'I have come to Australia to see what a global-warming future holds for this most vulnerable of nations, and Mother Nature has been happy to oblige: Over the course of just a few weeks, the continent has been hit by a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts. "In many ways, it is a disaster of biblical proportions," Andrew Fraser, the Queensland state treasurer, told reporters. He was talking about the floods in his region, but the sense that Australia – which maintains one of the highest per-capita carbon footprints on the planet – has summoned up the wrath of the climate gods is everywhere.'

"Sod all that, my correspondents insist: just look out of the window. No explanation of the numbers, no description of the North Atlantic Oscillation or the Arctic Dipole, no reminder of current temperatures in other parts of the world, can compete with the observation than there’s a foot of snow outside."

via joemoransblog: "Nice piece about snow and the big society by Alice Miles".

"Londoners who use Boris Johnson’s cycle hire scheme are 9 to 6 commuters, midday errand runners and fair-weather cyclists who take the tube or bus when it’s a bit cold and wet. How do I know? I’ve seen the data." Although: "I dont think it's a huge stretch of the imagination to say that rain and cold days means less cycling. That's an anecdote and not statistically significant, but this is a blog post based on five day's data, not a scientific paper."

"How did they do it before satellites and radar? It was a large scale coordinated effort involving telegraph messages sent from station to station across the country, used to compile a weather map." From the new site by Ironic Sans, looking at the most interesting stories from the weekend 100 years ago.

"If the Met Office is better than ever at predicting the weather, why has it stopped issuing seasonal forecasts?" An interesting article, or at least that's the way it looked on a skimreading. Amonst other reasons given: people don't understand probabilities.

Finally, high-res weather radar (both temporally and spatially) for the London area, albeit only "experimental... for a trial period until February 2010 for evaluation by particular groups of customers". Still, good to see.

"At no time did the Met Office state that Summer 2009 would be hot and dry throughout or forecast a ‘scorcher’." Probably as unlikely to work in terms of changing public perceptions as Michael Fish is ever to have people remember his "but it will be very windy" conclusion the the infamous "hurricane" statement. Ah well.

On the Met Office and the accuracy (or otherwise) of its seasonal forecasts.

I always wondered about making a Shipping Forecast twitter bot, but I've been beaten to it. A very nice writeup.

"the British are subject to two utterly random forces that regularly test their stoicism and their patience: the weather and the buses." On two icons of British TV in the seventies.

"notably 1912 when, without the benefit of global warming, 192.9mm of rain fell ... 21 times the year's April total ... the wettest, coldest and dullest of the 20th century. The average temperature was a mere 12.9C" Just in case anyone thought that this August had been particularly bad.

On average, August is the second-wettest month of the year, behind November. Driest? March and April tie.

"Here’s an idea for newspaper website homepages — just a search box and a list of blogs." One reader's frustrations trying to get local news out of a world-focussed US newspaper site.

Nice weather data for London from UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. If I was being nitpicky I'd ask for machine-readable data and precipitation radar, but it's pretty nice as it is.

Social weather forecasting. Lovely idea, this, although I'm not so bothered about the "what are you wearing" bit, given I have the same outfit more or less all year. I just hope it's not irredeemably UScentric.

The Guardian carries extracts from a book about everyday life, on breakfast, office work, and weather.

Somehow, this strikes me as a more interesting piece of "convergence" than anything else I've seen in the last five years.

Tornadoes are more common in the UK than people think, but this on top of the one in Birmingham is either very unlucky or very worrying,

what "rising slowly" actually means

"It feels hotter here than Australia, because I don't think England is prepared for it." Built is perhaps a better word than prepared. The Victoria Line was certainly very hot even at 10pm last night.

GBA vampire hunting game?

Echoing Chris, I'd really like to visit too. Especially as it sounds more and more like Last Chance To See

dots!