At about 9.30am next Friday, an extremely rare near-total solar eclipse will occur across the UK. The Sun will almost be completely masked by the shadow of the Moon, and northerly places will see the most dramatic sight, with a 99 per cent eclipse in Aberdeen.
A solar eclipse can also create some strange weather: the air cools, the wind changes direction and even clouds over the Sun can part. In a unique study, meteorologists and hundreds of schools and members of the public will take part in the National Eclipse Weather Experiment, the most detailed record of the weather ever made during an eclipse.
One of the observations will test a long-standing claim that clouds covering the Sun can sometimes part during an eclipse. “Looking at the clouds is something that can’t be done easily with instruments and is well suited to an army of observers spread all over the country,” said Giles Harrison at the University of Reading. “It could be that the clouds behave as they do sometimes at sunset, when they dissipate as turbulent mixing subsides.”
Another freak to measure will be the “eclipse wind” when air is said to flow into the cool shadow of the eclipse and creates a localised wind.
The temperature will also be measured in next Friday’s eclipse — in the last eclipse in the UK in 1999, the temperature dropped by up to 3C as the Sun’s energy was blocked off. This national project is more than just an academic curiosity, though, because it will allow meteorologists to test their weather models to see how they respond to such a local and very brief event.
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To take part in the National Eclipse Weather Experiment, go to the University of Reading’s website: http://bit.ly/1Eu7ZtR.
Note that it is vital never to look at the Sun, even when almost eclipsed, because the eyes can be severely damaged. The safest way to see the event is with special eclipse sunglasses (not ordinary sunglasses), or putting a pinhole through a sheet of paper to create a shadow of the eclipse.