Weather and climate: in the eye of the storm

By Julio Slingo,  published in the Financial Times, 13 April 2017 (h/t to Larry Kummer)

Julia Slingo is the former chief scientist of the Met Office.

In 1972, fresh from a physics degree at Bristol University, I joined the UK’s national weather service, the Met Office. I liked meteorology because I could look out of the window and see physics in action. Clouds forming in a blue sky, and the wind blowing so often from the west

— it was not immediately obvious why that should be, and I was intrigued. (I learnt later that the UK lies right in the path of the jet stream, a band of westerly winds that circles the mid-latitudes. The jet stream arises from the rotation of the Earth — the Coriolis Force — and because the planet is heated at the equator and cooled…