In this issue ofWeather

Abstract

We focus on aspects of the weather in India in two of our articles, beginning on p. 83 with Ancy Thomas and her co-authors’ paper, which asks ‘How accurate are the weather forecasts available to the public in India?’ As in much of the world, services are now available from a range of providers, in particular through mobile phones and personal computers. As in Britain, there is much interest in the weather in India, where heat, drought, pollution, chill and torrential rainfall are common visitors, but on an irregular basis. As elsewhere in the world, orography plays an important part in the variability of the Indian climate and day-to-day weather. Compared with a range of weather parameters, observed at both manned and automatic weather stations of the India Meteorological Department, forecasts from the Real Time Weather System, AccuWeather and Weather Underground all verify relatively poorly, although performance varies in space and time, as well as by parameter. Sporadic rainfall is a characteristic of the weather of India, in the months preceding the arrival of the monsoon in June and July. Priya Narayanan and her co-authors look at changes in this precipitation in ‘Trend analysis and forecast of pre-monsoon rainfall over India’ on p. 94. They conclude that although changes in this rainfall can be seen in data, the variation is different by month and location. In addition, it seems likely that the trend towards change will persist in future years. On p. 88 James and Samuel Curran look at the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide from Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii in order to examine the rate at which this atmospheric carbon is sequestered. ‘Indications of positive feedback in climate change due to a reduction in Northern Hemisphere biomass uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide’ explains that, although there is not only an increase in year-on-year atmospheric carbon dioxide, the evidence of significant carbon sequestration in this record is changing. The intra-annual fall in concentrations between May and September shows that this may be reaching a limit, the oceans and biomass less able to absorb the CO2 we produce. Finally a viewpoint article ‘Shakespeare's Tempest, witchcraft and the Little Ice Age’ looks at the rather gruesome effects of the relatively cold climate between 1350 and 1850. Gerald Stanhill shows how crop failures, shipwrecks and more generally tough living conditions in Europe led to witchcraft trials and their portrayal in the works of William Shakespeare, starting on p. 100.