View across the Outer Harbour of Stornoway

Friday, 29 June 2012

Friday 29 June

A surprisingly warm day, with the mercury shooting up to 18C at 2pm, when the sun came out. It has been a fairly bright day with varying amounts of benign clouds. It was even possible to have lunch outside. I pity the folks south of the border who have suffered quite severe flooding, likewise those in south Belfast. It wreaked havoc on the railways, with a landslip at Tulloch, 20 miles east of Fort William, knocking a train off the tracks. It was a goods train, but due to the remoteness of the location (miles away from the nearest road) it will take a considerable time before the wreckage is removed. Passenger trains suffered incredible delays, with one service arriving into Glasgow at 3 am, having taken 15 hours to travel from London, a journey that normally doesn't take more than 5 hours.

And then there was this article on the website of Dutch broadcaster NOS, claiming that research showed that fish oils (omega-3) did nothing to reduce the risks of heart attacks. When I clicked through to the original article, I found that NOS had not read the article properly. The study had been to investigate the effects of fish oils in people with diabetes and at risk of heart attacks - effects that were no better than not taking fish oils. You can't generalise that into making out that this applies to the whole population.

Hurricane update - 29 June

No real hurricanes to report on, except for this tropical cyclone in the southern hemisphere. 21P formed southeast off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea, but will not live beyond the weekend. The system is carrying winds of 35 knots, may strengthen to 40 knots before being torn apart by adverse winds in the higher atmosphere. The precursor to 21P existed in tandem with a disturbance across the equator, named 96W, which is heading west through Micronesia. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Honolulu is giving that system a high (> 50%) likelihood of turning into a tropical cyclone.

Further north, tropical storm Doksuri has made landfall in the estuary of the Pearl River, west of Hong Kong and will dissipate inland. Tropical cyclones tend to dump rather large amounts of rain (tell the people of Florida that, they've had 25 inches over the past week out of Debby), so I'm expecting that to happen in southern China as well.