So; what do we get up to, and why?

The British allegedly have “weather” as their main topic of conversation – and we certainly live in an area of very varied weather conditions.  The basic aim of the group is simply to try to develop members’ interest in, and understanding of, the behaviour of the atmosphere in the short term – weather, and over a longer time scale – climate.

What we are NOT about is forecasting – if I could do that accurately, I’d work for the Met Office and be paid even more than U3A pays me!

The group only formed in October 2003, and we have so far (to Spring 2004) looked at the composition of the atmosphere (a technical, and in some respects surprisingly speculative, necessity) before spending the rest of our sessions looking at:

• the Earth in space and the consequent variations in energy received at the surface
• the pressure patterns which result from those energy differences
• the wind patterns which result from those pressure patterns

So far attention has been centred on the global scale, and will continue to be so while we move on to look at the processes behind rainfall.

The plan is then to go on to look at what are grandly known as “synoptic” weather systems – the kind of things we see on the newspaper weather maps – and to gain some understanding of how they work.  That should carry us up to Christmas 2004, at least – more probably Easter 2005!

Assuming that the group – currently 7 ladies and 2 gentlemen – is happy to do so, I then intend to go on to look at some examples of regional climates within the British Isles and further afield, and ultimately to grapple with the hugely complex issue of “global warming”.

The approach is what could grandly be described as “seminar-based” – I start with a sort of lecture, which gets subverted and side-tracked into a fairly general discussion of the issues and some spin-offs!

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