Scorchio!

So yesterday, down south, France issued its first “red alert” for temperature, and with good reason, the afternoon temperature hit 45.9C. Now I know that’s “a moderately warn evening” to Australians, but around here that broke all records by a margin of about a degree and a half.
[refer to http://vigilance.meteofrance.fr/index.html but that doesn’t work with NetSurf; there’s a monochrome PDF available from http://vigilance.meteofrance.fr/data/QGFR16_LFPW_.pdf]

So as the outside temperature climbs up to 33.7C (humidity 44%, plenty of airbourne dust), I notice that my Pi2 is stuck at 400MHz. I have set CPUSpeed to throttle back the device if the core hits 55C, which obviously it did. There’s a 5C margin, so although it’s running at 51.8C right now, it won’t throttle back up until it goes below 50.
Yes, 50. None of the 85C rubbish. If it’s hot enough to burn a finger or cook an egg ¹, it’s too damn hot.

Glancing over to my weather station, 33.8C now. <sigh>

There’s a dual laptop fan sucking air from the Pi/PSU and blowing it onto the Vonets. Hopefully will keep everything cool enough.
There’s a dinky 5" (guess) metal fan running off USB blowing air onto me, keep me from overheating. :-)

¹ Many years ago (1995?), I had an A5000 with a 1GB SCSI drive that was dual partitioned with a Morley interface. It was in the days when 1GB was “holy crap!” and computers were sold with drives in the region of 150-280MB as standard. Thing is, the drive ran hot. Really hot. It got to a point where it would return a number of read errors (well, it’s SCSI so “sense error” and “target error”) until it had warmed up. Then all the time. By then I had a bunch of IDE drives and a tape backup, so I could transfer data to those and retire the SCSI unit.
The final thing that I did with that drive was power it up, leave it for an hour, then crack an egg over it and pour very slowly. The yolk slid off (gloopy mess!) but a lot of the white actually cooked! 34C outside now…

No large-scale records broken in Germany in June (ISTR however May was far too cold compared to the past), especially in the 30s and 40s the June was warmer quite often. However, the weather models predicted higher temperatures than what turned out to be, so it looks like the weather models are now based on the same broken stuff than the climate models…

E.g. there was widely predicted that last Wednesday would get very hot. Three days before, there was a weather warning for Cologne that temperatures would likely exceed 40°C. On Tuesday, that was reduced to 38°C. On Wednesday however, the highest temperature actually measured in Cologne was 28°C, as it turned out that the big Sahara heat wave only fully hit Southern and Eastern ermany, but not most of the North and the West. Oh well.

so it looks like the weather models are now based on the same broken stuff than the climate models…

There probably aren’t that many places in the world where the weather is accurately predictable. They knew that a big blast of heat was coming, but they didn’t know where exactly. Last week it was supposed to fry… what was it, Poland and Bulgaria? Something like that. Instead, southern France roasted.

Currently our hottest temperature – 34.8°C (we only made it to 34.7 yesterday). I’m inside, shutters shut. Tomorrow’s mid-20s will probably seem arctic in comparison, but I can’t say I’ll be sad to see this heat go. If I wanted this, I’d be living in Malaga (cough, four degrees colder!).

there was widely predicted that

I use an enormous pinch of salt¹ with any forecast over about 48 hours. We’re an atlantic climate where the result is a mixture of Azores High, whatever blows in from the East, and whatever the North Atlantic Drift is up to. In other words, good luck predicting anything over a couple of days. Even with satellites, multi-million euro computers, and extensive modelling… one might as well be casting runes when it comes to questions like “will it rain on the 10th of July?”.

¹ English expression meaning to view something with scepticism under the belief that it is unlikely to be true. Pretty much everything Donald Trump says should be taken with a pinchbucketload of salt.

I use an enormous pinch of salt with any forecast

That reminds me of a line in a Terry Pratchett novel (I forget which novel). He quoted the old adage “You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die” and then added as a footnote “A peck is about nine litres dry measure”.