(Non-radio) Clear signs of climate change.

When you live in a place that is 100m above otherwise flat land, 2km from the Irish Sea coast, and operate a radio station, you tend to notice the wind a lot!

But the strength of the wind, whilst it is increasing, is not so much something that is changing obviously these past few years, but the direction from which it comes.

Historically, the wind rarely blows from the NW to N directions on Anglesey.  This is a wind rose of data for the period 1981-1990:

Wind rose for Anglesey.  Image: Llansadwrn Weather, based on RAF Valley data.

I can't readily find a wind rose for the past decade, and whilst I have actually kept high quality weather records over about 7 years here, I haven't yet had time to computerise and analyse the data.

But it is pretty obvious as a lived experience that very strong winds of near-hurricane force now regularly come from the NW - N sector as deep low pressures travel from north to south.  They are pulled along by a jet stream that shows increasingly deep waves.

Deeper waves means greater weather extremes.

This increased deep waviness is in fact quite a well-modelled expectation for the jet stream under early climate change scenarios.  It arises because the Arctic regions are warming about four times faster than the rest of the planet.  This generates weaker temperature gradients between the cold air of the Arctic, and the warm air of more southerly latitudes.

So cold air from the Arctic can invade deeper south than has been usual, bringing the kind of very windy weather we are currently experiencing, and warm air is also able to invade much further north than has been usual.

Over the past week, we have seen the very real and obvious effects of these waves: 21 degrees Celsius and calm weather for three days, followed by 100km/h winds over prolonged periods and temperatures plummeting to just 7 degrees Celsius.

The timing of storms has also seems to have changed over the past few years, with many of the strongest winds shifting later into the winter and early spring.

Other examples of the effects of these waves in recent years have been the very damaging, ex-Hurricane Ophelia in 2017, which followed an almost unprecedented S-N track from the tropics to the UK, rather than the usual track from the Caribbean.  Winds reached gusts of 130km/h on Anglesey.

Ophelia brought an apocalyptic scene ahead of the winds by having sucked up so much Saharan dust and smoke from Portuguese wildfires that the sun turned red in a mid-day sky, as the air hung heavy in Wales with a strong smell of burning.  Local, RAF Valley pilots, checking the weather that morning at altitude didn't need their usual helmet sun visors - they could comfortably look directly at the sun.

Apocalyptic sky hours before Ophelia winds hit the UK.  Image: Express and Star.

Earlier in 2017, though only for a few hours, we had Storm Doris, bringing exceptional, 132km/h gusts from the NW, which my 12m LFA somehow managed to survive without damage.  Certainly, life on the west coast of Wales at altitude is becoming ever-more marginal, and will clearly need structural adjustments in the near future.