Having given my AGU talk on Hunga-induced atmospheric perturbations, I'm now off to the food court to address my own hunger perturbation.

Got a new grant just in time to not lose my two fantastic postdocs :-) Will also be recruiting for a new PhD student to study whether atmospheric gravity waves can be used to help predict hurricanes - an ad will be coming out probably early next year once the paperwork has worked through the system.

Giving an undergraduate lecture on the outer planets, and it feels weird to introduce Uranus as "discovered near the big Sainsburys'". However, since it was discovered in Bath, they all live here but won't know the street name, and that's the nearest major landmark...

Just to contradict the tube strike horror stories, this is my trip from King's Cross to Paddington (Thameslink then Elizabeth Line) at 4.45pm during today's strike. Not quite sure where all the people are - maybe scared off by the crowds earlier in the week?

✨Editor's Pick✨ In JGR: Atmospheres, a new high-resolution global model is used to study predictability of atmospheric circulation from the Earth's surface up to 120 kilometers. 🔗 Learn more in @eos.org: buff.ly/Hbe4kx4 #AGUPubs #Atmosphere

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

It turns out that satellites behave rather oddly when the Earth is 1000x less heavy than it should be. That was a delightfully challenging typo to find in the several hundred lines of orbit scanning code I'd written.

As a result of basically constant work travel for the last few months, I have upgraded the essentially-standard description of my inbox when I beg for forgiveness for delayed replies from "a bit of a bin fire" to "radioactive".

Job alert: we are looking for a postdoc to join the Atmospheric Dynamics group in Oxford to study Arctic atmospheric dynamics. The focus is on energy transfers between scales and implications for predictability. More details here: tinyurl.com/yc6h4b35

FAAM science flight (@ncas-uk.bsky.social) currently up over the Alps with all three mission scientists aboard from @uniofbath.bsky.social @caer-bath.bsky.social - hopefully Neil Hindley, Phoebe Noble and Tim Banyard will get some good data to help make the @metoffice.gov.uk model better :-)

Is this a better or worse name than my old one?

Changed my phone's OS language to be in French a few days ago as I really need the practice - my vocab is slipping badly. The worst bit? FINDING MY HOME COUNTRY'S NAME IN INTERNET DROPDOWN FORMS.

Extremely important this post by @edhawkins.org. We are about to lose our main data source for the middle and upper atmosphere, TIMED/SABER. We are in extreme need for monitoring of the higher part the atmosphere. Our @issibern.ch Team pointed it out a couple of months ago: doi.org/10.1029/2024...

On 9th July, @esa.int are choosing their next Earth Explorer mission. One of the proposals (CAIRT) would provide the capability to measure the upper atmosphere but not launched for several years. There are no easy choices, but we could lose our ability to monitor this region for an extended period.

It is now possible that the NASA satellites that monitor changes in the stratosphere and mesosphere will be phased out from October, depending on budget discussions. If TIMED & Aura do get shut down then this would abruptly end climate monitoring of these altitudes. arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

The Warming Stripes have been extended again into the mesosphere to help highlight risks to our climate monitoring capabilities. Like the stratosphere, the mesosphere is cooling due to the greenhouse effect & also shows solar cycle variations. (Thanks to @sosprey.bsky.social for the data.) But...

Saw a sign coming into the airport saying my flight was cancelled and to contact staff. Went to talk to the staff. Somehow I had misread the entry for *both* the wrong airline *and* at the wrong time and my plane is very much not cancelled, and thus the poor lady was very confused as a result.

Booked a hotel for a work trip to ESTEC to discuss satellite design. After receiving my booking the hotel sent me this response. I think I am not their usual type of guest.

This is also what my students say :-(

Thanks Acrobat, without you I don't know if I could manage to read *eight whole pages at double-line spacing.*

I got the train from Didcot to Vienna and back, and all 14 legs were on time. Wow.

Got an email suggesting October 2026 for my inaugural lectures. I appreciate the organisation to let me know, but even *I* don't plan my calendar out in detail that far in advance...

I GOT TO PUT 15 BOTTLES IN THE PFANDMASCHINE! I think the lady who came up to use the machine while I was halfway through thought I was mad because I was so excited, until I explained I was English and we don't have them.

I have eduroam in here, and the signal is stronger than in my concrete box in Bath. So: new office? Could put the desk between the end pillars, just need somewhere to hide the cables.

On the plus side I've, somewhat unnervingly, got all the way from Didcot to Wuerzburg without a single train delay and exactly on time despite it requiring five changes of train. The slight downside being one of my bags got stolen on the middle train. Bah.

Loss of the aging ACE-FTS and MLS satellite instruments will create a “data desert” around stratospheric composition, suggests a paper by @rosssalawitch.bsky.social et al in #BulletinAMS. Observation gaps may hinder understanding of climate change. Read more: bit.ly/41JORtl

Professor Corwin Wright shares his work in the Channel 5 documentary '#Volcano'. Episode 2 highlights Wright’s research on the 2022 Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption, which was one of the most explosive volcanic events of the modern era. www.channel5.com/show/volcano...

I keep seeing the newish VC on the bus up to campus. I think this is really good given how large a fraction of staff/students travel this way due to the massive hill - gives him a personal stake in one of the main factors of mine and many others' daily routine, and one which is frequently disrupted.

For those of you in the UK, I was interviewed a few months ago for the second episode of "Volcano with Dara O Briain", which will be shown on Channel 5 tomorrow night (Wednesday 2nd April - part 1 is tonight, i.e. Tuesday).

For those of you in the UK, I was interviewed a few months ago for the second episode of "Volcano with Dara O Briain", which will be shown on Channel 5 tomorrow night (Wednesday 2nd April - part 1 is tonight, i.e. Tuesday).

There is something uniquely, specifically irritating about how ESA travel claim forms are designed, and I'm not entirely sure what it is - I just feel grumpy and annoyed from about 1/3 of the way through filling out the form until an hour or two after I finish it.

"We do not yet know if we have a driver or not, but we did have one booked" is not the most reassuring announcement to hear when your train is stopped a single stop from home....

Spent most of my weekends for the last two months doing this - results now published: oxfordclarion.uk/citizens-ass...

It's probably not a good sign for your manuscript when my review breaks out the phrase "this is just the most egregious example"....

At FAAM training today for TeamX later this year.

Both of my final-year-project students this year have names very early in the alphabet, and I am greatly enjoying the reduced amount of clicking it takes me to do any kind of admin related to them relative to end-of-the-alphabet monstrosities like me.

People say UK rail tickets are complicated and there's too wide a variety of different ticket types, but I don't know why. 58 subtly-different purchase options for a one-way ticket between Didcot and Lincoln seems perfectly normal to me...

We are an ENTIRELY NORMAL household that just happens to have made a bulk purchase of ENTIRELY NORMAL stamps for sending all our letters.

Exciting opportunity to gather, work with and model orographic 🗻💨🗻flow in the European Alps as part of the TeamX (www.teamx-programme.org ) project based at UEA vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/14...

A process-based evaluation of biases in extratropical stratosphere–troposphere coupling in subseasonal forecast systems Our SNAP community paper, led by Chaim Garfinkel, was published today in WCD 🥳 Check it out! doi.org/10.5194/wcd-...

Wanted to load data from a satellite that flew in the late 1970s (Nimbus 7), but NASA didn't have a copy of the file reader any more, just the data. Emailed the [long retired] original PI (I have his personal address as I was his postdoc in ~2010), and I had the reader I needed within 5 hours...

The abstract deadline for the APARC Gravity Wave / FISAPS Symposium in Seoul in June has now been extended to the 25th of January. Abstracts can be submitted here: forms.gle/11hR4Qog2RaD... Please get in touch if you have any questions!

I have just got a train from London Euston for the first time ever, and if my usual London haunts of Paddington, King's Cross and St Pancras are mighty cathedrals to the train, then Euston is very much the bins round the back where they get rid of the stale communion wafers.

The classic combination.

I guess that after a long day on the Highway to Hell, it's good to be Back in Black for the night.

I am on a train stopped at a small railway station in the middle of Virginia. I HAVE EDUROAM.

After nine months part-time at the FCDO, I seem to have gone full Civil Service numbered-paragraph-with-bold-lead for my (very much draft-state) "e-lightning" AGU poster. I can't work out if this is good (helps people follow the flow) or bad (looks more like a legal document than some fun science).

I'm not the most imaginative human being.

Bit soggy coming into Bath today - this is normally mostly fields.