Storms over northern France
I was just reading a post on my friend Nik’s website with regard to the current heatwave in Europe (see this article for more details) and I decided to have a look at the max temp for Paris today: it reached 37C at Orly airport - abominably hot for a large city!
I then took a look at the satellite pictures taken today and saw that some gigantic storms had broken out over northern France - click the thumbnail below to see an image taken at 1745 BST (although be warned that it is 600Kb in size).
Source: NOAA Archive Bern, Switzerland
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Dear Jameshurrell,
Great to see that other people are as interested in the weather as me! I too was interested to see the weather patterns changing over France (which I could observe from my own personal weather balloon “The Flying Fish”). Initially I thought that an intense band of altocumulus was going to be driven upwards into a standing wave cumulonimbus, resulting in primeval anti-spiral of mammatus which in turn would lead to intense high pressure and the possibility of dust storms. Instead it looks like the altocumulus has partially discharged into a nimbostratus/stratocumulus plasma causing a surge of cirrus, cirrostratus and cumulus into the mesosphere, from which, of course, the only feasible outcome would be contrails, mammatus, orographic and billow clouds and a light shower!
Keep up the good work!
Lots of love,
Michael.
ps Hope that you don’t get too many sarcastic friends ruining what would otherwise be a good website.
Hurrummph. Thank you Michael. Always good to get visitors to my website from such esteemed personalities! However, even though I have the highest respect for you, I must take issue with your expected outcome of contrails following a surge of cirrus, cirrostratus and cumulus into the mesosphere. Please correct me, but I do believe that contrails are actually formed by jet aeroplanes…!? I found this superb website (http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/wxwise/class/contrail.html), to be a great help with regard to contrails.
Hi James,
I’m not convinced that that first comment really came from Michael Fish - the misuse of the term stratocumulus gave it away! It seems more likely that Sian Lloyd is messing around again! I wouldn’t be at all suprised if you get some input from that Carol Kirkwood woman in the not too distant future.
Bye for now.
James
I honestly think it was the contrails that gave it away… anyone worth their salt ought to have known that. Is that Carol Kirkwood woman any relation at all?
http://www.bapwatch.co.uk/GMTV/gw658.jpg