I know you might be concerned about the carbon footprint of big AI, but the thing you have to understand is that if *we* don't use the energy output of a small country on training these models, then someone else will just come along and do it for a miniscule fraction of the cos- oh hang on a sec...

Keeping an eye on the end of Jan, ECMWF currently predicts low pressure over the East Atlantic from the 24th onward. There's a lot of uncertainty in position and detail at this lead time, but a look at the Z500 precip precursor for southern england shows a high chance of bad weather on the way:

You might not guess that the weather in sunny sicily has much in common with Tromso up at the top of the world. But at the moment the same tripolar structure of geopotential height over Europe is bringing heavy rain risk to both regions, where a breaking ridge is augmenting low + high lat lows.

A new year, and my first one living in Bergen! Finally getting settled, and found time to get some operational weather products running that I've been working on for aaages. Here I'm going to give a brief explainer on these 'precursor products', and present some hot-takes on Jan precip in Europe. 🧵

Yes Bergen rains a lot, but when it doesn't, it can look like this 😍. Don't need a textbook to study orographic precipitation here.