2024-12-07 20:23:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-19
I woke at around 6am to winds buffeting the flat and a car alarm going off on the street. Can winds cause car alarms? I wondered as I drifted back to a light sleep. This morning, the needle of the barometer teetered far below 1000 hPa and pointed at the diagram of a storm. Indeed Storm Darragh was already swirling across the U.K., a storm so violent that the Met Office issued a red wind warning, alerting people of the threat to life – only the 19th since 2011.
2024-12-06 11:19:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-18
The needle on the barometer crept up from its place around 1,009 hPa yesterday afternoon to 1019 today around noon. True to the barometer, the sky opened up into a clear, crisp blue. I was reminded of Gaston Bachelard's writing on the aerial imagination, and his writing of air as 'thin matter' that is especially sensible to poets.
2024-12-04 07:50:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-15
2024-12-03 21:48:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-18
London's air is a crisp, cold air today, but the movement of the city keeps me warm. The pressure on my barometer reads over 120 hPa, and the arrow of change points to 'clear' weather. I spend the day in rooms full of students in colleagues, on multiple tube and overground trains, and on busy high streets. Walking from my university campus in Bloomsbury to Tottenham Court Road at sunset, I can almost feel the warm glow of each body as it passes by me in the crowd.
2024-10-12 11:14:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-18
Today on BBC, Keir Starmer says he is remaining focused on the achievements of his new government, refusing to be distracted by 'side winds'. The phrase gives me pause, as it suggests that recent scandals around campaign donations or staff adjustments are akin to a tangential or minor wind. I think about the associations between wind and chaos, and the way the prime minister must be intent on distinguishing the focus of his government from any hint of entropy or agitation. Yet, if there are 'side winds', what is in the centre or the middle? Is it a storm, like a hurricane? Is it another wind, but one that is constant and measured? At the salon this morning, I was telling my hairdresser about my Mom's experience of Hurricane Milton, and the number of people who texted me about my Mom's safety, having seen Milton's imagery on the news, as well as the rumours and lies that have emerged in its wake, about the government creating and directing the hurricane, or refusing emergency relief. A woman who has just been styled for an upcoming hairdressers convention overhears me, and tells me she is from Idaho. "it's so fascinating what you were saying about everyone focusing on Milton" she says, "because where I'm from, in Idaho, we had the largest and most severe fire in US history earlier this year, and it did not make any headlines. No one was talking about it". I confessed I had not heard about the Idaho fires either, despite being an American, perhaps more attuned to US media than most people in the UK. She had to leave for her taxi before we could finish this conversation - which left me thinking again about 'side winds'.
2024-10-11 11:27:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-18
Tropical Storm Leslie is brewing in the mid-Atlantic. By Monday, it may begin to reach the west coast of Spain, much like where the beautiful curving cyclone visible in today's image is swirling. For now, central Europe is dotted with a few clouds but is otherwise relatively clear. This image from an automatic ground station in my flat was captured by a turnstile antenna leaning on the windowsill, its metal dipoles shining in the noon sunlight.
2024-10-09 18:30:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-15
After having watched Hurricane Milton on various media throughout the day, and thinking about my family in Northern Florida, going to sleep tonight feels like a very difficult thing to do. As I try to distract myself with a book, I can still see the slowly spinning 'arms' of the hurricane, like an after-image.
2024-10-08 21:56:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-18
I wake up to news of Hurricane Milton, one of the most rapidly intensifying storms ever measured in the Gulf of New Mexico. The category 5 storm is on a path to make landfall in Western Florida by Wednesday evening in EST. My Mom just moved to Florida two months ago - on time for hurricane season. She lives in Gainesville, just north of the projected path of Milton. On various late night phone calls over the last two weeks, she has showed me mountains of debris on her street, still there from Hurricane Helene, which also passed close, but not directly over Gainesville. Later in the day, I am in a team supervision with one of my PhD students, and my co-supervisor, a geomorphologist and quaternary scientist, shares that he was planning on searching NOAA's National Centre's for Environmental Information the other day (researching data for a third year undergraduate course practical) but the NCEI headquarters are in Asheville (Buncombe County) in North Carolina, one of the cities hardest hit by Hurricane Helene in the last few days of September, and they have had a continuous power outage since. My colleague reports that most of the region's electricity substations were flood damaged, as are all the bridges. Initial damage estimates are coming out in the order of $30-45 bn. Out of >100,000 houses in Buncombe County only around 900 have flood insurance. A former NOAA scientist has estimated 40 trillion gallons of water fell. And now Milton has arrived. Normally, the NCEI would offer 'real time' products for tracking weather like Milton, and it is a crucial hub in packaging various forms of satellite, sensor and other data for a wide group of people including farmers, businessmen, insurance companies and weather services around the US. But as of today, none of NCEI's real-time tracking and forecasting features are available - this is a big hole in networks of weather data sharing and communicating. As I hold my turnstile antenna out the window for a satellite pass close to 11pm this evening, I read the prognosis of a Florida based meteorologist, speaking of Milton: "This is nothing short of astronomical... This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce."
2024-10-07 07:57:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-15
In Enemy of the Sun, Samih al-Qasim writes: I may – if you wish – lose my livelihood / I may sell my shirt and bed. / I may work as a stone cutter, / A street sweeper, a porter. / I may clean your stores / Or rummage your garbage for food. / I may lie down hungry, / O enemy of the sun, / But / I shall not compromise / And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist. | You may take the last strip of my land, / Feed my youth to prison cells. / You may plunder my heritage. / You may burn my books , my poems / Or feed my flesh to the dogs. / You may spread a web of terror / On the roofs of my village, / O enemy of the sun, / But / I shall not compromise / And to the last pulse in my veins / I shall resist. Samih Al-Qasim, “Enemy of the sun,” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance , Edited by Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeb (Washington, DC and Dar es Salaam: Drum and Spear Press, 1970).
2024-10-05 18:34:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-15
Today's night-time capture from Automatic Ground Station 10, currently in testing phase in London, looks like the 'ectoplasm' of 19th century clairvoyants, a current of veiled matter flowing over the continent.
2024-10-04 20:18:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-19
The satellite image collected by Automatic Ground Station 10 is framed with the noise and obstructions of a London street at night, a full story of building behind and four story buildings across the street. Yet in the window of signal there is a glimmer of movement, a curve and swirl of cloud that, in the infrared channel, speaks of something moving far away. I am still in awe of the fact that this is possible with an antenna held out of a window.
2024-10-03 20:28:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-19