Tristan Gooley
speaker
256 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 13 Nov
Tristan Gooley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
for me as a natural navigator there's some really fun things you can do with them in terms of making a map so they form over islands they form over dark woodland and they form over towns because each of those landscapes warms up more quickly than the land around them so whether it's a pacific navigator in the middle of the ocean looking for an island they'll be looking for cumulus clouds or if you're walking or driving across a wild area looking for a town
there's a very good chance that if it's, if it's a blue sky day, there'll be cumulus clouds over the town, but not anywhere surrounding it equally over dark woodland, the same thing. And then the third, the third family are the high wispy ones. I forget what the, what you, what you call it in the States. We call it candy floss, that kind of sugary candy stuff that we get at fairs here.
Do you know the stuff I mean? Cotton candy. Cotton candy. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. I forget. I forgot the term, but it's, It looks very wispy. It's very high, this cloud. The Latin is cirrus. Sometimes people think it looks like feathers, and it does have lots of different forms. And that can be used for longer term forecasting.
So if you've had a period of sunny settled weather, one of the early signs that things are about to get worse is this wispy cotton candy, feathery high clouds is one of the earlier signs that because it's so high, It's the leading edge of a warm front system coming through, which can lead to a couple of days of bad weather.
As I look out of the cabin window that I'm in at the moment, I'll just pick a couple of things I'm seeing there.
leaves for example so leaves are smaller on the south side of a tree and bigger on the the north side of a tree uh and the and the way their angle changes as well so they tend to be they tend to point more down towards the ground on the south side and they tend to be closer to horizontal on the north side and it's not you know the tree or the leaves don't care about north south east west these are these are just obviously organic responses to to what's going on out there if um
And just looking at the ground, I can actually see a puddle. We've had a bit of rain today and puddles can form anywhere, but the way they dry is quite specific. So they're obviously going to dry more quickly in the sun and more slowly in the shade. And if you're walking along a track or a road, the south facing side is actually the north side.
So you end up with longer lasting puddles on the south side of tracks and roads.
Well, in the case of both rain and snow, the very first thing I'm trying to do is work out which of the two cloud families are we looking at here because that will then reveal what's most likely to happen over the next 12 hours. And whether it's snow or rain, the same branch is there. It's either showers or it's blanket. If it's showers, it's coming from those heaped clouds, the cumulus ones.
And what that means is the word showers is misunderstood these days a little bit. In weather terms, you know, weather aficionados will know this, but if you're new to kind of looking for weather signs, the word showers to some people means light rain, but actually it's much more precise than that. Showers means short distinct periods.
So if you have a rain shower, it can actually be very, very heavy. Same with snow. A snow shower can be really heavy, but it won't go on for an hour. So the way I put it when I was writing about it is that, you know, showers don't last hours. If it's blanket and it starts raining, there's a really good chance it'll be raining in three or four hours time. Same with snow.
But if we've seen cumulus clouds, a little bit of blue sky here and there. And again, a lot of this stuff is common sense when we're seeing it in hindsight, but it's very easy to not actually pause and even go, well, which of those two is it? If it showers, you can plan actually to have a quite fun day dodging them if you want to.
And if you haven't had snow for a while and you're enjoying it, you might actually want to be out in it. But yeah, they're very different experiences. If blanket rain starts, it's not a good day to be outdoors, to be honest. It's going to be a bit drab.
Wind is air moving from a high-pressure region to a low-pressure region. And we can recreate this by blowing up a balloon, but instead of sealing the neck, if we just release the neck, high-pressure air in the balloon will flow towards the room, which is at lower pressure. And what's happening all around us and on every scale,
imaginable from the vast you know thousands of miles down to uh you know 10 feet literally is that the sun is heating some areas more than others and warm air expands and as it expands its pressure reduces so what's happening every single day is that the sun is heating the equator more than the poles for example so that leads to massive flows um over over literally thousands of miles
But it's also going to heat the dark tarmac in a city more than the green outside the city. And that's why we see those clouds above a town. In fact, I got a fun message from a friend who lives in the town nearest us. I live out in the country. And he said, there's a couple of birds of prey. I think they're buzzards and they're orbiting, they're circling.
And it was about 11 o'clock in the morning, which is very early for birds to be doing that. And I said, they're probably looking for a car parking space. And he said, what are you talking about? I said, well, if you draw a line vertically down from where they're circling, is that the large car park in the north of town? And he goes, yeah, how on earth did you know that?
I said, well, that's the only big dark place that will be warm enough to create the thermal that they'll look for. So it's, as I say, all wind is high pressure to low pressure. But what I'm trying to do is encourage people to not just think this is about these huge, massive, massive kind of charts we see on TV or internet forecasts.
This is something that's happening within, you know, 50 feet of us every day.
It's always trying to equal out, but actually air is a bit more viscous than most people think. Everyone sort of imagines that it could kind of equalize in five seconds. But it's more treacly than people imagine. It can't move across the surface of the earth as fast as people might think it does. But also, the second it equals out somewhere, the sun will create a difference somewhere else.
Showing 221–240 of 256 · page 12 of 13
← Previous
Next →