In this issue of Weather

The first paper this month is Neil Wells’ examination of the effect of the warmth of the North Atlantic Ocean on the climate of northwestern Europe: ‘The North Atlantic Ocean and climate change in the UK and northern Europe’ on p. 3. Although the topic of the moderation of temperature changes in western high latitudes is a favourite for geography students at school, Dr Wells adds much in his article, describing the many factors that keep northwestern Europe warm through the winter. The North Atlantic is a powerful heat pump, exceeding the effects of the North Pacific, despite the larger size of the latter. Continuous measurement in depth has increased our understanding of water flows and the advection of both temperature and salinity within the oceans. We are presented with a record of the changes in these factors over recent years – an area of increasing study in the oceanographic community related to climate and its rate of change in response to anthropogenic forcing. Malcolm Walker's last paper on p. 10 describes the life of researcher and former RMetS President Prof. P. A. Sheppard. Lewis Fry Richardson is well known as the developer of the principle of numerical weather prediction years before the invention of the electronic computer and he tested the proposal by bringing mathematicians together to work in parallel to calculate the future state of the atmosphere. This spurred an image of a ‘forecasting ­factory’, organised along the lines of mass ­production, that might have been developed in order to forecast the weather. Stephen Conlin imagined what this factory might have looked like and his painting is reproduced on the front cover of the journal. In ‘An artist's impression of Richardson's fantastic forecast factory’ on p. 14, Peter Lynch describes this painting in detail in relation to the forecasting process described by Richardson more than 190 years ago. Wednesday 1 July 2015 was the warmest day of last year for much of the UK , but this brought the hazards described by John Turnpenny in his short article ‘Missing the expected in the Cairngorms, 1 July 2015’ on p. 18.