Tiny amounts of rain at receiving spot.
This was my first time picking up a satellite signal!
Image shows some rain clouds over France and Bay of Biscay and just off the coast of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean.
Very intriguing process.
A clear, cool, breezy day here in Florida.
It was chilly (compared to typical Florida weather) and very cloudy, but not windy.
We stand on separate hills in the former golf course, one of us with a turnstile antenna, another with a v-dipole.
There's a bit of South America in the lower part of the image, such as the Panama Canal, as well as most of the East Coast.
Later, comparing images, we notice how there is a clear line at the midpoint of the turnstile's image that doesn't appear in the image made with the dipole.
We can see some tougher, perhaps stormy clouds moving in from the bottom.
This line is appearing at almost the same spot in previous images collected with the same laptop and antenna - a signature of the laptop?
After a few warm, humid days, the air today felt lighter, cooler and clearer.
or a glitch in antenna reception, at the peak of the satellite pass?
I took a long walk around the neighbourhood, and it wasn't long before I came across the edge.
Later in the day, we test the same antenna from the roof, shaded by southern live oaks.
A grid had been carved into the land near a local forest, sandy flats exposed, and the sounds of hammers and staple-guns echoed back and forth.
As there is no wind or rain predicted, we tape it to an old camera tripod found in the garage, simply stand it up on the roof's apex, and run a cable through a crack in a window.
I walked to the very limit of the housing development and found a gap in the trees, but as soon as I entered the forest I could see someone was living there, or at least squatting for a while, in a shelter made of tree branches.
Another day, another storm in the Southern Ocean.
Being alone around sunset, I turned away and found the empty pavement again.
I thought about removing the tip of my finger from my photo of my station, tucked in with the Zodiac boats and surrounded by coring equipment, but it shows a signal of how difficult it can be to operate anything that isn't tied down.
As I returned home, the orange sunset light was glowing through the palms, matching in intensity the light-up candy canes on a nearby lawn.
The rolling of the ship and the strength of the mind make any one-handed task just on the edge of impossible.
Cumulus clouds tower to the east of "Patio Homes" in Newberry, so sharp and iridescent, they look like they have crystalline facets.
I don't expect to experience weather like this again in my lifetime, but I also don't hold a lot of expectations that anything will remain as expected.
It is muggy today, but I stubbornly wear my Mom's flannel-lined denim jacket on my walk to the local golf-course-turned-park - I am needing protection.
The unusual humidity and warmth woke me up from a dream in a shadowy landscape, and it took me more than a few seconds to realise I was in Florida.
The political 'climate' of Florida has been on my mind today.
Peaking out the window I saw a suburban street framed by massive palm trees, southern live oak, bald cyprus and lots of ferns.
An organisation called Safehome ranks Florida the second most unsafe state in the USA for LGBTQIA+ people based on current legislation and records of hate crimes.
Spanish moss trailed down from the southern live oaks, sometimes so thick it seemed to cover the entire tree.
Governor Ron De Santis' GOP-led 'Don't Say Gay' law, passed in 2022, barred instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade on its inception, and was later expanded to all grades.
On a morning walk I discovered what seems to be an old golf course turned into a neighbourhood park, and I climbed the only hill (a very small mound) to see further across.
It had a chilling effect across the state, caused queer teachers to hide photos of partners and take down rainbow flags, queer festivals to be cancelled, and books featuring queer characters to be removed from curriculums.
As the landscape is so flat, I could see further than expected.
It also inspired a series of other similar laws in states like Arkansas, Alabama, Indiana and North Carolina.
On the other side of the cul-de-sac where I slept, there appeared to be a quarry full of excavation machinery and a bright turquoise pond, a bit too turquoise to be non-toxic.
A 2024 'settlement' clarified that LGBTQIA+ discussion can happen in classrooms "as long as it is not part of official instruction", and that the law doesn't apply to books with incidental references to LGBTQ+ characters or same-sex couples, "as they are not instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity any more than a math problem asking students to add bushels of apples is instruction on apple farming".
As I listened to NOAA-19, a group of men in high viz outfits drove up and down the golf course in small open door vehicles that appeared to be cutting the dry, light brown grass.
Though it is a relief to know that some books are being allowed back 'in', it is frightening to think they were removed from teaching in the first place, and the comparison between queer characters and 'bushels of apples' feels particularly wrong.
I watched them run over and over the same spots, and wondered what the purpose of this was- a seemingly futile looking attempt at edge-maintenance, kicking up small clouds of dust.
Ron De Santis called the 'settlement' a 'huge win'.
I lean out of the hotel window to catch a noisy signal.
In August 2024, all of the webpages on the Florida state tourism website related to LGBTQIA+ resources and travel advice were quietly removed.
The signal and noise come in waves: signal rising, noise rising, signal rising, rising, rising, rising.
On my walk back to 7th street, I notice two American flags raised high on a dedicated pole in the front yard of an olive green house.
"Assad’s gone." "I told you," my closest Syrian friend writes from Hong Kong.
Today is my last satellite pass in London during the year-long attempt at capturing satellite images and weather observations that began on the solstice in December 2023 and will come to an end in a few days.
"How are you celebrating?" I ask.
Hackney Downs was the best version of itself for the occasion, a low-lying sun shining across the grass, and reflections from apartment block windows adding a kind of sparkle or glimmer.
He sends a photo of him looking sharp, wearing a Mercedes cap, with a keffiyeh draped over his shoulders, holding a slice of red velvet cake.
Tomorrow I travel to Florida to visit my Mom who moved there a few months ago.
A gentle smile on his face is directed at the cake, not the phone camera.
As I traced the typical arc of the satellite orbit, I realised I would need to invent a somatic ritual for this year's solstice- both as a way to recognise the culmination of this near-daily practice of satellite image capture and weather sensing, but also as a means to start a new cycle, a new set of practices that I can't quite foresee yet.
"U have no idea how ecstatic I am"
No one I know believed this day would come.
On a call with two very good friends later in the afternoon, this sentiment was confirmed.
And, at what cost?
Speaking a set of rituals they have carried out during a time of transition, a time that is joyous but not without difficulty, one of them said "everything is meaningful, everything is magical - it has to be".
"I'd written off a future without Assad," WhatApps a former colleague who, in 2016, interviewed five survivors from Saydnaya Prison.
The view from the bluffs was a sunny and calm Pacific Ocean with only a distant layer of low clouds hugging the horizon.
I recall her saying that the investigation almost folded because because so few people left the prison alive there was barely anyone to interview.
A fifteen minute drive north along the coast would take you to Malibu where roads are closed due to the Franklin fire.
I watch on Al Jazeera as a stream of men and women walk up a dirt path between mine fields, into the open gates of Saydnaya.
A week earlier a fire erupted late at night.
London is all glare and reflection today as a very low cloud-mist settles over the city.
8 homes were burned as Santa Ana winds gusted to 100 kph and humidity levels dropped to 5%.
The sheen of street signs, asphalt, vans, and buses makes everything more obviously aggressive and frantic.
Pepperdine University was completely surrounded.
As I cycle to south London after dark, a white Prius pulls out in front of my bike, so close I have to skid to a halt.
The fire stands at 43% containment, but dry winds are expected to return in a few days.
When the driver looks over his shoulder, and sees me braking and motioning my fright, he hardly blinks as he merges into the centre of the road.
In November of 2018, the Woolsey fire burned 97,000 acres in just a few days.
The tops of tall buildings are drowned in cloud so it feels like we are living in a reduced space, the ceiling coming down.
The term "fire season" has little meaning at this point.
I am reminded of the fictional city Ravicka in Renee Gladman's novel Event Factory.
Insurance companies have been refusing to write new policies due to the increased risk of loss due to the changing climate.
Ravicka is a city of smoggy, ‘yellow air’ that, “vibrates around the foreigner in the street” (Gladman, 2010: 41).
This last week California agreed to allow insurance companies to increase their premiums in response to the new climate reality.
Edges and borders shape-shift as the city appears to rearrange itself, or, as the main character observes, “the singing structure eludes me” (Gladman, 2010: 93).
This is the farthest south towards Antarctica my body would go, although I didn't really put that together at the time I was receiving this image.
Today, in Gaza, a house was flattened in the packed Nuseirat refugee camp, while two separate strikes targeted local workers securing aid convoys.
This day was sunny and clear, which was very rare to see during my trip through the Southern Ocean.
US officials claim they have a 'jurisdictional dispute' with the ICJ and reject its call for arrest of Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant; another 'structure' that continues to elude.
The second mate has told be this is the grayest, stormiest research cruise he's ever been on.
This is an image taken from the porthole next to my desk on the RVIB Nathaniel B.
But this particular morning broke clear and bright and while it got a bit dark midday the afternoon was sunny again which offered a shadow of the ship onto the pancake ice.
Palmer on the day I imaged the weather.
Later, at what would be considered night but is in fact still light, the people of the ship would all pour out onto the decks to see the last glorious iceberg patch we would end up having passed through.
Typically the weather decks on the ship are closed during storms like this, but I was allowed outside to take my satellite reading.
The remainder of the time at sea would be in open ocean.
It was so windy I had to hold onto the antenna and my computer the entire time.
Whether by icy air or circulation of blood, the act of going out for a satellite pass at lunchtime managed to break a mild migraine - my first ever, I think - that had been ongoing for the last twenty four hours despite many painkillers, salves, and hours lying down.
to / desire / the world / as it is / not as / it was / falling / feather / attaches / to new life
The third poem in CA Conrad's book 'Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return' makes me forget to breathe while I read it over coffee.
By the time my brain and vision had relaxed from the pain enough for my senses to be alert to detail in the world, the sun had fallen.
for a moment / when the hammer / approached we thought / is that thing coming this way
I think of the many 'hammers' still falling on Gaza, on Syria and Lebanon, and of the metaphor of a meteor strike as world ending event, when we already have so many-
we are the fractal / drop to hear / our own / harmonics / in the muffled / underground / hum of seeds
I haunted the park at night, peering into blue-lit windows and noticing the ways streetlights highlighted the elegant curves of plane tree branches from below.
The sky was a thin, eggshell blue when T and I woke up this morning.
A faint oval-shaped pink cloud hovered over one hill of the park like an omen.
Two cats, a ginger and a spotted black one, were playing hide and seek in the overgrown grass of the back garden.
Two dogs tossed and tumbled in the dark, their paws vying for dominance and their teeth glowing.
For a few hours, perhaps three or four, the sun shone in London, but the night came so quickly that every flat on the street had lamps turned on by three.
They were eerily quiet except for their panting breaths.
I spent most of the day writing and thinking about projects sent to me by a network of friends and collaborators from whom I had solicited 'new and exciting work in the geohumanities beyond the US / UK'.
A person pushing a baby stroller walked briskly along a lit path with a tied up Christmas tree slung across their back.
My friend Cecilie sent me a link to a project called The Conference of the Birds, a transdisciplinary, socially engaged arts collaboration named after the 12th century epic poem by Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar.
"You look like the old man from Back to the Future" T says to me as I head out to capture a satellite image in still-raging Storm Darragh.
Focused on the loss of birds in the High North, the project involves community based exhibitions and events in Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and North-Russia.
"You mean Christopher Lloyd?!" I ask and she smiles a yes.
Reading the conference programme, I learned that one of the participants is a twenty five year old person who left home at 17 to learn birdsong and learn to survive alone in the forest.
I wonder about the resemblance as I walk to the middle of the park and set up a makeshift shelter for my laptop with one of the umbrellas borrowed from the communal umbrella area near the entrance of our building.
Apparently they can now sing the songs of 130 different species of birds, and they continue to live outside of human dwellings.
No matter which umbrella I chance to grasp, I always end up with a wire poking through torn Rayon, like a featherless wing.
In their profile photo, they are pictured shoulder up, with bright blond hair in dredlocks, and a small black bird on their shoulder, to which their face is turned in affection.
To keep the umbrella firmly over my laptop, and thus to protect it from random sprays of rain seeming to come from all directions and nowhere, I stood on the handle with one foot while shakily steering the antenna.
News came over the weekend that the Assad regime has fallen in Syria.
When sharp unexpected gusts threatened to carry the umbrella away from my exposed keyboard I had to lean my entire weight on top.
We see scenes of thousands of people celebrating in the streets, crying and cheering.
There were a surprising number of people in the park with their dogs, so these antics were in full view.
On Democracy Now, an interviewee refuses to 'analyse' the political moment, saying that analysis needs to be suspended while the feeling of this moment resonates.
A chocolate Labrador came bouncing over.
As I look ahead to the final sprint of a writing project, for which I will be submerged in books and my laptop the whole weekend, I am inspired by the collections of geographical thinking and arts practice that I pull out of the towering pile of books on my desk's side-table.
Normally I am happy to play with dogs while holding my antenna, but this one threatened to collapse my entire delicate balance in the wind.
I read of 'volcanic polyphonies', 'magmatic languages', 'fluvial hydropoetics', 'sand saltations', 'geo-mimicry' and 'reclaiming energy flows'.
"You nosey dog!"" I heard a woman's voice say before the wind drowned her out.
I think about the ways in which, across scholarship and creative practice, artists and writers are amplifying the animacies and memories of the elements, from Sotaventine rivers in Mexico, to tidal islands in Scotland, to the humid 'warm fronts' of Southeast Asia.
When I finally got to the end of the pass and started packing up, my fingers were so icy cold they fumbled, and somehow I managed to get a slab of mud on my trackpad.
In the satellite image that I capture today from Hackney Downs, I wonder about the repeated patterns and rehearsals of clouds in the North Atlantic, and consider these patterns as another form of air's 'working memory...
Later at Cafe Oto I saw the great poet, ritualist, mystic and queer icon CA Conrad read their poems.
a memory of energy' (Szerszynski, 2019).
For almost fifty years, CA has travelled by car across the US, writing poems and inventing somatic rituals.
The satellite image starts in darkness.
One of their rituals involved leaving tear off paper notes on notice boards across Philadelphia inviting people to call a number and leave a message for Elvis.
Absent of any rays of light from our nearest star, the top left hand corner of the image is almost pure black.
Several people would call each day, some multiple times.
I think of NOAA-18 and its near-infrared sensors trying to capture any stray photons as the satellite crosses the Arctic circle and the Nordic countries.
Another ritual involved them bathing their body in the sounds of extinct species.
The darkness feels vast, like what I imagine the deep space around Earth must feel like.
Later they started working with the sounds of coyotes, crows and foxes: "We've got to learn to love the world we have, not the one we lost" they said.
While planting a willow tree named Hildegard at the Stave Hill ecological park in South London on my lunch break yesterday, I dug into deep, black layers of topsoil.
I was moved by all of their poems, but one in a new pamphlet (created in collaboration with Jacken Elswyth, a queer banjo player) resonated especially well today.
Rebeka, keeper of Stave Hill, had inherited a mountain of rubble deposited from war-ruined buildings, as well as imported trash, on which the eco park was established in the 1980s.
It ends: "I've got the wind I say / with both hands".
She asked all of the schoolchildren from nearby schools to bring worms to the hill, and over the decades, the worms got to work.
This weather note was written by Weitao Wang, PhD student in the Geography department at Royal Holloway University, currently doing a fantastic project on the 'The geopower of air and fire: a cultural geography of fiery rituals in China'.
The deep, dark mulch that I dug into yesterday is the intergenerational inheritance and gift of these worms, and the soil that my almost seven year old willow tree will grow into.
“It’s a typical day in the UK, partly cloudy day, a bit windy, and not too cold.
Hildegard joins around ten other willows of ‘diverse varieties’ planted in a new willow coppice near Russia Dock Woodland and the Globe Pond.
As it’s the first time for me to participate, I feel a sort of transit in terms of the ‘body-(satellite)-weather’ relation.
As Rebeka explained to me, over the decades, these small twig-like willow trees will sprout from their bases, and their bendy branches will be sustainably harvested to build fences and other infrastructure around Stave Hill, another gift for the future.
At the beginning, I found myself disconnect with the weather (and satellite) because I had no idea of where it would come from and where it would go.
I've been testing open-weather Automatic Ground Stations all week, and as we are still seeing some unusual patterns and distortions in the images, I brave Hackney Downs long after sunset tonight with AGS 12 and my Yagi-Uda antenna.
However, as time moved on, I felt my body gradually coordinate with the satellite movement in the sky as I listened to the noises in the signal.
It is wet and cool but not freezing.
At the end, the signal slowly faded with noise, which made me wonder whether my direction was still correct and thus feel out of sync again with the satellite".
Today the pressure on my home weather station (given to me by Soph on my birthday last weekend) reads 1024 hPa, and points toward the symbol at one pole of the barometer that says 'clear bright sky'.
"The weather images produced on the screen reminded me of the previous remote sensing course I had took before, where the date collection process was more detached, abstract and rational because we were just sitting in front of the computer, clicking, and typing.
This feels at odds with the low-hanging cloud that I feel all around Hackney, but it is true that the weather is stable, and it doesn't feel like a storm is brewing, yet.
However, today’s outdoor data acquiring seems to invite me to be closer to the real-time weather dynamics.”
I found myself at the Southwark Reuse and Recycling Centre shortly before 11am this morning.
In a recent article on 'Clouding knowledge in the Anthropocene', Kate Lewis Hood proposes a "cumulative reading - where cumulative shares an etymological root with cumulus, a type of cloud (OED, 'cumulate') - that shifts from clear skies to fog, between atmospheric transparency and opacity" (2018: 83).
I have been fascinated by this place for a while- it is a series of gigantic warehouses where one can bring any kind of object, from clothes to appliances to batteries to cleaning equipment to stones and plates to furniture, in any condition, and after putting each item in the right place, the team at the Centre takes care of sorting, testing and repurposing.
Exploring poetry including The Weather by Lisa Robertson and Drift by Caroline Bergvall, Lewis Hood suggests that "such experimental practices enable a shift from asking whether to read or interpret in a certain way to engaging with the weather system of a text: its unpredictable changes and complex patterns" (2018: 185).
Clothes and linens are sent to local charities, appliances are tested and re-used if possible, batteries and old phones are recycled and household items of all kinds are either repurposed or ground down into their raw materials to make new things.
If today's weather system in London was a text, it might read like this passage from Robertson's The Weather:
Our skies are inventions, durations, discoveries, quotas, forgeries, fine and grand.
As I pulled up in a cab with a bunch of stuff from my old flat in the trunk, an older man with long gray hair was manning the entrance, and assessed me and my things before allowing me entry, like a guardian or gnome giving way to a magical place.
Fine and grand.
I took my time sorting my things into different corners of the warehouse, and was amazed at everything else that was there, from phones that looked like they were last used in the 90s, to very nice bags of clothing.
Fresh and bright.
In various corners and levels of the cavernous space, I could see staff moving around.
Heavenly and bright.
As there was a satellite pass shortly after I left the centre, I found a corner of a nearby housing estate- one with at least three tower blocks of dozens of stories each- and propped my laptop on a mossy wall.
The day pours out space, a light red roominess, bright and fresh.
Later I noticed how odd the concrete infrastructure of the estate was.
Bright and oft.
There were multiple sharply angled concrete features built into the walkway in between the tower blocks.
Bright and fresh.
Their shape and star-like structure, and simultaneous brutalist aesthetic, reminded me of some of the socialist monuments I had seen in Croatia and Bosnia while on fieldwork earlier this month.
Sparkling and wet.
The crisp blue sky opened above the estate, and magnified the concrete edges.
Clamour and tint.
Went out to the Venice Pier to capture a satellite pass on Thanksgiving.
(Robertson, 2001: 10)
From the image it looks like blue skies for the entire California coast.
Captured this satellite pass from a helicopter landing site on a ridge of the Santa.
The pier was busy with sport fishermen.
Monica mountains with the San Fernando Valley to the north and the Pacific to the south.
One approached me and asked me if I was looking for aliens.
From the overlook you could see small patches of light precipitation.
The aliens he was referring to, however, were not extraterrestrials.
I was visited by a curious crow and a grizzled hiker.
He was suggesting that immigrants were coming ashore via boats at night.
The hiker had more questions.
We I explained that the NOAA-19 satellite was harmlessly taking our photo, he suggested we all give it the finger.
After another round of Automatic Ground Station testing late last night, I saw that there would be a NOAA-15 pass around 7:50am today.
Sarah Josepha Hale had been campaigning for decades that the US celebrate Thanksgiving.
Carrying the AGS in a tote bag, and my turnstile antenna in another, I found a spot on the largest field in the park, as the sun searched above the horizon toward an array of small cottonball clouds.
In 1863 she finally convinced Abraham Lincoln to make the last Thursday in November a national holiday.
A man was in the middle of the field before me, pacing up and down with a flip phone in his hand.
In the midst of the Civil War, it was intended to find common ground and unify the country.
The grass was damp and water-logged.
Many Americans express anxiety at sitting down with relatives and navigating the inevitable awkward conversations.
A few schoolchildren hurrying along the park's main path looked over and pointed in my direction.
Sometimes I wonder if I am the "crazy uncle" at the table.
As storm Bert leaves I take the opportunity to test my mobile rig consisting of electrical wire in a joiner, a short coax, RTL-SDR and a Samsung Galaxy S6.
The air bit my fingers as I held onto the metal handle of my turnstile antenna in the pool of darkness that is Hackney Downs at night.
With no rain and a light breeze I was quite happy wandering around and aiming it roughly.
A police siren rang out in the distance and a high-speed chase progressed, two police cars tailing another car around two sides of the park.
I did not expect it to work so well after reading up on the 137MHz antenna variants and the precice calculations, pass filters and leaky coax.
Suddenly a faint neon light appeared to bounce and leap toward me, revealing itself to be a small bulldog wearing a glow-in-the-dark collar.
I feel a dangerously numb to news of extreme weather.
NOAA-15 circled overhead, scanning the outlines of North Africa, Italy and Croatia until I lost the transmission in the blurriness of the Arctic.
Yesterday, as I read a long and moving article about drought hit farming communities in South Africa, Storm Bert inundated costal towns in the UK.
Overnight, mountains of plane tree leaves have amassed on sidewalks, against walls and fences.
Is numbness what happens when, to quote deputy first minister of Wales Huw Irranca-Davies, the feeling is “here we go again.
Leaves paper walls, cars and bike sheds.
These traumatic weather incidents are a pattern of our weather”?
While Storm Bert has resulted in mass-rearrangements of leaves in London, elsewhere in the UK roads have been flooded, and thousands of people were without power.
I went to the Lois Ewen Overlook in the Santa Monica Mountains hoping to maximize my capture length, but missed the first few minutes of the satellite pass.
Although relatively minor compared to these other events, the leaf-mountains feel oddly dramatic in today's calm, blue sky weather.
At the beginning we were in complete fog-out with a visibility of maybe 20 meters.
Photographs don't do them justice- they are space-invaders, yellow-brown fillers of unused corners and parking spaces, where the westerly wind carried and dropped them.
By the time I took photos there was better visibility.
Storm Bert - the 'named storm' that was brewing on the Atlantic when I last contributed to the Archive on Thursday - is sweeping the UK this weekend.
The day before was the first precipitation of the year, though not even 1 cm.
"More than 200 flood alerts put in place and three men die on roads as wild weather crosses country" reports the Guardian this morning.
Slightly more rain in a few days.
The flood alerts are due to the rapid melting of ice and snow across the north of England and Scotland, as the storm brought milder temperatures.
Los Angeles is rare in that it has a mountain range that bisects the city.
Indeed today in London, it is shockingly warm, around 17 degrees- a huge jump from previous days.
The COP 29 negotiations ended today.
The Met Office has issued yellow warnings for rain and wind across large swathes of the country into Sunday, and this is felt in London, with gusts battering houses, trees and infrastructure.
Experts assess that $1 trillion/year is needed to assist developing countries as they address climate impacts and build a low-carbon infrastructure.
As I braved the park with my turnstile antenna, I noticed how a mountain of plane tree leaves had been pushed against the fence near the train tracks, drowning two bikes and the fence itself.
The countries agreeed to $300 million.
In the middle of Hackney Downs, the force of the wind meant that people walked with their heads down, hoods pulled over their faces.
The Trump presidency vows to withdraw from the Paris agreement - again.
My laptop flung wildly left and right as I tried to track the satellite pass.
Took another satellite capture from the bluffs over-looking the Pacific Ocean.
The turbulence reminded me of a day back in 2021 when Soph and I went out to Burgess Park to capture an image of Storm Eunice- against the advice of the Met Office- and I had to kneel on my laptop to keep it from flying away.
Over the last couple of days a "bomb cyclone" formed and is making landfall in the Pacific Northwest.
The blustery conditions affected the satellite image I captured today, as I struggled to keep hold of the antenna.
The name comes from how fast the storm developed.
Oddly, although the Guardian headlines its reports with various numbers of injuries and deaths across England and Wales, reading further into the reporting, a phrase consistently repeats: 'It was not clear whether the incident was linked to the storm'.
Heavy rains and strong winds have hit Washington state already.
Today's test of an Automatic Ground Station involves me carrying the AGS in a tote bag to keep it dry and away from dogs, and tracking the satellite with my Yagi-Uda antenna.
A few lives were lost to falling trees.
The results show a diagonal current of squigly lines in channel b - lines we think might have something to do with a recent update to the code in the AGS system that attempted to produce clearer images, but might have introduced other noise signatures.
From the image you can see a tail of the cyclone that might bring some precipitation to Southern California in the next few days.
The air is still freezing, and I regret not bringing gloves and a woolly hat.
While recording the pass a construction worker came over for a chat.
A freezing night in the park, with a clear, faintly star-lit sky.
He asked if I was recording aliens.
As I return to Hackney Downs long after sunset to test the open-weather Automatic Ground Stations, I am getting better at recognising night-time park activity.
I later pulled up a hotspot, decoded the wav file and showed him the image.
Though many people warned me of entering the park at night, I am growing to feel more safe.
He then asked me if the world is really round or flat.
Perhaps its something about holding a tall pole with a metal object attached at the end.
I guess sometimes it is however you want to see it.
I've also realised that, while daytime park activity happens on the fields, with dogs galloping and racing around each other, night-time park life stays close to pathways and the deeper shadows of trees.
It has rained, it has snowed, and the crevices and corners of London are thoroughly drenched in semi-freezing moisture.
I have rarely seen another person walk directly across the largest field, where I stood this evening.
This is testing the infrastructures of the city, a city that one might expect could have weathered many cold winters in its time.
As I watch the BBC weather report later in the evening, I learn that the beginnings of a 'possibly named storm' are brewing in the North Atlantic.
Yet, one of my best friends, K, who was over for a spontaneous Monday dinner last night, told me and T of her crumbling, disintegrating roof in Dalston.
I wonder and try to anticipate what the name of this storm will be.
The roof has been leaking for months, and mould has been growing along the walls and in corners.
It was 8am, but the sun hadn't properly risen over Hackney.
She had stopped paying rent after her umpteenth attempt to ask the landlord for repairs, failed.
As stream of uniformed children ran across it diagonally, somehow in an evenly spaced line, sleepily on their way to the primary school on the opposite corner.
Within weeks of her stopping payment, the landlord had workers visit the flat, and they claimed to have 'fixed' the issue.
In five minutes I was smothered by a black terrier, trounced on by a visla, and I had to separate an Australian shepherd from the previous two, while their owners called vainly in the distance.
But yesterday, when she got home after dinner, she texted me photos and videos of the rain coming straight down onto her floor.
Perhaps my status as a single dog-less human in the middle of the largest field meant I was a good one to mess with!
A long curving crack in the ceiling gave me shivers- as if the whole roof was going to collapse.
As I was testing an Automatic Ground Station outside for the first time, using a battery pack and my phone as a hotspot, I was anxious that one of the dogs would sit or step on the delicate cables or pee on the station itself, open as it is to the air because of the need for heat vents.
Luckily, K left to stay at her girlfriend's place.
Luckily only one dog leg brushed the AGS, and in a few minutes more, they had raced off.
I couldn't help but think how many people in London are feeling similar exposures to the rain, the cold.
The satellite image collected by the station was oddly grainy, and I resolved to try again later tonight, after 9pm.
How many walls are being eaten from the inside out, by the creep of humidity and the mould that thrives in it?
It's cloudy and cold, but no longer freezing.
I tested the AGS in the park late at night today.
It's also Monday yet, I mistakenly checked the satellite pass times for Sunday.
I didn't want to 'expose' the AGS in the park, less because of weather, wind or rain, and more because a number of people have had phones stolen in the park recently.
My displaced weekend feeling is because N and I have taken off work.
As the AGS is so conspicuous with its glowing light, I hid it in a tote bag.
We decided to only last week.
For the antenna, I wrapped the legs of an rtl-sdr v-diple around the top of a PVC pipe.
The idea is to spend a day outside the heavy weather that has characterised this year.
Standing in the middle of the dark field, holding the pole to the sky, I felt a little like a fictional character enacting some magical ritual.
So far, we have gone swimming and eaten omelettes with pickles.
The moon rose against the silhouetted plane trees and the outlines of bodies crossed under lamp posts.
Later, we plan to cook a roast and watch an episode of Self-portrait in a Coffee-Pot.
Most avoided the dark, open grass.
In other words, cultivate our own fragile high pressure system.
Went to capture a satellite pass from the Venice Pier.
If its strong enough, maybe it'll even persist into the week, this indoor sunshine.
Beautiful blue skies.
In a short essay titled 'The sound of temperature rising' in the edited book 'Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear' (Irene Revell and Sarah Shin), Christine Sun Kim writes of an artwork she made while pregnant with her first child, and while watching the devastation of Trump's first term as president.
The pier is covered with tourists, fishermen and many spectators watching the 40 plus surfers on both sides of the pier.
She elaborates, "Persistent droughts, floods and storms were marking the effects of climate change and a warming world.
A number of people approached me curious about what trouble I was into.
I felt these different kinds of rising temperatures intertwining, and used an open-ended musical notation to capture the feeling.
There was a family with three small children from Italy, a pair of senior citizens and a guy named Sidney.
When I draw musical staff lines, I use four lines instead of the standard five, which references how staff bars would be signed in American Sign Language (ASL) as four fingers pulled across the front of the body.
All were dazzled with the antenna and the concept.
Like my other mural and billboard works, I want the scale to actively impose Deaf people's existence and culture into the everyday lives of hearing people".
To complete the magic trick I used my phone as a hotspot and decoded the wav file live.
Kim's drawing is evocative - four lines curve from the bottom of the page to the top right, and musical notes dance on either end.
The audience was impressed.
The line 'the sound of temperature rising' hovers above.
Two weeks after the election the news is full of the latest on the cabinet picks for the next administration - an anti-vaxer in charge of health, a former oil executive to regulate fracking, and an alleged sex-trafficker to run the justice department.
Today, as I think about the multiplicity of weather during a satellite pass in Hackney Downs, and reflect on how much of the 'sound of temperature rising' is felt in our bodies, our lungs and other organs, Kim's artwork and words resonate powerfully.
I wish I believed in magic.
Around halfway through the satellite pass, as the image creeps down my screen and the deep darkness of the Arctic circle gives way to a few pieces of lighter cloud and land, the satellite almost over London, a football player comes trotting over.
I finish writing the talk at the same time as my phone alarm rings, reminding me to leave the relative warmth of our studio to receive NOAA-18's transmission.
He finds my tape measure Yagi antenna interesting, commenting, 'I never would have thought a tape measure could be so useful!'.
The satellite will pass 77º overhead.
When I point to my screen, he drops his chest and body to the field so fast it startles me, and for a moment he has his face a couple inches way from the slow-loading image.
It always feels like a waste to not catch such a 'good' pass, so I pack my ground station bag make the short cycle to the edge of the Augarten park.
I become self-conscious of the layer of dust on my laptop which, combined with the glaring sunlight of the afternoon, makes the satellite image challenging to make out.
I have learned to stay outside the its impressive brick perimeter wall, so as to avoid confrontation with Austrian rules-based culture.
Yet he hops up as quickly as he went down, and satisfied with his understanding, jogs away.
In the past year, multiple gardeners have told me that I need permission to have an antenna in the park and my German is not good enough to argue.
Grey skies, newly biting cold.
The satellite is above the horizon when I hit record.
My attempt at recording a satellite pass for several weeks.
I use the 10 minutes of bleep-bleeps to think about what I will say tonight.
I forgot the radio frequency extension able and used a wobbly USB converter… which caused SDR++ to freeze multiple times.
The talk is written, but I want to begin with a pause to think of Gaza, our former classmates, friends and colleagues in the Middle East, and to hold in our minds those whose names we will never know but whose existence is resistance to Israel's genocidal drive.
Next time I will pack different kit.
The architectural exhibition that the talk is a response to is a installation of Breathe Earth Collective's archive.
As the sun gets lower in the winter sky, the plants in our flat receive more light, and today they seem to be basking in it.
Material samples, organic matter, salt, copper pipes and more fill the gallery space, each exhibit labelled with a small paper number as part of archeological dig or forensic scene.
The flat almost feels like a greenhouse with fronds and stems poking out of all corners.
This anarchic yet indexed presentation and the earthy smell of decay in the gallery reminded me of the book 'M Archive: After the end of the world' by American writer and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in particular her description of an 'Archive of Dirt'.
One of our bushy plants is even growing a new orange flower from between two leaves.
The book is dedicated "to the purveyors of our bright black future".
A finger of dust reaches from Tunis to the Balearic Sea, another from Misrata into the Mediterranean.
Tonight I will read for Gaza the following poem:
they came with sugar not of sugarcane
sweetness not of cotton but of air
they came with cakes not funneled down to grease
with layers like clouds
they came every day like it was their birthday
or yours one or both
that was when they first came
and then they came with salt
with water and blood to wash you
they came with spit and sand to shine you
they came with cleansing first in mind
and woke your soul with it
next time they come
i hope they bring soil and green
soothe for the roots
i hope they bring dirt and depth
and plant us in it
we could sure use the grounding
for remembering earth'
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2018
During the satellite pass, a group of dog walkers notices me and my antenna, and while they stay on the far side of the field, I overhear the older woman in the group tell the others - 'yes yes...
It is a brilliantly sunny day in London and the sky is a deep, clear blue.
she does the weather'.
A lonely cloud skirts the horizon to the east.
Later, as I await the phone call of a doctor, the passing of the light feels slow and sluggish.
As I set up for the satellite pass in the park, I think of a poem I have just tried to translate from Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian.
I bury myself in email hoping to move it along.
It is called 'Pjesma žena' or 'woman's song' and it was written by Ana Matanja who is described as 'seljanka iz Ledenica' or 'villager from Ledenica'.
A radio antenna arrives in the mail, from Florida.
The first lines go like this:
Crna noćca svud pritisla
Nigde bjela dana,
U kuhinju stoji žena
Ćvrste prikevana
To je bilo prošlog ljeta
A sad toga nije
The poem- from the archive of the Antifašistička Fronta Žena in Sarajevo - describes a scene in which the 'The black night fell / no daylight anywhere / A woman is standing in the kitchen / Tightly chained / That was last summer / And now it is no longer' (loosely translated by me).
It comes in a rectangular box covered almost halfway down one end with rainbow 'first class' stamps, each individually advocating for breast cancer awareness.
It goes on to make a call to arms and to the voices of women who form that AFŽ to protect their rights, including those of voting.
For the first two hours of the morning, Soph, Lizzie, Dan and I discuss ways to 'animate' material in the Public Archive spatially, textually and visually.
The author - Matanja - is a villager, but 'Ledenica' literally translates as 'icicle' or 'icebox'.
Later I test three 'automatic ground stations' in various corners of my flat, and watch them boot-up to a new version (v1.1.4) of the programme they are running.
This, combined with the scene of the first lines, gives this poem of activism and mobilisation a sense of the dark, the cold, and the surreal.
Around 11:30 I catch a NOAA-18 pass from Hackney Downs, happy once again to be back in the park with my tape measure Yagi-Uda antenna.
As I attempt to catch the last fragments of signal from NOAA-18 over the southern horizon by standing on my tiptoes, two dog walkers approach and ask what I am doing.
Though I do lots of university work as well, catching up on the various crises and urgent demands in my inbox, today is a day mostly 'weathered' by open-weather.
I explain, and we chat about my tape measure Yagi antenna briefly.
Looking out over the Pacific Ocean on another beautiful day.
As they are leaving, the man of the couple turns around and says:
'It's not who you know, it's what you know!'
City crews are busy behind me trying to stabilize the bluffs from their relentless slide towards the ocean.
I’m really struggling to get images.
Multimillion-dollar homeowners are in denial of the inevitable, attempting to resist the forces of nature.
I have SLIGHTLY better luck with a dipole.
It has been nearly a week since the election.
I tried a random wire to see if that helped but not really.