The shadow of a solar eclipse over the UK

For what it’s worth here is the eclipse stuff I mentioned earlier.

Figure 1, cloud abruptly cleared at midday.

There are 755 days of data from the Chilbolton Observatory, Hampshire, England, one of the worlds primary cloud research sites. Our interest is thermal radiation data. The collected is parsed from web plots, the raw data is available a month later, vast and I generally don’t process it. Either way this is one of the few sources of high resolution data in the world where there is public access.

Software here takes the data and processes to a new all-in-one thumb and a data file, gives a fair idea.

Unfortunately it was a cloudy morning, mostly unbroken low cloud, just about make out the sun. If it had been clear this would have been wonderful given the vast array of instruments.

Figure 2, detail, doesn’t add much meaning.

Figure 3, thumbnail of all the parameters. See previous Talkshop posts for meanings. A sub home page at Chilbolton Observatory, the actual home page is useless, NERC standard.

Met Office data

I also archive the Met Office hourly data a question being does anything show up?

Yes, which surprised me. Quite a few stations show a temperature drop at 10 hrs.

An often featured station is at Katesbridge Northern Ireland

Figure 4, Katesbridge, only a few parameters.

The data covers all the UK. A rough plot of all stations is done daily to a 23 page PDF for the 24 hours of the day.
PDF is here (1.3MB)

Averaging all UK stations produces a figure of an 0.6C temperature drop at 10hrs. This would be much more under clear sky and sharp at a finer time quantisation.

The 1999 total eclipse from memory didn’t notice as chilly, I thought it was a sweltering hot and humid day. A 2011 Talkshop article shows a plot from a web page elsewhere, still there, doesn’t imply a hot day, how odd.
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/moon-carves-wake/

I need to add there are problems with the Met Office data, an open support ticket goes back to early January. Hopefully this is not fatal to an understanding of the plots.

Post by Tim