Weather

Yeah, it died yesterday when I tried going for a wind foil. I got 2 blasts in an hour, very frustrating. I would normally be sending it almost the whole time. Should have done the grocery shopping instead.

just curious, has Fogg joined the liveaboard community in Bon Accord 

The weather is very interesting at the moment.
Earlier I comments that we would normally have blocking highs with steady, stable, clear settled weather about now.
The current weather maps show the blocking high I am expecting, of 1036hpa, BUT, centered over the Auckland Islands, not over Auckland. It is South of Invercargill, blocking the furious 50's...
Early next week is looking very interesting. A massive Southern Ocean front is due to bang into the Auckland Islands blocking high, and roll up, over it, hitting the west coast of both islands.
What is most interesting is currently all the weather models currently agree - (Metservice's UK rain model, and the main two on Predict Wind). This is that the Southern Ocean front is going to mix with the humid tropical air just north of Auckland and create something that MSM could probably call a weather bomb. Significant localised heavy rain.

Predictwind's CAPE index is the highest I've ever seen it at 1.4. CAPE is convective available potential energy. It is a parameter made up for the tropical areas to indicate how squally or unstable the atmosphere is. In NZ, if the CAPE ever gets up above zero it indicates a very unstable air body, i.e. thundery, squally, lots of warm and cold air mixing. One PW model shows 55mm of rain in an hour. That should trigger some warning criteria, if it eventuates. Add to that everything is bone dry, so I expect water to get into cracks in the hillsides and the odd slip here and there. Glad I don't own clifftop property.

This isn't due until Sunday night / Monday, so it is highly likely to change between now and then. Still, I thought it was worth a mention, that and a blocking high south of 50 degrees South!?!
PS, should be good weather for windsurfing Sat & Sunday, and good for going to work (and not much else) for the start of next week.

Always wondered what the CAPE measure was. Will have to go an read about it now.

That's for sure. Today was a firewood foraging session for next year's stock and rearranging the wood shed, giving the spiders a fright

Interesting read alright - i see that Russian observatory is about 10,000 feet up but this bit has got me foxed "Vostok, a Russian meteorological observatory, is about 1300km southeast of the South Pole" . How do you travel south (or southeast) from the south pole?

Good spotting. When I first read the story and say Vostok mentioned, I got confused and thought it must have been a base in the Artic, but read on and confirmed it was in the Antartic. Sounds like a shit hole of a place to be posted. On a cold, frozen continent, then on top of a mountain... only the Russians...

PS, I can only assume the SE bit is a typo.