speed for a significant tornado (73 mph, 117 km/h) anywhere on Earth.
6. Tornadoes are classified according to the Fujita Scale depending on how much damage it does. An F0 tornado does the least amount of damage while F6 is the maximum.
7. A tornado can appear almost invisible until it picks up dust and debris or water. In the northern hemisphere tornadoes usually rotate in a counter-clockwise direction, and in the Southern hemisphere they rotate clockwise. The sound the make has been described as being like a freight train, rushing rapids or waterfall, or a nearby jet engine.
8. There are a lot of myths about tornadoes. One is that they don't occur by rivers or lakes - they do. Another is that they cannot cross mountains - they can. Some say the change in air pressure around a tornado can cause a house to explode unless the Windows are opened. This isn't true either and could even put people in danger as they spend time opening all their windows instead of seeking shelter. 
9. The safest place to be in a tornado is in a basement, ideally the side or corner opposite the tornado's direction of approach (usually the northeast corner). If you don't have a basement, the central-most room on the lowest floor, under the stairs or under a sturdy table. The best thing to do if you're outdoors is lie in a ditch, not, as many believe, under a motorway overpass. If the tornado actually hit the overpass, you'd be in big trouble. Nor should you stay in your car because the car could get tossed about.
10. Tornadoes are most likely to occur between 3 pm and 9 pm, but can occur at any time. While there are warning signs, forecasts are wrong about 70% of the time. There is no evidence that a Green sky definitely means a tornado is coming although it is a phenomenon associated with the kind of severe weather that spawns them.

Secrets and Skies

Jack Ward, President of Innovia, owes his life twice over to the enigmatic superhero, dubbed Power Blaster by the press. No-one knows who Power Blaster is or where he comes from - and he wants it to stay that way.

Scientist Desi Troyes has developed a nuclear bomb to counter the ever present threat of an asteroid hitting the planet. When Ward signs the order giving the go ahead for a nuclear test on the remote Bird Island, he has no inkling of Troyes' real agenda, and that he has signed the death warrants of millions of people.

Although the island should have been evacuated, there are people still there: some from the distant continent of Classica; protesters opposed to the bomb test; and Innovians who will not, or cannot, use their communication devices.

Power Blaster knows he must stop the bomb from hitting the island. He also knows it may be the last thing he ever does.

Meanwhile in Innovia, Ward and his staff gather to watch the broadcast of the test. Nobody, not even Troyes himself, has any idea what is about to happen.

Available from Amazon or Amazon Kindle