Mountain Weather - A Guide to Understanding the UK's weather

A guide to help walkers and climbers understand weather in the UK mountains. Helps you to develop the skills to interpret forecasts, understand weather maps, and read the weather so you can make important decisions about acitvities in the hills. Illustrated with weather maps and satellite imagery.

Our British mountains have plenty of weather. They are almost always windier, colder, cloudier and wetter than low country. What is more, the weather mood can change bewilderingly quickly - from gloomy, lowering skies and driving rain to shafts of sunlight and breath-taking patterns of colour. The weather can delight or endanger. It can create a mental picture never to be forgotten or thrust the unwary into a fight for life.

Whether it is to avoid danger or to add to enjoyment of the mountain scene, before starting a day outdoors among the hills it is wise to know what the weather is likely to be. This book helps hillwalkers and climbers to get the weather forecasts most suited to their needs, to understand them, and to modify them in the light of experience of mountain weather.

The book is in three parts.

PART ONE describes the kinds of forecasts available and how they can be found.

PART TWO helps you understand the forecast through using weather maps.

PART THREE describes and explains some of the ways our mountains make their own weather.

All hillwalkers and climbers should read Part One, but if you want to understand the forecast, rather than just know it, Part Two will help you. It is not meant to be more than a start, for an understanding needs a knowledge of why the weather changes. That cannot be learned from a few pages; it comes from experience using weather maps, your eye, and further reading about the weather. (Some sources are listed at the end of this book.) The hardest bit is understanding how the mountains make their own weather. It is often said that mountain weather is unpredictable. That is not true, in principle, because it follows the same physical laws as the weather elsewhere. But, in practice, those laws can be difficult to apply to given places and times. You need plenty of experience. Part Three shows you some of the things to look for on a day among the hills. As your experience grows you will become better at modifying the forecast to suit your particular hills and valleys, for no forecast can yet do justice to all the peculiarities of mountain weather.