2024-10-13 17:06:00
Prototype Test Device Los Angeles
Los Angeles, United States
United States
NOAA-19
2024-10-12 11:14:00
Automatic Ground Station London
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
Automatic Ground Station London
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.
2024-10-11 08:57:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
Remoteness is a position. The prototype Automatic Ground Station has freed-up my time to write more contemplative, spelling error free Weather Notes, but this has come at a cost. I no longer need to go outside in all weathers at inconvenient times of the day (when I should be in a meeting, eating dinner or just doing something unrelated to satellites and weather). For several weeks, I have not had to checked satellite orbits, hold an antenna or manually decode sound and process files. As a result, I look at today's satellite image with a sense of detachment. I treat the image more like a 'data product' than an hard-won 'weather observation'. This abstraction makes the tropical storm systems just beyond the image's frame feel remote and the weather outside my window feel comfortingly local. What's more, I have allowed a 'safe' distance to open up between me and other geopolitical heavy weather. When I manually captured longer satellite images, I often looked for Black Sea or coastlines of North Africa, the Gaza Strip, Israel and Lebanon to orientate myself. Put differently, I have put the 'remote' back into remote sensing and it has become easier for me to deny shared atmospheres and storm systems, interdependencies and breath.
2024-10-10 06:37:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
The weather today sounds like names: Milton, Kirk, and Leslie. The weather sounds too like rain, even though here it is not raining. This is because the tree outside my studio window makes a rustling, swishing, and swooshing sound in the wind. Laden with dried beanpods it has become a musical instrument. I see passersby turn to find the origin of its percussive song. While working, I tune out of the news feeds of Hurricane Milton crossing Florida and tune into the tree.
2024-10-09 18:30:00
Automatic Ground Station London
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
Automatic Ground Station London
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."
2024-10-08 19:24:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
"When the sand settles," said my sister on the phone earlier. I think that she meant to say "when the dust settles" but misspoke and created a one line poem.
2024-10-07 19:36:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
On my way to work, I see a posy of flowers and candles arranged around a group of 'stumbling stones' (Stolpersteine) for Jewish Holocaust victims. The care and thought contained in the small act of memorialising such unfathomable violence moves me. Yet, I also feel disquiet at the possible mnemonic "fusing" of the October 7 attacks with the Holocaust. In a Guardian article, 'How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war', Naomi Klein asks what are the dangers (and motivations) of making such parallels? Klein's arguments have resonances beyond Gaza to other contexts where work is being done to remember the violence and victims of war. Sasha, I am thinking of your 'pilot' research into your family's Balkan ancestry, knowledge of wind and other more-than-meteorological weathers. I am thinking too about how half a decade ago I tried and mostly failed to write about the flawed efforts of Western NGOs to record and so mark the deaths and injuries of civilians in the wake of US-led aerial bombing campaign against the so-called 'Islamic State' in Iraq and Syria. The questions that recur, for me, are about how the memorialisation of "traumatic histories can be done in ways that encourage collective healing and a sense of solidarity across divides" (Klein 2024). And, how when this is not the case, throughout history the transmission of trauma has been used to stir revenge and justify punitive campaigns of violence. Conversely, too, how when public or collective acts of remembrance are forbidden, mourning becomes an act of resistance. Remembering or "zochrot" in Hebrew, writes Klein, "in its truest sense is about putting the shattered and severed pieces of the self together (re-member-ing) in the hopes of becoming whole" (Klein 2024).
2024-10-07 07:57:00
Automatic Ground Station London
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).
2024-10-06 06:40:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
“How cold do you think it is outside?” I ask N as I hesitate between a light woollen or puffer jacket. “Now maybe it'll get cold. Until recently, with the sun it was okay,” he replies. I choose the black puffer jacket and we make a walk around the neighbourhood, appreciating the changing colours of dusk. We wander into a large Gemeindebau and weave through its ascending courtyards until, unexpectedly, exiting onto a familiar street. After three days of rain the sky is clear and air crisp. TD and GD left for Berlin this morning. Their spirits were not dampened by the wet weather. GD left an tunnel made of pillows, chairs and towels in our living room. Except for the walk, N and I spent the day in our pyjamas enjoying the afterglow of a weekend spent with friends.
2024-10-05 20:49:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-18
Giant Riesenbovist mushrooms, colourful Kurbis (pumpkins), and sweet Sturm made from fermenting grape must are the seasonal highlights this weekend's market. Sturm (also spelled Storm) is made from grapes picked in Austria and is named after its swirling, cloudy appearance. As well as the autumn storms that typically signal its arrival. This year Storm Boris flooded the Danube valley before the grape harvest was complete. Sturm is so volatile that bottles of it are sold without lids, so as to allow the gases to escape, and its alcohol content can vary from one to around ten percent. A fellow shopper asks the stall holder in earnest if there will be more Sturm next weekend. He responds it is likely, but stops short of offering a guarantee. By next weekend will the Sturm already be wine?
2024-10-05 18:34:00
Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-15
2024-10-04 20:18:00
Automatic Ground Station 10
London, UK
UK
NOAA-19
2024-10-04 08:44:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
The temperature is hovering around 11 centigrade. Not quite the "baltic" but still bone chilling. It's wet and soggy. Yesterday, I learned the German word for "drizzle" is "Nieselregen". Today, Nieselregen has turned into "it's chucking it down" or depending on your mindset, "lovely weather for ducks!" My favourite word for especially grey wet weather is the Scottish, "dreich". To my ears, it sounds perfectly bleak.
2024-09-29 19:35:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
2024-10-01 10:09:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-18
2024-10-02 06:44:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
2024-10-03 20:28:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station London
London, UK
UK
NOAA-19
2024-10-03 17:41:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
New automatic ground station test location. Today is cold! Or perhaps I am just feeling the cold as I type this because I have to keep a small window open to run the ground station cable indoors. Brrr.
2024-09-30 17:19:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
"Helene Has Killed More Than 90 People. Here Are Some Of Their Stories" read the New York Times headline. I tried to recall if I had heard of the serial killer. Woman serial killers make headlines as the embodiment of evil – women who choose to take life, rather than reproduce it. I realised that I knew Helene. She had been seen a week ago in the Gulf of Mexico, before making landfall over the Big Bend of Florida's Gulf Coast, churning out death and destruction in her wake. Helene was a hurricane. Her first name was Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine, given to her by United States meteorological service on 23 September 2024. A day later, as she grew in strength and her personhood took shape, they renamed her Helene. In writing about plants, Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer observes that “names are the way we humans build relationships, not only with each other but with the living world” (Kimmerer 2013). My home country, the UK, began naming storms in 2014, following the US which had started giving tropical storms female-only names in the 50s. It took decades of feminist fighting for the US meteorological service to assign storms names coded male too (Skilton 2018). Lately, I have been thinking about the power of naming and names to affect real-world relations. I read a British study that compared named and unnamed storms of similar strength, and found that there were fewer cars on the roads during the named storm. The study's authors reason that this is because of the media event that formed around the named storm, possibly saving lives (Charlton‐Perez 2019). In North American and European nomenclature, storms are named at their geographic origins. If a storm named by the US meteorological service crosses the Atlantic and reaches the UK, it will retain its American name. What if, I wonder, we were to reference a different origin? For example, social, historical or political? In ‘Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)’, Rebecca Solnit argues that to name is to “diagnose” and so to transform our ability to speak about a subject, even articulate our relations to it (Solnit 2018). What if, rather than naming storms after each other, we traced their social origins? One outcome could be that unusually large storms, such as Helene, are named after the extractive industries that make their existence statistically so much more likely. If Hurricane Helene had been introduced to us as Hurricane ExxonMobile or Storm Shell how might our relations to such 'extreme weather' events be changed? To name storms after Big Oil feels as offensive as it is flattening. Yet current naming practices fall short too. It would be apt if, in media coverage, mega storms sounded less 'woman serial killer' and more 'corporate killer' or 'colonial menace'. Could such an expressive exercise help us grasp our role as "weathermakers" (Neimanis 2014), to diagnose the social-political origins of today's weather, and so articulate our relations, our knotty response-abilities to it?
2024-09-21 19:34:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
I stretch the blue plastic gloves over my hands. Harvesting grapes reminds me of Marina Abramovic's performance "Counting the Rice" in which participants count and separate grains of rice for a minimum of six hours. At first, it's a novelty to be outside cutting, sorting, and plopping the grapes into the bucket at my feet. Then the repetition becomes annoying. I even feel a little anger. But I have committed to be here so cannot stop and by the morning break of coffee, Käsebrot and gherkins, I have found peace. My experience is more solitary than that of the other volunteers whose German language chatter I struggle to follow, espcially when it slips into Viennese dialect. The grapes are small weather globes (Wetterkugeln). We remove the brown, mushy ones smelling of vinegar that did not survive Storm Boris's record rains, dumped on the Wachau region only a week ago. We leave the purple-brown ones that smell sweet and have a fuzz of 'good mould' (Edelschimmel). Their sugars index a summer of sun and heat-stress – Europe's warmest summer since records began (Copernicus 2024). Lastly, we pick out the grapes with small black bruises left by hail early in the growing season. These are mostly on the South-facing vines that I am picking. They will not be sweet, the winemaker tells us.
2024-09-17 08:54:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
2024-09-16 09:06:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Berlin, Germany
Germany
NOAA-19
2024-09-09 06:40:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Heavy rain and cold. In the Vienna woods, mist hangs dense and low between the trees. Back in the flat, on the phone to my mum, I noticed a red balloon suspended above the rooftops. It appears to be tethered by a long string, implausibly stretching the length of the block before disappearing behind a roof. The string is long and weighs down the balloon, which despite its size must have had significant buoyancy. It looks not much larger than a child’s party balloon, but perhaps this was an illusion of perspective. I wondered if it is a weather balloon come back to Earth, however there is no visible payload. Perhaps it is a child's ambitious experiment?
2024-09-08 09:58:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-18
Tomorrow is Schulstartwoche (the week Austria's public schools reopen after the summer break). On Saturday, the man who I buy apples from at the market, tells me that he remembers the Schulstartwoche being cold and rainy. Today, it was so warm outside we closed the windows to keep the flat cool, only to give into the humidity and reopen them. Weather forecasts suggests that, inline with memories of Schulstartwoche, Monday will being heavy rains, causing the temperature to drop to a chilly 19C.
2024-09-07 10:11:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-18
V and I, adamant that it was the last day of summer, caught the train in the opposite direction from home to Hallstattsee. The lake was blissful. Its steep sides and deep waters have kept it cool, even after the hottest of summers. This we learned this from an older couple and their two dogs, who joined us on the narrow pebble beach. I took my first dip since the operation. The cold water held me, drawing me down. Despite my caution and an unfamiliar tugging in my abdomen, I dipped under again and again. The feeling was one of release. I extended my body, unfolding and stretching it in ways that I have not since the beginning of August. The lake’s water was cloudy and its stoney bottom, quickly dropped away. With my film camera, I photographed V floating in a starfish position, her peach colour swim suit beautifully offset by the dark greens of the lake and mountain side. In that moment, I think that we both felt a supreme confidence and peace in our bodies.
2024-09-06 19:19:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
It is one month since the operation and being engulfed by the 'closest weather' of my body. Last night I dreamt that I was standing in a brackish pool near the coast, bare foot with a fine mud between my toes. N and S are nearby. The coastline could be West Scotland. N asks if I’ve stood in the pool before. I know that I have, but for reasons I cannot explain, I lie and say that I haven't. Stripy leaches appear from the mud and attach their mouths to my feet. In horror, I freeze, unable to move for fear of stirring up more leaches. N reaches over and helps me jump out of the pool. I wake distressed and go to the next room where N is sleeping. I fall asleep again, only to dream that I am at a surreal hospital check-up.
2024-09-05 19:31:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
Despite the daytime heat, the nights are cooler. Only the mosquitoes continue to be a pest. There must have been a mass hatching event as there are so many, espcially in the studio. I think that I am now able to tell part the larger black and white striped ‘common’ mosquito from the smaller brown ‘tiger’ mosquito. With some encouragement, the last of my five scabs 'fell' came off. I pulled at the plastic surgical threads still protruding my my belly button but they wouldn’t budge and later my tummy ached. Once all the wounds are seal, I can swim again. These days, I can mostly move without pain but I am still cautious about twisting or turning too suddenly. I wonder if the doctor will find adhesions when I have my check-up in two weeks. The thin red scars look small on the surface but feel bulbous beneath the skin. In the evening, S from the hospital, WhatsApp'ed me to say that her endometriosis had already returned. The news is disturbing. She already has a new cyst! So, soon? “No one could have known,” she writes.
2024-09-03 20:50:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-18
Sunny, but not too hot. A manageable heat to get work done in.
2024-09-02 21:03:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
There are so many mosquitos in the studio! They bite you even when you are wearing buy spray.
2024-08-29 19:17:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-28 19:30:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-27 19:42:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-26 20:50:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-25 08:37:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-24 08:49:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-23 09:58:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-22 17:29:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-20 19:28:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-19 20:38:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-18 20:50:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-17 06:35:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-16 08:48:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-14 17:35:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-14 10:11:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-13 06:38:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-12 19:27:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-11 19:39:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-10 20:50:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Satellite not known.
2024-08-09 21:03:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-15
Today, I came home from the hospital. The weather was fair and I wore a tee white printed shirt and black slacks, loose at the waist. Satellite not known.
2024-08-06 19:00:00
Prototype Automatic Ground Station Wien
Vienna, Austria
Austria
NOAA-19
There was no satellite recording today because N was still troubleshooting the prototype ground station, so a bending of time, this recording is from tomorrow, the day of my operation. As I write this, I am waiting for the 'big day'. It’s raining, I can hear but not see the water cascade onto the hard facade the 1970s hospital building as the long curtains in my room are closed. Possibly for privacy or, I speculate, because the my roommate left for the operating theatre this morning when it was still dark. Either way the yellow glow of the artificial lights makes me groggy before anyone has even laid a finger on my body. A nurse searches for the word in English, “I will tie the bandage tight so as to stop a …. hema-toma." "Your vein opened too wide," she explains. "God", I say, "that sounds bad!" She reassures me, then sticks a cannula above my wrist where there seems too little flesh between skin and bone to cushion its intrusion. It stings. I watch my blood back flow into the two plastic tiny tubes. “I think that I’m going to throw up,” I say as a nurse announces lunch. I am given a cardboard bowl to throw up in and a tray with a clear soup, asparagus, rice, lettuce leaves, and a yogurt. I skip the yogurt and throwing up, and decide that I need sunlight. Opening the long curtains brings into view a drab but solid looking Altbau opposite. The rest of the day passes with time suspended between boredom, anxiety and grief, the sources of which I guess but chose not to give shape to with words. Satellite not known.