For the love of weather – Details, episodes & analysis

You can watch this episode on YouTube https://youtu.be/HGMIqOpH0Ng

In this episode of For the Love of Weather, hosts Gemma and Aisling are joined by adventurers Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne, the first women to complete a non-stop, unsupported row across the Pacific Ocean.

They share their remarkable story of how a conversation about “what next?” soon became one of the world’s toughest record breaking adventures, rowing from Peru to Cairns.

After a devastating equipment failure forced them to abandon their first attempt, they returned to ocean to finish what they started. With two-hour rowing shifts, minimal sleep, limited fresh water, and constant exposure to the weather, every day became a test of resilience.

In this episode, we talk about:

🚣‍♀️ How Jess and Miriam discovered their love of the ocean and adventure

🌍 The journey from Atlantic rowers to taking on the Pacific

🛠️ Two years of preparation, training, and planning

🌊 The dramatic first attempt, a broken rudder, and a rescue at sea

⏰ The reality of two-hour rowing shifts and surviving on very little sleep

🍫 Eating 5,000 calories a day and the foods they dreamed of while at sea ☀️ Extreme heat, freezing nights, and living completely exposed to the elements 🌦️ How weather forecasts helped them navigate the Pacific

🔋 Managing power failures, broken equipment, and a failing water maker

💧 Hand-pumping water for hours each day while still rowing 🐋 Incredible encounters with whales, dolphins, turtles, and ocean birds

🎧 Passing the time with music, audiobooks, podcasts, and endless conversations

❤️ How their friendship grew stronger after six months alone together

📚 Their next chapter: writing a book and dreaming of future adventures We have been so inspired by these two adventurers, even before they left to row and we absolutely love their message of how the adventure is figuring it out along the way. Whether it’s rowing across an ocean or simply trying something new, Jess and Miriam’s story is a reminder to step outside your comfort zone and see where the journey takes you.

If you would like to find Miriam and Jess https://www.seasthedayoceanrowing.com/

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend. You can follow us on social media - @fortheloveofweather

We hope you leave this episode loving the weather that little bit more.

You can subscribe on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

In this episode of For the Love of Weather, Gemma and Aisling are joined by renowned meteorologist and climate communicator Bernadette Woods Placky. At the time of recording Bernadette was the Chief Meteorologist and Climate Matters Director at Climate Central. She has since moved on to a new role.

Bernadette shares her journey from studying meteorology at Penn State to becoming an Emmy Award-winning TV meteorologist and the first female meteorologist in Baltimore station history. Bernadette tells us how conversations about the weather are as much a national pastime in the US as it is here.

The discussion dives into Climate Central's groundbreaking work on climate attribution science, helping people understand how climate change is influencing the weather events happening around them right now.

We cover quite a lot of other topics including

❄️ Forecasting snow is rarely straightforward, even in regions where snow is common.

🌪️Tornadoes

⛅Favourite clouds

🌡️Dew point often tells us far more about how weather feels than relative humidity.

🌍 Communication is a climate solution.

🌡️ Attribution science now allows scientists to quantify how climate change influences individual weather events.

📈 Climate solutions are advancing rapidly, but progress still needs to accelerate.

🗣️ Everyone has a voice and can contribute to climate conversations and action. We learned a lot from our chat with Bernadette. She is doing tremendous work in helping to educate as well as shaping conversations around weather and climate.

You can find Bernadette on LinkedIn ‘Bernadette Woods Placky’ as well as on instagram.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend. You can follow us on social media - @fortheloveofweather

You can subscribe on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

Resources Mentioned

https://www.climatecentral.org/

https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters

https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-shift-index

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/ https://www.met.psu.edu/

Please welcome award winning climate activist Laura Young aka @lesswastelaura to the podcast.

If you haven’t heard of Laura, she is the person that changed the law in under 500 days to ban disposable vapes in the UK. She is also an award winning climate activist as well as being named in the King's Foundation's 35 under 35.

Laura talks about her current PhD research on enhancing Scotland’s resilience to climate change. Her research explores both physical changes to the environment as well as the negative physiological impact and financial burden that are often overlooked after the initial weather event.

She has a wealth of knowledge and ideas about nature based solutions to the changing climate. But it is not just her ideas on nature based solutions that are intriguing but also her community led initiatives of sharing resources, like a tool library.

She is passionate about using the community around you and coming together to make it a better place for everyone with less waste.

We feel very lucky to have chatted to Laura and were so inspired by how she sees the world and the future. She was just such a pleasure to chat to and we look forward to seeing what she brings to the future.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can subscribe on Youtube -

https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

Please welcome to the podcast, meteorologist and weather presenter Clare Nasir. Aisling and Gemma have wanted Clare on the podcast for many years so this podcast feels extra special. She brings to life the joy and journey that weather has brought her along.

Clare started her career at the UK Met Office, training to be a meteorologist before moving to a broadcast meteorologist role. She has since worked for every major UK channel, covering weather but also bringing climate communication to a new level. She is a voice of authority, calm and sense and loves to share her knowledge with the next generation offering her time as a mentor. In a full-circle moment, Clare is now back working with the Met Office, presenting weather forecasts as well as their climate videos.

In this episode, we chat with Clare about her remarkable career and the work she's doing as a mentor and consultant for startups focused on sustainability and adaptation. We also discuss the UK heatwave of July 2022, when the UK recorded 40°C for the first time on record. Clare shared how it felt deeply personal and how the communication around this event was different, with attribution science allowing us to make direct links to climate change.

Clare is an accomplished author of several books, including the children's book 'Colin the Cloud' and 'What Does Rain Smell Like?' We honestly don't know where Clare finds the time to do everything she does but we are big fans.

We really hope you enjoy this episode and finish it loving the weather a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can subscribe on Youtube -

https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

Tara Thompson is a communications specialist working with world-leading Earth Observation scientists, ensuring expert facts are at the forefront of the climate conversation in policy making and within the media.

In this episode Tara tells us about a recently launched Biomass satellite fondly called ‘Space Brolly’ because of its incredible 12 metre long antenna.

Tara tells us about how this is the first time precision data will be collected for global forests, with the Biomass satellite making continuous passes of the Earth’s lungs.

Biomass is capable of seeing through the trees canopies, using advanced P-band radar technology. This technology can be used to measure the structure and carbon content of forests providing an understanding like never before on how much carbon is sequestered by forests. This data will be vital in informing better climate policies and how do we best protect the world’s forests.

Tara is optimistic about the future of climate change and how all climate science is helping to shape a better world. In our ‘get to know me round’ we learn Tara’s favourite season as well as reflecting back on a childhood in the west of Ireland, where her first spark of joy for the weather was born.

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and leave loving the weather just a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X and BlueSky @4loveofweather. If you would like to follow more about Earth’s satellites check

https://www.nceo.ac.uk/ and https://space4climate.com/

You can subscribe on Youtube -

https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

In this episode we chat to Alice Stevens, creator of welly walks. These are bright yellow tech wellies that people can walk around in. Depending on the weather, the wellies would say different poems, sensing the weather with low tech barometric sensors to understand the weather at the moment. She is also the creator of rain trail which uses paint to reveal illustrations that would only appear if it rained. She has many more projects in the pipeline such as ‘blissful rain, isinit?’, a dialogue around using positive language around rain.

Alice is a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Arts University Bournemouth and is currently doing a PhD in the intersection of British Weather, Creative Practice and Ecolinguisitics. This is a field of language that studies that explores the relationship between language, human societies, and the natural environment and says that if we hide away in building we lose connection and conversation about the weather and climate.

She leaves us with some poignant thoughts about the importance of using positive language around the environment, for example talking about 'blissful rain'. She is working on a new installation ‘WeatherKin’ that will be used in bus shelters that shares other people positive memories of rains.

You can find Alice on LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/alice-stevens-222667a0.

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and leave loving the weather just a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X and BlueSky @4loveofweather.

You can subscribe on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

June 2025 started off cool but is set to be a record breaker for parts of the UK.

At the time of recording there was still a few days to go in June but some regions will have their hottest June on record, tumbling a 49 year record.

During the summer of 1976, there was a well documented heatwave and up until now was the hottest June on record for quite a few regions in the UK.

There are a lot of fun facts in this short podcast including a little chat about 'swullucking'!

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and leave loving the weather just a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X and BlueSky @4loveofweather.

You can subscribe on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

For the love of weather podcast is back with a new series. This first podcast is a hero-gram to climate scientist Prof Ed Hawkins.

Climate scientist Professor Ed Hawkins is an expert in climate change communications. Ed was surprised when his visualisation of a warming world burst into life when his climate stripes #showyourstripes were used in the 2016 Rio Olympics.

#showyourstripws is a simple and unique way of using colour to visualising climate change through warmth and colour.

One of Ed’s many climate projects was undertaken in 2020 when he set up a project to transcribe and digitise millions of paper rainfall observations. This was undertaken by thousands of volunteers, the results of which would feed into and ultimately make climate models more accurate.

It was a project he thought would take a very long time to complete, but with the help of lots of volunteers they managed to complete it in just 16 days; the results have been phenomenal.

Ed chats about his brilliant ‘warming stripes’ - #showyouratripes , which are a simple and unique way to breakdown complex science into simple colours to highlight a warming world and an incredible strength of spirit to keep going to find new ways to tell the story of climate change - a story he cared about deeply.

The warming stripes are available for lots of countries and cities around the world and you can find them here - https://showyourstripes.info/

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and leave loving the weather just a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can follow us on social media - @fortheloveofweather

You can subscribe on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

You can find Ed on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/edhawkinsclimate/?originalSubdomain=ukand on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/edhawkins.org

In this new episode of For the Love of Weather podcast we chat with meteorologist, weather presenter and author Sean Batty, who dives into his debut children’s book “The Worst Christmas Weather Ever.”

This is a beautiful story that explores real events of climate change through the adventures of Santa Claus and focus’ on children as the hero’s.

Sean emphasises the importance of hope and offers practical solutions to climate change while encouraging positive action.

If you would like a signed copy of his book - https://www.seanbatty.co.uk/store/p1/TheWorstChristmasWeatherEver.html

And you can follow Sean on socials @SeanBattyTV

For a signed copy of Sean’s book, visit his website.

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X @4loveofweather.

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast and leave loving the weather a little bit more. See

In this episode we chat to the brilliant Sarah Kent - a meteorologist and founder of Wild Soul Coaching.

Sarah lives on a narrow boat and has done so for the past 2 years, navigating UK waterways.

Her curiosity about the world around her as a child led her to science but she bas always had the soul of a philosopher.

We get a practical insight into life on a boat and how being a meteorologist comes in handy. But we also learn about what really means to live a sustainable life and to be in each moment of a day.

Through her coaching Sarah empowers women to live extraordinary lives, and to make decisions that put positive ripples out into the world. In this episode she also reminds us that time is precious.

If you would like to find out more about Sarah's business Wild Soul Coaching you can find her at https://www.sarahlkent.com/

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X @4loveofweather. We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast and leave loving the weather a little bit more.