Today I am striking in solidarity with Palestine together with other UK-based practitioners and organisations. The strike is organised by Mosaic Rooms and Migrants in Culture, specifically calling for groups and individuals engaged in cultural work to withold labour today, May 31st. My academic work as a cultural geographer is part of the cultural milieu in the UK, as I publish open access articles related to artworks, artistic collaborations and networks. Though open-weather is a fragmentary, precariously funded cultural project, it does participate in the cultural sphere. In lieu of a long-winded 'weather note' or working on a new academic article, I am spending the day doing the following: - Building an open access resource library on Palestine Geographies - Emailing my union on moving forward a public statement on Palestine - Engaging with and applying resources on university action by University and College Workers for Palestine

After another colder, misty and rainy day yesterday, and intermittent dark and gloomy clouds this week, it is a relief once again to feel some sun. The air is relatively calm, and a high altitude cirrus or haze makes the light a bit silvery. The ground is still moist in places, though elsewhere the grass has dried and turned a light beige. As I walked down the steps of my and T's house, a man on a bike, whose name I later learned is Duane, did a double take, then stopped and said he had seen me many times in Hackney Downs, and wanted to know about my Yagi antenna. We chatted briefly and, though he had to go toward Clapton, he said the next time he saw me in the Downs, he would come over and see what I was doing. We shook hands twice before parting. As I was leaving the Downs after the pass about twenty minutes later, an older man called out to me. He said he lived close to Hackney Downs and had seen me many times with the antenna, and now wanted an explanation. I showed the satellite image I had just live-decoded and he mentioned his own work as an artist. As his hands were trembling, he asked me to type in the open-weather website to the Notes on his phone.

It is very windy today - the kind of surprising wind that gusts and blows in corridors. It was a struggle with my Yagi antenna, as it catches the air so easily, and at several points almost took me sideways with it. The tape measure joints swung at odd angles from the wood stick. An older woman and a small, white, curly haired dog were meandering nearby and I waved to say hi. We ended up speaking for most of the satellite pass. After considering my antenna for a few minutes she said: "the satisfaction... it gives satisfaction" and then "it's contact". I completely agreed.

In the field that has been turned in to a parking lot for university graduation services, I link up my v-dipole, dongle and android. A maintenance man or security guard sitting in a blue van looks on with a bemused expression, but mostly he ignores me and talks on the phone. The air is warm for the first time in weeks and it is such a relief from the cold, rainy, at times torrential rain we have had in the U.K. Later in the afternoon I show my satellite image to SB, a physical geographer who specialises in studying past climates through tephra (volcanic ash). He points to the wavy line of the increasingly wobbly jet stream and explains how, with the poles warming faster than the equator, the difference in temperature and pressure that stabilises weather and holds the jet stream north is decreasing, causing the jet stream to curve and bend south more and more, bringing moisture laden air from the Atlantic to Northern Europe - this describes our recent weather experiences. Now that I’ve seen the curve of the jet stream with SB’s help I want to look back to all of the past imagery and try to spot it. Meanwhile, he says, ‘anywhere below 40 degrees (latitude) is burning’. Soph is just back from holiday and describes a level of heat in Croatia over the last week that was at the limit of their physical health. It doesn’t take much for heat to stress London- on my tube journey home, the air is so stifling that people are visibly haggard, some using makeshift fans and others flushed read and eyes closed, waiting for their train.

Low-pressing grey again. A feeling of melancholy. I'm missing Soph's presence on zoom calls and text channels. I go searching for the funfair in the northwest corner of the park. It has not yet been activated, but I can see people walking around inside, checking and testing things. I capture a satellite image with my Yagi antenna and Android phone, kneeling in the yellow grass. After the pass, I circle the perimeter of the fair, and notice that there is a line of trailer vans and mobile homes on the far side, facing the overground train tracks. Laundry is flung on the metal fence that divides the funfair from the park, or on small drying racks set up outside semi-ajar car doors. I hear a man speaking at an elevated volume on the phone. He says something like 'I thought I had 2 points! where are my points!' I realise, then, that the funfair is an entirely mobile operation: all the big machines are transported on two very large, glossy red trucks, but the real 'infrastructure' are the staff who likely follow in their vans and mobile homes. I wonder how many places they go. As I walk back to Downs Road I pass a couple walking their greyhound. As I pass I can hear the woman say to her partner 'Oh yes that's the lady with the...'

It is a grey, energy-less, dark-clouded day. My thoughts, however, are with the pale blue skies, swift winds and coastal swamplands of Buenos Aires as I re-read my field notes written during the month of fieldwork I carried out there last spring. As I make my way through my fast cursive handwriting, sometimes having to puzzle at words, I remember how breathlessly I wrote these notes, trying to record and remember everything. It mostly works. As I close-read, I am transported visually and sensually to Villa Inflamable, the community close to the centre of Buenos Aires that is the site of the research I am doing with a team of collaborators in Argentina. My colleague / friend Joaquin had taken me to VI after a morning spent on the rooftop of my other collaborator, Debora, eating pancakes and experimenting with radio antennas. There was not a speck or glimmer of cloud in the sky- and it was a wide open horizon. It took Joaquin and I only 12 minutes to drive from Debora's house to VI. My field notes read: "We arrived in the midst of heavy vehicle traffic - large tank trucks, mostly with Shell on them, entering and leaving the petrochemical facility. We passed to the right of a large sand dune - a sand production facility- there were thick clouds of dust in the air". From the open clarity of Debora's rooftop, it was a different experience being on the ground in VI. We walked around the neighbourhood with Claudio Espinola, a long-term activist and organiser in the community who also helps to ration water to families (the 'running' water is undrinkable, so families get a number of bottles of water per week). VI, like much of Buenos Aires, is on marshland, and we passed many pools of water and algae-covered ponds. The streets had been recently paved, but this had caused water-runoff problems and a man in a car told us he would prefer the dirt road if the sewage would not flood the streets. Later, as Joaquin and I left Claudia and made our way to an air quality monitoring station not far from the community, "We passed a plant that Joaquin suspects is where they began burning medical waste during the pandemic. It looked very old and dilapidated. Joaquin suspects that environmental regulations were relaxed during the pandemic to enable the repurposing of these kinds of incinerators. We also passed a smaller river - maybe 20m wide - that looked like slow-moving cement. There was on oil slick on top. Claudia had compared the river to cement too". I thought about who made the decision to start burning medical waste in an out-of-order incinerator in an already impoverished and environmentally stressed community like VI. I thought about what it takes to turn a river into cement. I also thought about the divergences in the experiences of people in this community and those only a few blocks away, somewhat sheltered from the 'weather' of the petrochemical facility. I thought about the 'weather' of Villa Inflamable, the weather of flammable. In a recent article on perceptions of air in Mumbai, two scholars write: "For the state, flammability is the result of the residents themselves. It is them, and their forms of work, that create fire risks, and so it is they who need to be removed. Residents, on the other hand, attribute causality to the gases that the garbage ecology itself produces. They are acutely aware of how the state has aligned blame in an opportunistic way with them rather than the material hazards of place, poverty and labor" (Tripathy and McFarlane, 2022: 12). From my fieldnotes alone (and without any experience of living in VI) the causality of the environmental toxicity in the neighbourhood is shockingly clear, yet my colleague Debora has written extensively of the 'labour of confusion' produced when residents of VI are told their environment isn't so toxic, or that nothing can be done about it. This is about perception indeed, and it is about whose perceptions are taken to mean 'truth' or 'causality' and whose are seen to trouble the order of things. I spend most of the day co-writing a draft chapter with Debora, returning in my memory to VI, trying to articulate in words the causalities and breathing relations at work there.

We made the 12:45 ferry to Portsmouth with one minute to spare, and opted for the 'sun deck' despite the total absence of sunlight. The deck felt more inviting than the humid, dark interior of the boat with airplane-like seats and sullen-looking people. We ate cheese and pickle sandwiches that neither of us liked very much. A NOAA-19 pass began just three minutes after the boat's departure. Though the maximum elevation was only 18 degrees to the west, I decided to try anyway, having never received a satellite image while moving in water! It worked far better than anticipated- I curled the legs of the V dipole antenna tripod around the metal railing, and a few minutes later the signal was ringing-in clearly. I wondered how my trajectory on the boat was affecting the image reception, if at all. A young man who had also come up to the deck asked if he could take a photo of me with his analogue film camera. He had travelled to the Isle of Wight for the weekend to 'see the stars'. Yet he also admitted to being 'very out of it' and having had 'little sleep'. He lamented the rise of Starlink and the other ways we are 'ruining the planet', and didn't say much more. When we approached the port, the clearly audible signal of NOAA-19 cut out sharply for a few seconds, so much so that I briefly wondered whether the satellite had stopped transmitting or glitched for these seconds. My experience of noise is normally a little 'softer', more like a gradient than a cut.

Finally the grey has passed and a crisp wind has blown away most of the low-hanging, misty clouds. The air has a sharp chill, but one that will fade soon, I suspect. I am reminded of Derek Jarman's weather note on June 4th 1989 (from his diaristic book Modern Nature) which, though clearly of another time, place and month, describes today's weather perfectly: "The billowing white flowers along the shore are gone; but the mountainous white clouds in the blue sky and the horses breaking across a silvery sea cheer their memory to the echo. Today wind and sunlight fill the landscape with laughter. An old window opened in the wind and sent the cobwebs flying. The grasses are clapping - even the seagulls loop the loop".

It is another grey, misty and cold-ish day in London. I spend the morning working and take a brief break to capture a satellite image. A curly haired black dog tackles me and rolls around on my laptop as I am mid-pass. His owner looks mortified but as soon as I say it's not a big deal he becomes interested in my antenna, and it turns out he used to be an engineer, working with Radar. We don't speak long. Later in the afternoon, I see the weather from the seventieth floor of the Shard (a sneaky birthday-week adventure with T, who has wanted to go to the top of the Shard for years but is always too anxious of the elevators). We rise sixty floors in what feels like five seconds, our ears popping. At the top, T and I carefully approach the knife-edge, holding on to the metal beams for reassurance. After a few minutes, though, we have our foreheads pressed against the glass gazing in every direction. A stranger offers to take photos of us. Though the view might be more stunning on a sunny day, the changeable clouds and shifting rain are spectacular, and we try to time how long a rainy cloud takes to pass over London. It sort of dissolves rather than making it the whole way. There are only a few other people, and so plenty of space to circle all edges and study all perspectives. Descending, we go on a hunt for an ivy-coloured wall on an old building at Kings College that we could see hidden a few blocks away from St Thomas' street. Once we find the wall, we spend a few minutes admiring the density of the ivy, its even spread and growth over red brick, nearly engulfing the entire building.

The day starts cold, gray and misty. During the satellite pass, I feel chilly in my Mom's flannel-lined denim jacket, jeans and boots. How is this the second of July, I think. In the slow-loading satellite image, the sun glints tantalisingly, catching its own reflection over the Mediterranean. I am wondering where Soph is at the moment, as they left for a two-week holiday on Sunday. I think somewhere in Croatia, soaking up sunrays and salty air. Thinking about it makes my heart hurt, both with happiness that Soph is there on holiday, but also with a feeling of deeply missing the Adriatic and especially the small bay called Zaraca, near the village Gdinj where my Baba grew up on a remote part of the island of Hvar. Is it possible to miss an atmosphere, or a weather pattern? Is it possible to be nostalgic for places, less through their material surfaces and more through their elements? Having spent so many long summers in Zaraca as a child, having climbed the windy road that goes from the bay to the sparsely populated village Gdinj, with its fig trees and olive groves, with its tunnel spiders catching impossible flecks of dew in the dry landscape and epic cumulonimbus clouds dancing over the Karst rock of the mainland, and wtih its slantwise sunlight that remains until the last drop (since the road climbs on a south-facing slope) I feel so entwined with this weather. It is perhaps easy to say on a day like this in London, as I shiver through my trousers in the first week of July. Yet I think there is something beyond the beauty of Hvar and the Adriatic Sea that I am missing so much. Maybe it's a direction I will always turn.

Bees, flies, ladybugs and other insects buzzed around my ground station, located near to the Biological Sciences bee apiary in a meadow on the campus of Royal Holloway. One long-winged fly, looking like a cross between a grasshopper and a moth, landed on my keyboard. Purple-pink cornflowers and daisies bloomed abundantly in the uncut grass. I remembered Jaime Sebastians' story that he had recorded the sound of a NOAA satellite together with the chirping of crickets or cicadas, and he could 'see' the chirrups in the resulting image. I resolved to return to the apiary one day and attempt a recording of both an orbiting satellite and honeybees.

At the Restore Nature Now march in London today, signs read, 'To Bee or Not to Bee', 'Hey Kier OR Rishi! Bee Radical for Nature!', 'UK Arms Sales Destroy Life and Environment', 'Protect Essex Badgers!' 'I Just Really Like Bugs', 'SOIL not OIL', and 'No Justice, No Peas' (accompanied by a drawing of wailing peas). As the march wound South toward Piccadilly Circus, a burst of cheering led my partner and I to cross to the other side of the current of marching bodies, where we found a 'Dyke March' going in the opposite direction on the other side of the road. Their signs read 'Choose Butch. Choose Femme. Choose a Big Fucking Lesbian', 'Lesbianism is not a choice, it is a Blessing!', 'Dykes Against Occupation', 'Whose got a Wand and a Rabbit?', and 'Dykes For Trans Rights!'. Our allegiance to the XR march was seriously challenged! T said 'OMG, there's Stav B!', (legendary artist and performer who used to host underground nights for queer womxn in east London). We barely resisted jumping the street barrier and carried on in the Restore Nature Now crowd. An couple hours later, after meeting one of my old College friends in a pub near the Thames, we found ourselves on the southside of the river at Southbank Centre, where we stumbled upon a stage where people were gathering for a set of acts on the theme 'Queer C*ntry', part of Chaka Khan's curation of Meltdown Festival. There were just as many cowboy hats as dolly parton wigs. Two older men, dressed in matching pinstripe shirts and blue jeans, out-danced many of the gays. A day like this, of so many frequencies, actions, and parallel mobilisations, felt like a kind of litmus test of London, like pulling three colours out of a paintbox. On a day like this, we give our gratitude to this city.

My first pass with a homemade, 'tape measure' Yagi antenna! I followed a design described in a YouTube video by India Rocket Girl, though I cross referenced India Rocket Girl's design with other sources for tape measure antennas and DIY dipoles. I also watched around seven YouTube video tutorials on how to solder wires to each other and to metal surfaces as my soldering skills are incredibly rusty. I lacked many of the components that India Rocket Girl uses, but made do with zip ties and metal brackets that I found at the local hardware store. Instead of PVC pipe, I used a long piece of wood that was intended for house moulding. The tape measure was an old heavy duty one that I had in my electronics box. Last night after dinner I started testing a few things, and before I knew it I was knew deep, spread all over the flat (T was away in Italy). I didn't think I had gotten it right, and I was convinced I would need to re-solder, but when I set up this morning, connected the antenna to my dongle and lifted the giant Yagi off the ground, pointing north, the signal was immediately strong! I tracked the satellite to a maximum elevation of 45 degrees to the East and then down to the Southern horizon. Toward the end of the pass a couple approached me from behind and were almost as excited as I was about the tape measure design and the image of the Mediterranean forming on my screen. Shortly after they left, Martin rode over on his bike and kindly took the photos of me shared here, very grateful for documentation of this DIY moment! More testing to follow soon...

Camped out at a long table at a corner cafe, and feeling quite sleepy after a late night, five of us spoke for hours about our former lives, the legacy of communism in Bulgaria and the Balkans, developments in AI, and the politics of queer spaces. I set up my ground station at a cafe table on the streetcorner and was soon the subject of many looks and glances, though people were more hesitant to approach than the evening before. When Sofie arrived and began expressing enthusiasm about what I was doing and laughing at the situation, a small throng suddenly materialised around the ground station, including a man and a young boy, and an older man who gave me a small paper card that advertised 'La Constructorium Maya': "vise à construire une pyramide astronomique, un centre de démonstration des sciences et techniques, Précolombiennes à San Marcos (Lac Atitlan) au Guatamala". The man also insisted on showing us a photo of the Lake Atitlan, which was a pearl blue surrounded by deep green hills. Yet when I search for the website on the card I find what appears to be a french organisation that researches in the materials of building construction. Ten minutes through the pass, though we were still receiving a surprising signal given the five story surrounding buildings, rain began to cover my laptop and we went back inside. I placed my open laptop upside down on the brunch table so it could dry itself out. The following hours of the afternoon was a grey, dark, rainy mist until the sky suddenly cleared and sun poured out as Sofie and I left a bookshop where we had gone to a beautiful reading of a novel featuring vampires, a gay couple, a theatre festival and a skateboarding evangelist.

The sunlight comes sideways today. There are low-hanging, grey and dark blue clouds circling above, and I leave the flat for the park a few moments after rain has stopped, feeling daring with my uncovered laptop. A flash of sun comes from the horizon as a gap in the sky opens for a few seconds and closes again. I can tell the moment when the sun has come out for just long enough to lure a whole hoard of dog owners and dogs outside, yet as soon as they reach the field the darkness falls again. I am in the park just long enough to see Martin who rides over on his bike, and we briefly speak about his plans to build a satellite ground station. As I work at my desk for the rest of the day, I am surprised by the slantwise light, searching through the corners of our kitchen and living room, making the whole place seem a little off-kilter, making my admin tasks feel a little surreal. I find myself turning on and off the desk lamp and living room light, unable to find optimal emailing conditions. One clap of thunder booms across the city just after lunchtime, answered by a far away siren.

Pockets of deep cerulean blue shown through grey and white cloud this Sunday morning. I stole a few minutes to capture the satellite image before heading out to a local pub for a roast with my partner and one of her ex-partners who is staying with us for the weekend. As the pass was ending, a man named Paul rode over to me on his bike, and asked what I was tracking. He was suprised that the answer was satellites, as he had expected wildlife. After I asked Paul to take a photo of me (two of which are attached, thanks Paul!) he said he could show me a photo of him. The photo was of Paul next to a train with the lettering Dr Paul Stephenson on the side. 'In my dreams!' joked Paul. Later in the day I looked up the train, and found out that Dr Paul Stephenson is a well known civil rights campaigner in the UK who organised the 1960s Bristol bus boycott which overturned a ban on people from ethnic minorities working on buses in the city. Dr Stephenson's campaigns were instrumental in paving the way for the first Race Relations Act in 1965, and in 1992, he also helped set up the Bristol Black Archives Partnership, which protects and promotes the history of African-Caribbean people. Great Western Rail apparently has a programme called the 'Great Westerners' where people can be nominated to have trains named after them, as a mark of respect to contributions to UK society. I had not heard of this practice of dedicating trains, and this made me wonder whether airplanes or satellites are ever dedicated in this way. Soph and I had recently wrote a short text that includes a vignette of a woman who asks to have her name attached to a powerful storm, and it becomes Storm Babette. I had assumed that 'In my dreams' referred to the 'Dr' part of the name, but I realised maybe it was about having your name on infrastructure, or being recognised as a 'great westerner'...

Brunswick Square Gardens was empty this morning except for a circle of exchange students trading stories about English habits of life, and a long-haired older man walking in circles, puffing on a joint and coughing vigorously. Despite the tall brick buildings around the square I was able to capture a relatively clear image of the UK and the middle of the continent. Yet I failed to recognise the impending rain that would baffle all predictions for the day's weather. Later in the afternoon, at a seminar where three of my PhD students were presenting their work while weather brewed above, ideas of the planetary were discussed in relation to sonic geographies. One of my students is building networks of 'live audio streams' as an investigative tool to listen to sites of extraction, and another is listening across great timespans and timelines through conservtion bioacoustics archives, through which scientists trace the changing compositions of species in landscapes, and observe how the memory of sound is intergenerational, held in the bodies of animals (even non vocal animals) in ways that far exceeds individual lifetimes. As I listened quietly, resisting the urge to speak as the rest of the research group asked probing questions, I reflected on the different modes of planetary 'stretching' and 'scaling' being enacted in their work, and the devices they were using, from DIY audio streamers to experimental notation systems. The climate crisis requires us to 'stretch' and 'scale' but sometimes our conceptual frameworks scale unevenly or in unexpected ways. By the time we had celebrated the seminar and had dinner, the brewing weather had arrived, and it was pouring (an event that had not been predicted on any platform I had checked which suggested 35 percent light rain). I cycled home for 40 minutes, at times coasting through rivers of water that came up to my standing knee. Of course I had also worn my nice white trousers. I felt thoroughly stuck in space-time, unable to stretch or extend, each peddle bringing me two metres closer to home.

I knew I was out earlier than usual this morning as the fluorescent cones for the children's soccer practice had yet to be distributed across the field, and balls were piled in a corner. The air was grey, and though it wasn't exactly foggy, things felt muted, soft and indistinct. This made me think of Craig Martin's article on fog (one of the first articles I really engaged with in my studies of atmosphere as a young MRes student at Oxford). Fog, for Martin, "is located at the interstices of the incoming and the outgoing: lingering at this juncture, it could be said to determine the immanent connection between body and world" (2011: 456). In other words, fog makes us feel the air as something 'thickening', but in doing so, it demonstrates "a different absorption of time and space" (458), one that counters the 'invisible' and 'transparent' freedom we often associate with air. There is also something resonant between the experience of fog and that of heat. Martin quotes Taussig: "Heat... is a force like color, that sets aside the understanding in place of something less conscious and more overflowing, radiance instead of line, immanence instead of the famous bird's eye view" (Taussig, cited in Martin, 2011: 457). Later in the morning, on a train to Bristol, I decode the satellite image and the cloud-free lakes of Russia come into view once again. I think about the exactness of the image: today it feels full of lines, curves and arcs, land-shapes outlined against the darkness of ocean. Instead I try to feel the 'thickening' of air and fog, and the 'radiance' and 'immanence' of the too-warm land.

Water and dust: these are the two prominent features in the satellite image I collected today. In the North, Lake Onega and Lake Ladoga are dark prints in the land near the now ice-free Gulf of Bothnia. Northern Europe is unusually cloud-free and seeing these lakes so clearly makes me feel uneasy, as if these waters are 'laid bare' by the sun. Another notable 'body of water' in the satellite image is unmarked on Google maps, but searching further reveals this is the Rybinsk Reservoir built by Russia in 1935. It was the largest man-made body of water at the time of its construction. The reservoir caused 150,000 people to be displaced and over 600 villages were submerged. In contrast, further South, there are other geographies and histories of immersion and displacement. The borders of sea and land are obscured in places by a current of dust making a soft streak from Tunis to the Southern tip of Sicily. News media are alert to this dust in different ways: an online publication called Gloucestershire Live warns readers that a 'scorching' Saharan dust plume is about to 'hit' the UK, and goes so far as to offer advice for how to 'properly clean your car' (hint: 'brushing' is not enough!). In the Swindon Advertiser, Saharan dust will 'sweep' across the UK. Yet in the Metro, these alerts to dust are dismissed with evidence from the Met Office: "their forecasts have no suggestion of a Saharan plume heading our way – good news for our cars which would otherwise end up coated in dust". The car is, once again, the primary surface on which we 'see' dust in European news media, and the object that needs most protection from it. When there are half-hearted gestures to the way dust can affect breathing for 'vulnerable' and 'asthmatic' people, these are rarely gifted the same emotional fervor for protection. There, scattered across the windscreen or front hood, dust speckles and glitters, forming 'galaxies' (as described by Nicola via Soph in an earlier weather note) to be 'properly' and thoroughly removed in the wash.

In a recent article on 'breathing climate crises', Blanche Verlie and Astrida Neimanis advocate for a move beyond strategies of bodily 'attunement' found widely in the environmental humanities and toward practices of 'conspiratorial witnessing' involving the use of 'proxy stories' as 'amplifiers and sensitisers' of our own attunements (2023: 126). For these authors, microscopes, qualitative interviews and poems might all be "mediating prostheses that open certain experiences for us" (2023: 126). As I stand on a picnic table on the west side of Founders Field at Royal Holloway, I think about the antenna I am holding as a prosethetic. This is not unfamiliar: together with other members of open-weather, Soph and I have written about the relationship of body to satellite (and DIY ground station) as a “subversive prosthetic” (Engelmann et al., 2022). In later writing (Engelmann, 2023), and in dialogue with Soph’s masters dissertation work on the material politics of radio (Dyer 2017), I have tried to understand the relationship of body to antenna (and satellite) not through the lens of the prosethetic but as a mutual 'agitation': an agitation of embodied and sensory weather knowledges, and, in turn, an agitation of the “scientific weather” made accessible through orbiting satellites. When we use technologies to tell 'proxy stories' of weather and climate, how much do we need to account for the way these stories come into friction, creating agitation and heat? How might this agitation, this heat, itself be a site of 'witnessing climate'? Midway through my satellite pass on Founder's Field I manage to ask a second-year undergraduate 'Financial and Business Economics' student to take some documentation photos of me waving the antenna at the sky. He politely keeps from looking amused or bewildered. Walking down from the field through the Royal Holloway woodland, I can't help but notice the swampy waters of the woodland pool and a green-feathered duck asleep at the bank. The woods are buzzing with green life, but they feel far too warm and languid for May. Later in the afternoon at a staff meeting, serious conversations about university finances cause various states of anxiety and worry, and bodies slope in their chairs. I think: how do we witness when things heat up? What is the 'heat' we witness?

After an early morning appointment near London Bridge I paid homage to a site that hosted one of the first 'satellite seances' of open-weather in August 2019: Mint Street Park. As I set up my ground station next to a large flock of pigeons at the top of the park's terraced mound, I remembered the gathering of people who had participated in a satellite pass and poetry reading (by JR Carpenter) at the same location almost five years ago, as part of a series of gatherings and a reading group called 'Weather or not', led and curated by Arjuna Neumann. Soph and I contributed regularly to the reading group and discussion sessions for several months before open-weather was initiated. Today, the air is far colder and my laptop is speckled with rain. I ask a lone walker to take a photo and he takes fifteen. Later, I am meeting the author and scholar Jean-Thomas Tremblay for coffee in central London. They are visiting London for a conference and it is a rare chance to meet a North American scholar who I admire so much. Tremblay wrote the incredible book Breathing Aesthetics (Duke, 2022) that has circulated widely in the humanities and has inspired entire exhibitions in Canada, and I was asked to review it. The review came out last week. Over coffee, at the end of a conversation about book writing, air scholarship, environmental humanities and 'negative action' (another forthcoming book by Tremblay) I show them the satellite image and ask if they would like to contribute to this weather note. This is a half-typed, half paraphrased record of what Tremblay generously offered: "In the context of the Palestine solidarity movements I am thinking about the lack or absence of the possibility of gatherings for resistance [in London]. I am thinking a lot about denouncement... this has been a bit uncanny to see [here]. When I was in New York City a few weeks ago there was an omnipresence of the performance of politics (in the most generous sense of performance), and I've been looking for it here"

I have been thinking a lot about how atmosphere can gather like a force field around a person, an object, a space, a time. One of my favourite writers of atmosphere Kathleen Stewart, says: 'It was then that I began to think, along with others, that nameable clarities like family or friendship or love or collapse or laughing or telling stories or violence or place are all atmospherics. All forms of attending to what's happening, sensing out, accreting attachments and detachments, differences and indifferences, losses and proliferating possibilities' (2011: 448). This morning I cycled through the uncannily warm, dusty, petrol-infused air of London to Burgess Park, which used to be my local park and the place I captured many satellite images in the early days of open-weather. On the hill in the park I thought about its atmospherics, how my move to Hackney has changed my attachments and detachments to the park's hills, fields, communities and skyline. As if to interrupt my nostalgia, a couple men who had come to lie on the hill started speaking and then fighting. One started laughing at the other, clearly in a way to make him eveny more angry. I rushed to pack up my antenna and rolled down the hill on my bike, noticing that the other hilltop walkers had done the same.

On my walk to the train station at 6:30am, the sun was already warming the park and highlighting its colours. I passed an orchid rockrose that looked eager to be seen, so I stopped and took its portrait. I learned later that rockrose flowers last one day. Later, at the university geography department where I work, I attended a seminar on 'plant humanities' in which someone suggested that plants 'scale time' in nonlinear ways. They hold hours, minutes, and seconds in recursive spirals, cycles and loops. This made me speculate about non-linear plant-weathers. In the orange rays slanting through windows on the train ride home, I wondered if the rockrose was finishing its rotation or defiantly resisting the dimming light, stretching time.

The sun has flooded London these last two days. I use the word 'flood' deliberately as the city feels like it is inundated with light, beyond its own capacity. In central London yesterday on an errand, I noticed people with their eyes closed, standing or lounging on streetcorners. The sun leaks into apartments and buildings through open doors and flung-wide windows. In the park today, I set up my ground station on the south side to feel even more of the sun's rays. Nearby a woman practiced throwing frisbees. A small terrier came running up to me with a growl, but soon softened as I said hello. 'You must be seeing a lot of weather today' the dog's owner said. I didn't know what he meant until he mentioned the thunderous rain on the bank holiday. As we spoke, the dog – who is named 'muffin man' due to an incident with some muffins – cuddled next to me on the grass. As I left I admired the burnet roses and the ladybugs asleep in their leaves.

The Met Office have issued a 'thunder warning' and a 'wet washout' to the end of the Bank Holiday weekend. One forecaster commented, 'if you manage to avoid showers, then it will be nice in the sun'. The contrast in these comments struck me as I held my antenna out of the flat window to catch the signal of NOAA-19. If sun... then very nice sun! If rain... then thunder and floods.

I returned home from Brighton very late last night after celebrating with a group of close friends, and memories of the beach, the sparklers we lit, the twilight and our group dances are fresh in my memory. The sun feels too bright for these memories! In the satellite image, two swirling cyclones curve over the Atlantic and northern Europe, and I am reminded of the von Kármán vortex streets, or repeated patterns of swirling vortices, described by Esther Leslie in her essay on 'Fog, Froth and Foam': 'stress factors on a curve, the agitation of the air, clouds, the wind...'

This week in London, there have been lightning storms in the middle of the night. My partner woke up one morning earlier in the week with a story of how the sky flashed brightly at 2am in quick successions of electricity with no thunder. I slept through the lightning. The sky today is a deep cerulean blue, so deep and bright it feels charged, amplified. I wondered about the residual effects of lightning: what happens to the electromagnetic pulses of energy, the sferics, that are emitted? How far do they travel around earth, and do they return?

Warmer air has arrived in the UK over the last couple days, and I realised I was overdressed on my way to the park. The grass was still cool and damp to sit on. I wondered about the number of wood shards on the ground before realising how many dogs had been chewing sticks and branches. Two german shepherds chased a ball nearby, and one of them kept lying down not far from me, panting-heaving with his/her whole body. Yet when the ball was thrown again, she went for it. I later met the dog, Akira, when her owner came over to chat. My activities were approved with a 'good on you', and 'we need to know whats going on up there' (hand gesturing to the sky).

On the far side of the park close to the basketball courts I found myself surrounded by daisies. My head ached from a late night out with old friends, but I felt relaxed and happy to be in the air. The pass was a very social one- two joggers came over to me and inquired about what I was doing. They kept jogging in place for our whole conversation. Bill and Nutmeg appeared, and I learned about an app that notifies you whenever scientists detect gravitational waves- gravitational wave weather? A man on a bike, trailed by two kids, asked one question as he glided past. Finally I was visited by a small terrier who stared longingly at an older woman as she walked away over the field. She called to him but he would not follow her, and she kept going. Instead he came over to me and sat in the middle of my ground station for a couple minutes before bounding over to another dog.

Today my heart is racing and my chest feels tense. I have been in a sprint toward several deadlines. I have several chapters and many thousands more words to review of collaborators' and students' writing today, and every minute counts. Sitting in the grass of the downs was a welcome respite, at first, until a dog fight broke out nearby. One dog owner tackled his dog to the ground, and began agressively yelling and hitting the dog in front of several other dogs and people. An older woman with a terrier tried to intervene to say he should stop hitting his dog, but he yelled at her and she walked off. In the aftermath, the owner of the dog who had been attacked remained, and said to the one who had been violent, 'I would have done the same... everyone knows you here, mate'.

Writing of the atmospheres of the South Asian monsoon, Harshavardhan Bhat describes how the wind 'carries the ocean to the sky... transforming its air and everything in its temporal wake with the possibility of life' (2021: 6). Though monsoons do not occur in the North Atlantic, the aftermath of Storm Kathleen makes me think of the wind 'carrying the ocean to the sky'. The clouds feel like wave crests in fast-moving currents, spinning away from the weakening epicentre of the cyclone. In the park, as I was hurrying to set up under fast-moving clouds, a man and his dog asked what I was doing. After my reply, he said with more than a hint of humour, 'I wonder why I didn't wake up and think of doing that today'

I felt happy to be back on the grass of Hackney Downs setting up my turnstile antenna this morning. After so many satellite passes in this location, I know the heights and depths of the park and its surrounding buildings like a favourite dreamscape. People in the park found me familiar, too. I man on a racing bike cycled over on the grass, and immediately recognised my Funcube Dongle, saying he had the same, as well as a full amateur radio license. We compared approaches to satellites and ADSB, I told him about open-weather, and he said this encounter had inspired him to break out his dongle again. A few minutes later, Bill and his dog Nutmeg came strolling over. Apparently Bill had been talking about me to his friends on the other side of the park, explaining what I was doing, and he approached to take a look at my image, while Nutmeg raced after a tennis ball. It was a good day to share the image, which was a long view of Europe and much of North Africa. Chott Melhrir lake is visible in Algeria, standing out as a dark spot against the lighter hues of Land. I read that this kind of lake, one characterised by Chott geology, is usually dry, but fills with water at certain times of the year. I want to keep a lookout for the lake in the coming months as it dries and most likely becomes crystelline and reflective with salt.

I found myself near London Bridge after an appointment at Guy's Hospital early this morning, a meeting with a specialist doctor which had me thinking a lot about the energy flows through and out of my body. Cycling out to the middle of London Bridge involved ducking and weaving through throngs of tourists and families who, despite the grey and blustery weather, were determinedly taking group photos and pointing at London landmarks. I had to hold my laptop with one hand and orient the antenna with the other, as gusts of wind wobbled both laptop and antenna dangerously close to the edge of the bridge's railing. Passing by my ground station and curiously observing my antenna, a young boy said 'Dad, what is she doing' and was answered with a flat 'dunno.. tracking something'.

My satellite pass happened in the midst of preparations for 'pranzo di pasqua', and I could year the operations of the kitchen continuing as I set up my ground station and orientated myself in the garden. After driving directly into the saharan dust plume seen on my satellite image yesterday, and spending the night with family in Friuli, I wasn't surprised that the air was still hazy, and the clouds an obscure matte grey. There had been red spot patterns on vehicles and other stationary metal surfaces when we woke up this morning. Later in the day, while on a walk along the Tagliamento river, my throat and eyes felt the dust. As I got ready for bed, a 'tempesta' broke, causing a downfall of rain that my italian hosts called a water 'bomb', a new coloquial term for an extreme, unpredictable and heavy rain.

We awoke in Courmayeur, the famous Italian ski resort near Mont Blanc. The weather was a hot topic from our first conversation with the hotel manager at Stella Del Nord, who advised us that the most accurate weather info would not be in our smartphones but in the hands of the ski shop owners. The person we spoke to yesterday evening said definitively 'non e bello', but today the verdict is that the clouds are 'high' and snow won't fall. A strong wind that was rumoured to arrive yesterday, also didn't materialise. To our good fortune- we are headed to the slopes!

The last twenty four hours have been rainy in a nonstop, relentless kind of way. Today, shadows chase each other across the grass of the park as clouds give way to bright sun. My observations of shadows were interrupted by a squeeling bundle of dogs leaping by. One of the owners got upset that his dog had nipped another. For the next few minutes the park echoed with loud cry: 'Bruce!! that's THREE dogs today!!!'

The sound of the satellite, low and noisy over the nighttime horizon, mixed with the sizzling of a frittata and the slicing of salad leaves.

I perched my ground station on a forked tree trunk that lies on the grass in Hackney Downs. The bark and most of the trunk is wet but, unlike fallen trees that I've seen in forests, it doesn't feel like its decomposing. I wondered whether this tree has been preserved in some way, or whether its decomposition is slowed by the relative bareness of its surroundings.

In today's satellite image, the the rivers Garonne and Dardogne are very prominent, carving a dark line into the west coast of France and joining into a delta meeting the Atlantic. In the High North, Lake Onega is a pale white, suggesting it is entirely frozen.

Last night, while sitting in the corner of the park on a bench under a streetlamp, an older, long-beareded man on a bike stopped, circled around, and told me I was 'too far into the park'. He advised me to go to the edge of Downs road to be safe, and added 'you are my daughter too'. This encounter stayed with me as I went back to the park this morning for a satellite pass, and looked at the distance between the bench and the streetcorner – a matter of metres – but in the dark, perhaps much more than that.

I went for a very low pass today – only around thirty degrees over the horizon – but thought I could get something from the top of the fire escape at the back of Queens Building where the Geography Department is situated. Unfortunately there wasn't much of a signal, and for several minutes at the height of the pass, bursts of interference blocked any chance of clear reception. Still, standing at the top of the fire escape gave me an amazing view of the residential neighbourhoods to the East of the university campus, and I could clearly see airplanes taking off and landing at Heathrow Airport, just over the reservoirs.

A cold mist is hovering over Hackney today. Fewer people seemed to be out with their dogs, though it could also have been the timing of the satellite pass. However a group of people had gathered on the far side of the open field near Downs Road, bikes fallen sideways on the grass. They were stood in a wide circle doing slow movements with their arms and legs. As they were mostly dressed in long puffer coats and thick scarves, and because of the blurring fog, they looked like people made of cushions or marshmallows, moving slowly in coordination.

The university campus is coated and swathed in fog today. I set up my ground station on the near-end of Founders Field and could barely make out a group of students smoking (or just breathing in the cold) on the picnic table on the other side of the field. I met some colleagues in the local cafe afterward and they mentioned the fog to me too: 'it must be nice to see out of the fog today'...

The bulbs and magnolias in Hackney Downs have been blooming in wild and 'spontaneous' groups. Across the UK, magnolias and camellias are blooming four weeks earlier than last year. As if in counterpoint to the conversations I had yesterday, today two older women and their dogs came up to me as I was kneeling by the daffodil beds in the park. One of their dogs, a terrier with huge whiskers, had come over to check out my antenna. The women were both wearing dark sunglasses and wool coats, and apologised for being 'nosey' before asking what I was doing. One of them remarked, 'there must be a whole group of people like you out here, I have seen them around'. I replied I didn't know who this group was, but that perhaps she was seeing me, as I had been in the park with my antenna almost every day (though the possibility of a secret Hackney Downs satellite group stayed with me). A younger woman then ran up to us, apparently having gotten confidence from the older women, and asked more questions with a lot of excitement- she had assumed I was tracking 'geotagged' animals, like birds.

There weren't clear signs of rain when I left my house to go to the park, but as I arrived in the open I could feel a sideways blowing mist of very fine droplets. Once my laptop was out for a matter of minutes it was complete coated in water. I debated the risks of completing the pass vs laptop damage, and decided to keep going, though huddled over the computer with my body. I imagine I looked quite strange to passerby- a hooded person bent over a small screen, trying to hold an antenna with one oustretched arm.

I was aware today that a meadow has its own weather. As I captured the satellite pass, I was conscious of the way the air in 'West Field' at Royal Holloway, surrounded by oak and plane trees, seemed denser than it had felt on my walk up the hill to campus. The open sky over the meadow seemed closer than it had when I woke up in London.

My ground station merged with the wet grass and mud of Hackney Downs field this morning. Mud was everywhere- attaching itself to my antenna bag, on the RF cables, the antenna dipoles, my coat and shoes. Nearby a young boys' soccer team was playing a morning match, egged on by a very loud coach who kept yelling at players by name and asking them 'who are you playing for?!'. I had forgotten my phone so I took photos of my ground station with my laptop camera. They were dark and gloomy but they somehow captured the atmosphere of the field, the game and the intermittent storm clouds.

Today is wet, cold, soggy and muddy. A storm swept through London last night, and pattered the windows of my flat for most of the night. Most commuters early this morning had an air of being half-asleep and were hunched down into their scarves and woolly hats, like sea urchins. Founder's field, where I collected the satellite pass, was empty except for me with my V-Dipole antenna and laptop.

The westerly wind was so strong this morning that, on my bike ride from East London to Bloomsbury, I felt at times that the strength of my body wouldn't manage to move my bike forward, and I regretted my choice to cycle in the first place. I was sweating so profusely inside my green puffer jacket that, once I arrived in the square, I risked the cold air and took off my coat to try to air myself out. I coudl tell that passerby were wondering what a person in nothing but a thin shirt and blazer was doing holding a metal object to the sky at half past nine, but no one approached me. On my cycle home in the evening, the wind, as I hoped it would, practically carried me forward, so that the roads felt glossy and smooth.

London is gray and cold today, with a haze that feels like a soft blanket. On my way to buy bread this morning, the air made street corners, cars and shops look a little fuzzy. Being inside a bakery, and back in my flat with a warm loaf of bread and a coffee, was deeply comforting. It feels like good weather to be tidying up the house, changing sheets and watering plants.

The sky is a deep cerulean blue today – cloudless, and slightly purple in hue. I spent part of the satellite pass lying on my back looking up. The grass was so wet and cold that I didn't stay on the ground long, but the feeling of being engulfed in a January blue has stayed with me.

Today the park was spontaneously drizzly and I hunched over my laptop to keep it dry for the ten minutes of the pass. As I was crouched so low to the ground for most of the time, I experienced the weather of the park at the height of a small child or animal.

I wanted to catch the satellite pass in my back garden, but the gate was so cold the lock had frozen or stuck, and I couldn't open it. I hurried to Hackney Downs and found a spot very close to the entrance in the long shadows of the plane trees. As I was listening to the satellite a woman with bright pink gloves came up behind me and asked what I was doing. When I told her about the satellite and my radio antenna, she immediately asked – are you a creative? This is the second time a person in Hackney Downs has asked me whether I am a 'creative' while I am holding my antenna. She kindly took the photo I uploaded.

The grass crunched with frost this morning, and the air was so cold that my hands felt clumsy while assembling the antenna. Midway through the pass, a beautiful Italian greyhound in a pink sweater came over to investigate.

Standing in an elevated parking lot attached to the Heather Village condominium complex in Culver City, Los Angeles, I could hear engines starting and wheels tentatively moving as commuters started their day. The nearby 405 Freeway made a constant whoosh-hum, and airplanes took off and landed at LAX.

A pack of coyotes howled in the distance as I captured this satellite image. I was on the edge of Yucca Valley bordering Joshua Tree National Park, and while the air was cold, the sun was very strong, reaching into the crevices of the hills and boulders. The wind whistled among the Joshua Trees and Cholla Cacti. I felt very 'close' to the satellite too- there was so little radio noise, the moment I picked up my antenna, the satellite signal came through clearly, even though it had barely crested the northern horizon. I didn't need to look at the compass on my phone because the north star had shone so brightly the previous evening and it was easy to remember where 'north' was.

On my way to LAX airport to drop off my brother this morning, the air was so misty and wet, and the rain was so "strong", that people were driving at almost half the normal speed limit- a sign that the rain is affecting how people feel in LA. I didn't think the same would be true of people or drivers in the Pacific Northwest or Europe. By the time I caught the satellite pass, the clouds had parted and the sun was hot on the balcony.

The air has been warm but the visibility is low- a light fog has settled over the Los Angeles basin. Throughout the day the fog became more dense, and was likely trapped by the marine layer of cold air coming in from the Pacific.

A very warm, bright balcony

Today the light is a pale yellow and the air shimmers with leftover water evaporating from puddles and storm drains in LA. The city smells more intensely, as if all the materials on concrete surfaces, roads and sprawling buildings have sublimated. Throughout the satellite pass, the roar of airplanes taking off from runways at nearby LAX was palpable, though the misty clouds meant none of the planes could be seen.

There were flood risks in Southern California over the last few days as the region received storm cell bursts. I recorded my image during a clear break in the rain, though the air, ground, trees and sidewalks were still soggy. A woman was throwing a branch to her Australian Shepherd in the park while I was recording the image. The dog was kicking up so much mud its multicoloured fur was completely mud-coloured after a few minutes. As I returned inside after the satellite pass, another burst of rain began pounding the roof of my Mom's condo.