Near-zero humidities on Ben Nevis, Scotland, revealed by pioneering 19th-century observers and modern volunteers

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Burt, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5125-6546 and Hawkins, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9477-3677 (2019) Near-zero humidities on Ben Nevis, Scotland, revealed by pioneering 19th-century observers and modern volunteers. International Journal of Climatology, 39 (11). pp. 4451-4466. ISSN 0899-8418 doi: 10.1002/joc.6084

Abstract/Summary

The weather on Ben Nevis – the highest mountain in the British Isles, 1345 m AMSL – sometimes shows episodes of remarkably low relative humidity (RH) with few precedents anywhere else in the British Isles. We are able to quantify this for the first time using a high-quality series of hourly dry- and wet-bulb observations, made on the summit. These observations were made between 1883 and 1904, but have only just become available to modern science, thanks to thousands of volunteers who worked to rescue this unique and exemplary dataset from published volumes. Careful examination and analysis of the original observations using modern psychrometric theory revealed several occasions where we are confident that the summit RH fell close to zero as a result of anticyclonic subsidence. Three case histories are examined in some detail. The nineteenth-century Ben Nevis humidity records are also compared with contemporary automatic weather station (AWS) data from two high-altitude Scottish mountain sites.

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Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/82775
Identification Number/DOI	10.1002/joc.6084
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Uncontrolled Keywords	Ben Nevis; relative humidity; anticyclonic subsidence; psychrometric calculation; crowdsourcing; Scotland; Cairngorm; Aonach Mor
Publisher	John Wiley & Sons
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Funders:	Natural Environment Research Council	The sponsoring bodies who contributed funding for the creation of this item. Example: NERC Example: The Royal Society of Chemistry A pick list of funders may appear as you type in the funder's name in full or as an acronym. Select a correct match to complete the field or type in a new entry in full. For new entries, the full name is preferred.
Projects:	Predicting the Climate of the Coming Decade Funded by: Natural Environment Research Council (NE/I020792/1 - £452,829) Local Lead (PI): Ed Hawkins Project Lead: Edward Hawkins 1 April 2012 - 31 March 2017	Click Add to select your project (received at Reading) from an autocomplete list.

Deposit Details

Date Deposited:	21 Mar 2019 11:38	Date item deposited into CentAUR
Last Modified:	16 Nov 2024 02:40	Date item last modified

References

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