Weather

Front cover: © Frank Le Blancq. Virga trails from cirrus uncinus cloud over St Brelade (Jersey) on 24 June 2010.

Front cover: © Cesar Azorin-Molina. Cumulus clouds over the Salinas mountain range in Spain at 1345 local time on 1 May 2007.

Front cover: © George Anderson. According to data from the Met Office, 2012 was the wettest year on record for England and the second wettest in the UK national record dating from 1910. It was the third wettest in the England and Wales series from 1766 and, despite concerns early in the year of drought, the year ended with flooding in many areas. This picture shows one example: flooding of the River Thames at Marlow (Buckinghamshire) on 27 December 2012.

Front cover: © Mila Zinkova. A weathered iceberg in the Arctic. See the article on page 72.

Front cover: © David Clark. A rare display of nacreous cloud over Aberdeen (Scotland) on 9 December 2012. Nacreous (mother-of-pearl) clouds are a type of polar stratospheric cloud formed at temperatures around –85°C in the lower stratosphere, typically downwind of mountains which induce gravity waves. The bright iridescent colours of the nacreous cloud, caused by the diffraction of sunlight by similar sized ice particles in the cloud, contrasts here with a much lower tropospheric cloud illuminated orange in the twilight.

Front cover: © Charlie Davison. The Matterhorn and a wave cloud viewed from the outskirts of Zermatt (Switzerland) at midday on 11 December 2011.

Front cover: © Alan Goodman. Walking in snow-covered woods at Elterwater (Cumbria) on 7 December 2010 (see article on page 323).

Front cover: © Jan Knight. Areas of Portugal were affected by many wildfires this summer. This photograph, taken from the village of Serra de Alvorge on 18 September 2012, shows a large pyrocumulus cloud generated by a forest fire in the area of Miranda do Corvo. Light northwesterly low-level winds caused the smoke to drift slowly to the southeast. However, the atmosphere was deeply unstable above about 2300m and the convective plume rose quickly to a considerable height.

Front cover: © 1987 The Lynn Tait Gallery. A car wrecked in Westcliff-on-Sea (Essex) by a fallen horse chestnut tree blown down in the storm early on 16 October 1987. (See article on page 255).

Front cover: © Charlie Davison. Developing cumulus congestus clouds viewed in the late morning of 29 September 2011 from Paphos lighthouse (Cyprus). A breeze from the sea assisted in cumulus towers building over the Laona Plateau (which rises to over 600m) and large convective clouds also developed over the Troodos mountains to the east (elevation 1952m). By evening, thunder and lightning over the Troodos could be observed from Paphos and this continued into the night, but no rain fell at the coast.

Front cover: © Frank Le Blancq. A line of cumulus over the Greek island of Kythnos in the Aegeon Sea on 17 May 2011

Front cover: © Neil Rowntree. Cumulus clouds and the anvil cirrus of a distant cumulonimbus capillatus, viewed from a mountain above Reinigeadal on Harris (Outer Hebrides, Scotland) on 3 August 2008.

Sunset over the Caribbean Sea viewed from Buccament Bay (St Vincent) on 23 January 2011. Crepuscular rays rise above a bank of stratocumulus cloud and a glitter path is reflected off the water. © Sally Wilkinson

Cirrus uncinus over Horsham (West Sussex) on 25 May 2011. © Richard Griffith.

Devastation in Hackleburg (Marion County, Alabama, USA) caused by an EF5 tornado on 27 April 2011: see article on pages 88–94. With thanks to Gregory Carbin (NOAA) for tracking down an image for the cover. Front cover: © US National Weather Service

A magnificent display of iridescence in cloud over Warrensville in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina (USA) around midday on 4 January 2012. © Kelly Clampitt

Solar halo and its reflection as seen on 17 April 2011 from the glacial lagoon, Jökulsárlón, in southeast Iceland. © Nigel Paice

A snow drift on Hawkswick Moor in the Yorkshire Dales on 2 December 2010. The view is looking down Wharfedale from between Kettlewell and Hawkswick. © Matthew Clark

The snow-covered beach at Budleigh Salterton, Devon, on Christmas morning 2010, some five days after snow fell – a remarkable survival of snow for a south-facing beach in southwest England. See article on pp 315–321. © Glen Harris

Rainbow in spray over Gullfoss (Golden Falls) on the Hvítá river in southwest Iceland on 20 April 2011. © Nigel Paice

66.10
October 2011

Kite surfers taking advantage of a Force 4 breeze at St Ouen’s Bay, Jersey, on 16 October 2008. © Frank Le Blancq

The sun sets behind stratocumulus cloud at Odiham, Hampshire, on 26 September 2007. Front cover: © Ray Pearce

Rain clouds off the Indian Ocean approach the beach at Nungwi on the northern tip of Zanzibar island, Tanzania, on 22 August 2007. Front cover: © Roger Barrowcliffe

In 2008 the island of Cyprus suffered a water shortage. The Mavrokolymbos Dam on the west of the island, north of Paphos, has the capacity to hold 2 180 000 cubic metres of water, but in the late summer of 2008 the reservoir almost ran dry. Was this a sign of climate change, or was the lack of rainfall merely due to natural climatic variation? In this issue of Weather we take a broad look at the climate change debate. Front cover: © George D. Anderson

The underside of this supercell storm was photographed on 25 June 2010 in southern Minnesota, USA, shortly after the storm became tornadic. The turbulent appearance is often likened to a whale’s mouth. © Tim Moxon.

Our cover photograph, taken from the International Space Station, shows a view that could only have existed in the imagination 65 years ago. When Weather was launched in 1946 no-one had witnessed a view of the atmosphere from the vantage point of space. Nowadays, weather satellite images are commonplace, and one can only wonder what advances the next 65 years will bring! NASA / courtesy of nasaimages.org

A circumzenithal arc seen in the sky over Noirmont, Jersey, on 18 September 2010.(© Frank Le Blancq)

In contrast to last month’s cover picture of a car in snow in 1947, this month's cover photograph is from earlier this winter and shows snowfall in Perth, Scotland, on 4 December 2010. (© James Pirie)

Snow on the North York Moors near Lockton, Yorkshire, in the winter of 1947.(Courtesy George Woodhead.) (© David Wakely)