Drought has certainly been in the news recently and the beauty of the digital age means that we can monitor this in real time – note the spike on Monday 12th March when the UK government announced the imposition of a hosepipe ban: We can even visualise it on an interactive map such the proto-type […]

Last week we observed some of the most significant solar activity of solar cycle 24 (SC24), with a series of solar flares and Earth directed coronal mass ejections (CMEs) which were forecast to interact with the near-Earth space environment. This attracted significant media coverage and it was reported that this sequence of events had the […]

The Earth is a complex system of interacting components, such as the atmosphere and ocean, which produce a wide variety of natural variability. This natural variability ensures that the evolution of a particular region’s climate, e.g. that of Western Europe, could be completely different to another region, or indeed the global mean climate. Such variability […]

Understanding and predicting the summer monsoon in South Asia is important for more than a billion people since their lives depend on the four summer months (June to September) to bring 80% of annual rainfall. Knowledge of the timing, intensity and duration of the monsoon are important for agriculture and industry, while extreme rainfall can […]