In this issue of Weather

Abstract

We begin February’s issue on p. 39, marking the 50th anniversary of a storm that caused serious damage in many northern and western parts of the British Isles. This storm has received relatively little attention in the scientific press and was hardly reported in national newspapers at the time. In ‘50 years on from the Great Glasgow Storm… What have we learned from powerful storms since then?’ Penny Tranter and the Editor of this journal describe the effects of the storm and the lessons we have learned from this and other similar storms, over the years.Many readers may remember the terrible droughts that caused serious famine in the monsoon zone of West Africa in the 1980s and Kwadwo Owusu’s paper on p. 46 ‘Rainfall changes in the savannah zone of northern Ghana 1961–2010’ shows how variable the rainfall was in this zone in the 50 years to 2010. Indeed, although serious drought has not been a main feature in recent years, rainfall remains below that seen in the 1960s and early 1970s.A recent UK storm features in the paper on p. 54. Warnings of poor weather can cause changes in behaviour, not least travel. In ‘Better by bus? Insights into public transport travel behaviour during Storm Doris in Reading, UK’ Hannah Budnitz, Lee Chapman and Emmanouil Tranos describe changes in travel patterns on 23 February 2017.Our final paper, on p. 60, looks at the change in temperature in recent years along the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. Kareem M. Tonbol, Tarek M. El‐Geziry and Mohamed Elbessa compare temperature changes over time and against both global and European temperatures in ‘Evaluation of changes and trends in air temperature within the Southern Levantine basin’..