Waves taller than a church

  During Storm Ashley we found a link to this site. It gives the live data from the buoys in the Atlantic used to feed weather information to the Irish Met Office. At the time, buoy M6 was recording waves 20m high. That's taller than our church tower!

Anti-cyclonic gloom...

... was a phrase used by Tomasz Schafernaker to describe the weather in the UK under a continent-wide high pressure. It's about as high as I've seen my barometer go and is a good time to calibrate them against a known reading. Mine is really close to the BBC reading for Carlisle so that will do.

The conditions won't be doing much for renewable energy. No sunshine, no wind and no waves!

Cumecs

I was interested in the board for the river flow gauge at The Hermitage near Perth. I'd never come across cumecs as a unit abbreviation. 

Durham Geology Map

I loved this map on the pavement outside the Bill Bryson library. They have done their best to make the stones in the pavement match the correct type found in that location.

Here's Cumbria. Wigton is indeed on some lovely red sandstone - but clearly not our easy wearing type!

Units for pressure

This came through my door. Pressure can't possibly be measured in joules. Those are units for energy. 

Durham Cathedral Meridian Line

I found this notice and looked across the cloisters to see one covered over section.

And below is the view from the other side.

Their website says it is quite recent: 1820s. They made a mark at noon when the Sun was highest in the sky on summer solstice. The mark is on the floor.

Repeated at winter solstice and the lower sun puts the mark higher up the wall.

They drew a line between the two. On any other day, when the Sun hits the line it is noon. Watches and clocks can be set by this. The website says this was necessary because devices were less reliable in those days. This was still before train timetables so there wasn't a standard time across the country. This fixed local Durham Mean Time.

Which I guess means I was wrong about Murdoch Mackenzie's Meridian in Kirkwall. It probably wasn't for surveying purposes as a base line but was to fix accurate local time.

And the pressure has gone right back up again!

An impressive rise of 0.5 inHg in 12 hours.