Looking to the sky

Red kites are spreading and in some parts of England, they are visible all day. What is the story behind the appearance of this amazing, big bird, drifting around over our cities and towns and the countryside, taking scraps from back gardens one minute and following the plough behind a tractor the next? Where did they come from, where were they before and how did they get here? What does it mean now the kites are here? All this and more are part of the Red Kite’s amazing story in the UK.

Clouds are made of many physical processes. In and around clouds, water changes from vapour to ice and liquid and back. Meanwhile, buoyant air, which is warmer and moister than air outside a cloud, is mixed around by eddies of several 100m across to swirls of only a few cm. The complex physical interactions make clouds difficult to forecast in even the most advanced weather prediction models and difficult to observe. We will talk about new aircraft and radar observations that we will gather this summer in “Wessex” to try and better understand the turbulent nature of clouds.