Tristan Gooley
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There are some big signs that people may be loosely familiar with, but the really undiscovered world, and the reason I ended up writing a book with the title, The Secret World of Weather, is the smaller signs, the things that are going on, you know, sometimes within touching distance.
Something You Should Know
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And that's what gets me really excited is when I go outside and I go, wow, how did I not notice that for 20 or 30 years? And suddenly it's there in front of me. And that's
Something You Should Know
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yeah that's what fired me up for the last three years so give me an example of you walking out and saying how did I not notice this for the last 20 years what like what I'll give you a couple one um so much of the small weather signs are related to to the key forces of the the sun and the wind there's a a thing called a sun pocket which is where
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we can find a place in a landscape which is a lot warmer than even somewhere only 30 feet away. And to do that, we just have to be, we have to find a spot that's in direct sunlight. You know, it's no great surprise that being in the sun is warmer than being in the shade.
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But the slightly cunning thing is, you get these really super warm pockets if you can find somewhere that is both in the sun, but actually has shelter directly above you. And that stops the heat escaping vertically upwards. So as an example, February of this year, I went out with a picnic. It was very cold.
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And by finding a spot underneath a conifer where the sun could reach in, a low winter sun could reach in, but the heat couldn't escape upwards, I was able to sit there very comfortably for 20, 25 minutes. But if I'd moved out from under the tree, and it's a little bit counterintuitive, we'd sort of imagine being out in the open and the sun would be warmer.
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It would have been far too cold to sit around eating a picnic. Equally, the wind behaves very differently around any obstacles, but let's stick with trees for now. If you're moving across an open area and you get used to feeling the breeze, what you can notice is that the breeze accelerates underneath an isolated tree.
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If we think of a sort of almost like a stereotypical tree with a nice big green canopy and a gap underneath where we see the tree trunk, if you walk in underneath that canopy, the breeze will accelerate. The physics is the same as the way air accelerates over an aircraft wing. It will actually accelerate underneath the tree.
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Now, both of those examples, I mean, the warmth on a cold day can be really practical and helpful. You know, if you're, I can remember waiting for a bus on a very cold day, and you can be really quite warm in a bus shelter, but sometimes not even understand why. It's just more fun when you understand why, that the sun is coming, is reaching in, heating things up, but then the heat doesn't escape.
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So it just really just turns the temperature sort of a dial up and makes things much more comfortable in winter.
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Where To Find Answers to Your Toughest Problems & How Weather Works
Yeah, and so much of my work is obvious in hindsight, but people can go their whole lives and not notice it. So, I mean, my work is rooted in natural navigation, finding our way just using nature's signs. And there are over 20 ways we can navigate using a tree, but I'm fairly confident that, you know, fewer than one in a hundred people will know more than one of those 20. So,
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But once you explain that trees are bigger on the southern side and that the angles of branches are different, people go out there and they see it. And once you see these things and experience these things, you can't unknow that, if you know what I mean. Every time it's there, it sort of announces itself to you. And that's what I mean is you go like, wow, it's really not, it's not deeply hidden.
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We don't have to peel back 10 layers to find this stuff. It is in front of us, you know, and I mean, I often say to people when they don't understand the strange line of work I'm in, and I don't presume people should understand it. It is quite odd what I do. But I say to them, pick anything that you've seen outdoors today, literally anything. And you can do this now, Mike, if you want.
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And I will find a clue in it.
Something You Should Know
Where To Find Answers to Your Toughest Problems & How Weather Works
Yeah, so one of the cornerstones of natural navigation is that the sun is due south in the middle of the day. For everyone north of the tropics, which is almost all of the USA, all of Europe and lots of other places as well, the sun reaches its highest point when it's due south in the middle of the day, halfway between sunrise and sunset. And that's when it gives us most of its light and energy.
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And of course, the trees need this light. It's their breakfast, lunch and dinner. So it'd actually be quite odd if trees were symmetrical, bearing in mind You know, light is what's feeding them. So what they tend to do is they respond to these stimuli like light, and they actually just grow more on their southern side.
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So if you look at a tree from all directions, you walk around one, you'll very quickly realize that there's no such thing as a symmetrical tree. And on average, there's just more tree. There are bigger branches and more branches and more leaves on the southern side. I never knew that.
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Yeah, if you ask anyone to draw a tree, it doesn't matter if they're five years old or 95 years old, they'll draw a symmetrical tree. It's sort of how we imagine a tree. But of the X billion trees on planet Earth, there isn't one symmetrical one. They are all asymmetrical. And one of the kind of core ideas of my work is that two sides of everything are different.
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And if we ask the question, why is one side different to the other?
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will tell us something about where we are it'll tell us something about either direction or or possibly what the wind has been doing and and through that we can start to build up a richer picture of what's going on around us so tell me some other things like that that i don't know well i'll put myself on the spot here you tell me one thing you've seen uh and we haven't prepped this i genuinely have no idea what you're going to say tell me something you've seen outdoors in the in the last few days
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Well, I saw fog when I woke up this morning. It was foggy outside. Okay. So fog, the simplest way to think of it is it's a low cloud. There are different types of fog, but if you see fog early in the morning, it's a counterintuitive sign that actually the weather's probably going to be quite good because it's a type of fog called radiation fog.
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And what happens when we see fog very near the start of the day is it's actually a sign that the sky's been clear overnight. heat has radiated out of the land, the land has grown very cold, and moist air when it touches cold land forms this blanket of fog in the morning. So if it's a still morning, and you walk out into fog, there's a pretty good chance the sun will be shining by lunchtime.
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Yeah, the cloud world is like a lot of nature. It can be intimidating because people are maybe curious and they start to investigate it and then they start getting hit by too much Latin and they start realising there's a classification system and maybe I'm meant to learn the names of 20 different clouds. And I come at all of these things in a totally different way. Names are never important.
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So, because we can look at a sign in nature, like a cloud, and worry about what type of Latin word and stuff like that. But actually you could go to meet an indigenous person on the other side of the world and they will be able to see the sign in it and you'll never agree what that cloud should be called.
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So that's a really important point for me is that names are never actually the interesting part, but shapes and patterns are. So in clouds, what we do is we think about three main families of clouds. There are the blanket clouds, which, if we're going to use the Latin, is stratus, just from the Latin for blanket. And these are the long, flat, you know, they can cover an entire landscape.
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And they're pretty dreary. And they just really tell you that there's not going to be much change over the next few hours. And if there's any change, it's going to be glacial in pace. Everything's going to happen very slowly. They are the least interesting of the three. The other two, the next one we look at is the bubbling up heaped clouds, the cumulus clouds.
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And these are the ones that the easiest way for me to describe them is, you know, if you've seen the opening credits of The Simpsons or pretty much any other cartoon cloud, you've got a blue sky and these clouds typically have a flat bottom and they bubble up. They look like a, you know, a bunch of white soccer balls in a bag. And they are telling us something very specific.
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They are saying that there is convection, there is warm air rising in that particular spot
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for me as a natural navigator there's some really fun things you can do with them in terms of making a map so they form over islands they form over dark woodland and they form over towns because each of those landscapes warms up more quickly than the land around them so whether it's a pacific navigator in the middle of the ocean looking for an island they'll be looking for cumulus clouds or if you're walking or driving across a wild area looking for a town
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there's a very good chance that if it's, if it's a blue sky day, there'll be cumulus clouds over the town, but not anywhere surrounding it equally over dark woodland, the same thing. And then the third, the third family are the high wispy ones. I forget what the, what you, what you call it in the States. We call it candy floss, that kind of sugary candy stuff that we get at fairs here.
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Do you know the stuff I mean? Cotton candy. Cotton candy. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. I forget. I forgot the term, but it's, It looks very wispy. It's very high, this cloud. The Latin is cirrus. Sometimes people think it looks like feathers, and it does have lots of different forms. And that can be used for longer term forecasting.
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So if you've had a period of sunny settled weather, one of the early signs that things are about to get worse is this wispy cotton candy, feathery high clouds is one of the earlier signs that because it's so high, It's the leading edge of a warm front system coming through, which can lead to a couple of days of bad weather.
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As I look out of the cabin window that I'm in at the moment, I'll just pick a couple of things I'm seeing there.
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leaves for example so leaves are smaller on the south side of a tree and bigger on the the north side of a tree uh and the and the way their angle changes as well so they tend to be they tend to point more down towards the ground on the south side and they tend to be closer to horizontal on the north side and it's not you know the tree or the leaves don't care about north south east west these are these are just obviously organic responses to to what's going on out there if um
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And just looking at the ground, I can actually see a puddle. We've had a bit of rain today and puddles can form anywhere, but the way they dry is quite specific. So they're obviously going to dry more quickly in the sun and more slowly in the shade. And if you're walking along a track or a road, the south facing side is actually the north side.
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So you end up with longer lasting puddles on the south side of tracks and roads.
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Well, in the case of both rain and snow, the very first thing I'm trying to do is work out which of the two cloud families are we looking at here because that will then reveal what's most likely to happen over the next 12 hours. And whether it's snow or rain, the same branch is there. It's either showers or it's blanket. If it's showers, it's coming from those heaped clouds, the cumulus ones.
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And what that means is the word showers is misunderstood these days a little bit. In weather terms, you know, weather aficionados will know this, but if you're new to kind of looking for weather signs, the word showers to some people means light rain, but actually it's much more precise than that. Showers means short distinct periods.
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So if you have a rain shower, it can actually be very, very heavy. Same with snow. A snow shower can be really heavy, but it won't go on for an hour. So the way I put it when I was writing about it is that, you know, showers don't last hours. If it's blanket and it starts raining, there's a really good chance it'll be raining in three or four hours time. Same with snow.
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But if we've seen cumulus clouds, a little bit of blue sky here and there. And again, a lot of this stuff is common sense when we're seeing it in hindsight, but it's very easy to not actually pause and even go, well, which of those two is it? If it showers, you can plan actually to have a quite fun day dodging them if you want to.
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And if you haven't had snow for a while and you're enjoying it, you might actually want to be out in it. But yeah, they're very different experiences. If blanket rain starts, it's not a good day to be outdoors, to be honest. It's going to be a bit drab.
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Wind is air moving from a high-pressure region to a low-pressure region. And we can recreate this by blowing up a balloon, but instead of sealing the neck, if we just release the neck, high-pressure air in the balloon will flow towards the room, which is at lower pressure. And what's happening all around us and on every scale,
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imaginable from the vast you know thousands of miles down to uh you know 10 feet literally is that the sun is heating some areas more than others and warm air expands and as it expands its pressure reduces so what's happening every single day is that the sun is heating the equator more than the poles for example so that leads to massive flows um over over literally thousands of miles
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But it's also going to heat the dark tarmac in a city more than the green outside the city. And that's why we see those clouds above a town. In fact, I got a fun message from a friend who lives in the town nearest us. I live out in the country. And he said, there's a couple of birds of prey. I think they're buzzards and they're orbiting, they're circling.
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And it was about 11 o'clock in the morning, which is very early for birds to be doing that. And I said, they're probably looking for a car parking space. And he said, what are you talking about? I said, well, if you draw a line vertically down from where they're circling, is that the large car park in the north of town? And he goes, yeah, how on earth did you know that?
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I said, well, that's the only big dark place that will be warm enough to create the thermal that they'll look for. So it's, as I say, all wind is high pressure to low pressure. But what I'm trying to do is encourage people to not just think this is about these huge, massive, massive kind of charts we see on TV or internet forecasts.
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This is something that's happening within, you know, 50 feet of us every day.
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It's always trying to equal out, but actually air is a bit more viscous than most people think. Everyone sort of imagines that it could kind of equalize in five seconds. But it's more treacly than people imagine. It can't move across the surface of the earth as fast as people might think it does. But also, the second it equals out somewhere, the sun will create a difference somewhere else.
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So if it was nighttime for 10 days solidly, things would start to equal out. But obviously, that's not what we experience. So everywhere the sun, at any one moment, the sun is rising somewhere and it's setting somewhere else. The sun is sort of setting this game going the whole time.
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Every time things start to equalize a little bit, there'll be the sun heating up a bit of land more than the sea or heating up the low latitudes more than the high latitudes. So it's all driven by the sun. And because it's sunny somewhere always, the game never ends.
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Dew and frost are related. And they're both a sign that we've had clear skies overnight, similar to we were talking about fog a little bit earlier. And it's a similar thing that if you have clear skies overnight, the heat leaves the land. I think everybody's comfortable with the idea that heat energy radiates from the sun to us.
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But people are slightly less familiar with the way heat radiates out of everything, including us. You know, I'm looking at a desk and a chair. There's heat radiating out of those. I've got a cup of tea. There's heat radiating out of that. And heat radiates out of the land and it does it much, much more quickly and dramatically when there are clear skies.
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So what we tend to find is if you've got the blanket, the stratus type cloud over an area at night, you wake up in the morning and there'll be no dew.
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If the following night, those clouds have cleared away and you've got clear skies, the land gets very, very cold overnight, the moisture in the air, and there is always moisture in the air, even over the hottest deserts in the world, there's some moisture in the air. There's no such thing as
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perfectly dry air on planet Earth, then that moisture comes into contact with the cold ground, it condenses and forms dew, and if it's cold enough, it will form frost. So frost is just frozen dew? Yeah, there are different types of frost, but the one most of us are familiar with, that's the exact process. It's dew forming at a cold enough temperature that it freezes on contact.
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And one of the fun things we can do is, both dew and frost, is just notice how it disappears when you walk under any form of shelter. So whether it's a jutting bit of a roof or a tree or anything else that stops heat escaping. And you can probably start to sense how the pieces sort of come together here. We have a sun pocket we're warmer in because the heat can't escape vertically upwards.
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But the flip side of that is if the heat can't escape vertically upwards, that bit of ground will stay warm overnight and you won't get dew or frost there. And I think, again, everybody's had that experience where you go out and you see a frosty landscape.
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But if you just pause for two seconds, you go, I'm used to kind of seeing it, but I've never actually thought, why is it more frosty there than there? And why is there no frost there?
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The other sort of real cornerstone is prevailing wind direction. So in most of the temperate parts of the world, it's a little bit different in the tropics, but in you know, most of the US and Europe, we find that the wind blows from one direction more often than any other. And that leaves footprints absolutely everywhere. So the tops of trees will reflect that direction.
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So you can't predict what the wind's going to do from the prevailing wind direction. So the wind can blow from the north, south, east or west on any day of the year. But over the course of a year, there are patterns and they're fairly dependable. So if it In my part of the world, the wind blows from the southwest more than any other direction.
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And that means I can look to the tops of trees and quite a few other places just to see that footprint. You just see the trees bent over from southwest to northeast. And wherever you are in the world, you just tune into what your local prevailing wind is.
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Um, and if you, if you're not sure it's, you know, you can, however you want to do it, you can look it up on the internet or you can, um, just have a look at the tops of trees in a fairly exposed place, you know, go up a hill a little bit or something like that with practice.
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You can see it in parks in the center of cities, but, but when you're starting out looking for that effect, you just want to look in places that are getting blown by the wind quite a lot because it's a much more dramatic effect. It's much easier to pick up.
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Cheers, Mike. Really good chatting.
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So if you look at a tree from all directions, you walk around one, you'll very quickly realize that there's no such thing as a symmetrical tree. And on average, there's just more tree. There are bigger branches and more branches and more leaves on the southern side.