It was only about six months ago when the US Northeast was the focus of our attention in Weather and Climate Discussion. Hurricane Sandy, also known as the “Frankenstorm”, brought a massive storm surge and devastating coastal flooding to the states of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Two weeks ago, the US Northeast was […]

I recently organised a stakeholder engagement event on “floods and droughts – what can the latest science tell us?” which involved over 20 researchers from across the Met Department (see list here). By stakeholders – I mean people outside academia, for example from Government Departments,business, charities.  The event gave stakeholder s an opportunity to engage […]

Given the fact we had about a week of lying snow last month, and that I’ve already been asked ‘is that it for this winter?’, I thought some statistics on lying snow here in Reading might not go amiss. We have complete day-to-day records of the dates with lying snow (defined as a coverage of […]

From the early 1990s, high levels of tree mortality have been observed across large areas of forest in North America infested by species of bark beetles. The majority of the damage originates from the native Mountain Pine Beetle Dendroctonus ponderosae. The beetles burrow underneath the bark of the trees to lay their eggs, disrupting water […]