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Author Archive — Chris Playford

The importance of Synoptic Charts

Synoptic charts… Do you really need to know about these? Yes, you do (if you don’t already).This is pretty basic stuff at first, apologies if it’s a bit obvious.
The principles are pretty simple (GCSE Geography gives the basics) and a quick overview can be found on the BBC Sailing website plus David Pedgeley’s Mountain Weather. [...]

Scottish Avalanche Information Service

What a cracker: an absolute goldmine of a website. This website builds nicely on the information from MWIS and the current condition of the snowpack to provide an expectation of what is likely over the following 24 hours.
As with the other weather and conditions websites, prior knowledge when reading the forecasts really helps me understand [...]

Getting the most out of MWIS

As I’m sure most of you are aware, the Mountain Weather Information Service is a tremendous website that has enhanced our capacity for understanding weather and conditions on the hill before we leave home. This has a catch though: as we have more information this tends to reduce our interest in verifying the forecast and [...]

Introduction to Interpreting Weather Forecasts

As a climbing nerd and increasingly chair-bound researcher, many a wistful hour has been spent avoiding work on my dissertation & thesis with the altogether more entertaining task of studying the internet for weather related information. Embarrassingly, I think it highly likely that I have spent more time digging around on this topic than actually [...]