Norwich Science Week – Food and Farming!
On Sunday 18th Feb, the Norwich Science Festival held its day for all things agriculture, aiming to show all those who visited “the journey food takes, from fields, to farms all the way to the end of our forks”! Agriculture is one of the main sectors we supply a service for, so it was a pleasure to be invited to take part on this day.
We got the chance to show off some of our favourite weather instruments, including the anemometer (the fastest wind speed created by a visitor blowing into the anemometer was 74 mph – the equivalent of a storm!), whirling hygrometers (what we use to measure humidity) and the rather topical rain gauges (over the weekend, some parts of Norfolk saw more than 30mm of rain, leading to local flooding).
On top of this we had a display weather balloon (which in operation can reach heights of ~25 km –with the balloon reaching the size of a small car), three example radiosondes that would be attached to the balloon (normally measuring humidity and temperature, also containing a GPS for wind speed and direction) and a video of a balloon release. This generated a lot of conversation about how we use the data from weather balloon radiosondes, the five stations across the British Isles that release them and the worldwide balloon network.
This then allowed us to go into greater detail about how forecasts work, by measuring the current weather data, then inputting this to weather patterns and computer models to help determine what the weather will be, an hour, a day or even a week into the future.
Finally, we showed a couple of maps relating to our agricultural research, including the locations of vineyards across the UK, sparking conversation on how climate change will cause the suitable grape-growing areas to shift, causing more British vineyards to pop up in the future!
Overall, we at WeatherQuest had a fantastic time talking to all the visitors, letting them know a bit about forecasting and the role we play in the agricultural field (pun intended), so thank you for coming along and saying hi if you did! We also thank the Norwich Science Festival for inviting us and hope to return next year for more!
