What drives our weather?
IF you consult learned sources to find out the difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ you will be informed that ‘weather’ is what is happening now, stuff like cloudiness, precipitation and wind, within minutes or days of the present. ‘Climate’ is weather averaged, usually monthly, over the last 30 years and trends expressed in decades or centuries.
This is not very helpful.
Sailing is a slow way of getting anywhere and for those lucky enough to live the cruising dream what is required is something in between ‘weather’ and climate’. The cruising yachtie might be choosing between a season on the east coast of Australia including perhaps islands as far east as Fiji, or exploring The Kimberley coast in Western Australia.
When Robyn and I spent seven years sailing around the world aboard Stylopora in the 1990s any kind of weather information at sea, seasonal or daily, was pretty hard to get. We had a program on our laptop called Weatherfax2 that could pull weather maps through a modem connected to our SSB HF radio. On passage it took a lot of our time, fiddling endlessly with the tuning to get something readable from whatever was useful, at any time of the day or night, both on and off watch.
Being a bit of a weather nerd, I have watched with interest as the concept of ‘climate drivers’ has
