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The Architecture of Weather #1. Have you seen the weather?
To design in, with and for our destabilised global climate, weather must be understood as multi-dimensional. Through the lens of recent dramatic weather events, Christina Leigh Geros draws-out relationships between atmospheric architecture and various sociopolitical dynamics of our time.

To consider the architecture of weather, we must first understand one simple fact: air is always in motion. Guided by imbalances of pressure, or heat, it finds and fills every open space.1 We know that air nearer the equator is warmer; and because hot air expands, becoming less dense, it rises. The much cooler air above the earth’s poles is more dense, heavier, and thus presses more insistently against the earth. Called towards the poles by the gaps left by the cool air moving towards the equator, the warm equatorial air circles to fill this empty space. As the warm air from the tropics descends over the poles, the weight of the air about the earth’s surface further increases and a centre of high pressure emerges. This planetary-scale exchange of air between high- and low-pressure systems provides the first condition of weather creation.

If heat provides the first condition of weather, the second condition must be moisture.

If heat provides the first condition of weather, the second condition must be moisture. While air is mostly gas, it is also full of potential water. When a low-pressure system, or depression, moves into our environment, the air about us feels unsettled—windier, rainier, stormier. Meanwhile, a high-pressure system will produce the opposite—very little potential water. As the Earth’s surface does not hold heat equally, the air above different surface materials heats and cools, rises and falls, unevenly. In fact, there are twenty-two centres of atmospheric action—at various, yet specific, locations around the globe.2 As these centres abut one another, currents of warmer air and cooler air flow side-by-side, sometimes intersecting.

The United Kingdom experienced clusters of explosive thunderstorms (June), record-high temperatures (July), and a spate of flash floods and seaward discharge of raw sewage (August).

Driven by thermal dynamics, this network of high- and low-pressure centres wrap the planet, helping to determine the global distribution of weather. For example, the Azores High lies over the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Spain. Over the past century, it has grown in size and signal and has shifted northward, introducing warmer and lighter air to the United Kingdom, France, and the Iberian Peninsula.3 As recently as the summer of 2022, the Azores High forced a current of hot, dry Saharan air north towards the United Kingdom. As part of a series of heatwaves across Europe and North Africa, for three days in June, three days in July, and another six days in August, the United Kingdom experienced clusters of explosive thunderstorms (June), record-high temperatures (July), and a spate of flash floods and seaward discharge of raw sewage (August). While extreme weather events offer opportunities for us to visualise earth-systems and draw-out potential consequences of destabilising relations, the placement and size of these pressure centres is linked to more than just momentary disruption. Persistent and increasingly dry conditions across western Europe can be attributed to the increased size and strength of the Azores High over the past one-hundred years. The reach of this atmospheric centre extends to the eastern seaboard of North America with intensified storms building over the Atlantic Ocean; to the Arctic and its thinning sea ice; and to temperature variability in the eastern Mediterranean.4 The Azores High does not work alone to direct all of this weather-action, but it does act.

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Teleconnections, or long-distance correlations between meteorological and environmental events can be powerful reorganisers of both weather and geopolitics.

A system of relations rather than a single exchange, the South Asian monsoon is one of the largest moisture phenomena around the globe. It comprises two branches, each with its own spatial and temporal range. The Indian summer monsoon (ISM) extends from June through August and originates from the Arabian Sea, travelling toward the Tibetan Plateau. Alone, this branch of the system is responsible for 70-90% of India’s annual rainfall and plays critical roles in renewing and distributing water resources along the southern rim of the Himalayas.5 From year to year, the ISM varies its delivery of rainfall across the region. In recent decades, scientists have observed a steady and significant shift westward in the ISM’s heaviest belt of rainfall; seeming to correlate with an intensified signal from the Azores High.6 Data appears to show a correspondence between the Azores High and the Tibetan High, a high-pressure centre that sits atop the Tibetan Plateau and calls the monsoon winds inland from the Arabian Sea. Along with the growing strength of the Azores High, the ISM has been shifting away from the northeast and Indo-Gangetic plains towards the western territories and Pakistan.7 While the Azores High baked associated, proximal landmasses, an intense and prolonged monsoon season fed unprecedented floods in Pakistan—floodwaters which began in July and have yet to recede were preceded by prolonged, intense heatwaves from March to May.8 Through these atmospheric relations, the north Atlantic Ocean acts upon the resources directed by and housed atop the Tibetan Plateau.9 Teleconnections, or long-distance correlations between meteorological and environmental events can be powerful reorganisers of both weather and geopolitics.

We must begin to materialise the architecture of weather in order to imagine points of intervention.

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Since 2015, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative—a global collaborative of multidisciplinary scientists—has been working with live, unfolding, real-time analysis to determine whether, and to what degree, climate change has contributed to extreme weather events.10 Against a backdrop of politically weaponised climate science, finding verifiable fingerprints of climate change for these increasingly frequent and intensified events has changed the face and pace of scientific modelling. Yet the term “climate change” remains broad, geographically and materially indeterminate, and does little to demystify how weather comes into being. Materialising climate change is essential to combat the weaponisation of climate science. However, we must begin to materialise the architecture of weather in order to imagine points of intervention. In this four-part series of short essays, I will try to plant a few seeds of imagination with quick dives into thermal-materialities, hydro-intensities, and the various occupations of weather, unseen.


Read the whole "The Architecture of Weather" column by Christina Geros.

Bio

Christina Leigh Geros is an architect, landscape architect and urban designer who specialises in conducting design-led research that critically engages the production of knowledge infrastructures related to climate- and neuro-ecologies. Currently based in London, she is a tutor in the Bartlett School of Architecture’s MA Landscape Architecture Programme and in the MA Environmental Architecture Programme at the Royal College of Art, leading RS2: The Orang-orang and the Hutan and RS4: ANEMOI. Previously, she was a research fellow with Monsoon Assemblages at the University of Westminster in London, the design director for Anexact Office, and the design research strategist for PetaBencana.id in Jakarta. In these various positions and since 2012, she has worked with local community groups, activists, artists, and researchers to engage with environmental and human rights violations across south and southeast Asia; which informs her current practice of designing engagements, implementations, and interfaces of investigation that bridge across platform, scope, and inquiry. Christina holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Tennessee and two graduate degrees from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design: a Masters of Architecture and Urban Design and a Masters of Landscape Architecture. As a research and design contributor, her work has been featured in publications and exhibitions around the globe.

Notes

1 See Gabrielle Walker, An Ocean of Air: A Natural History of the Atmosphere (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
2 Christina Leigh Geros, “Monsoonal Atmospheres”, Monsoon as Method: assembling monsoonal multiplicities ed. Lindsay Bremner, (London: Actar, 2021), pp. 234-40.
3 Nathaniel Cresswell-Clay et al., “Twentieth-century Azores High expansion unprecedented in the past 1,200 years,” Nature Geoscience 15 (2022): 549-50.
4 Twentieth-century Azores High expansion, 552.
5 Randhir Singh, Neeru Jaiswal & C.M. Kishtawal, “Rising surface pressure over Tibetan Plateau strengthens Indian summer monsoon rainfall over northwestern India,” Scientific Reports 12 (2022): 8621.
6 Ramesh Kumar Yadav, “Relationship between Azores High and Indian summer monsoon,” npj Climate and Atmospheric Science 4, 26(2021): 7.
7 Rising surface temperature over Tibetan Plateau, 8621; Relationship between Azores High and Indian summer monsoon, 1-2.
8 Smriti Mallapaty, “Why are Pakistan’s floods so extreme this year?”, Nature [online].
9 Christina Leigh Geros, “Drinking the Winds: Monsoon as Atmospheric Spring”, GeoHumanities, 7:1, 65-88.
10 See www.worldweatherattribution.org.

Published
06 Feb 2023
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