Extreme Weather Event comes to Exeter
WAM -Weather Art and Music, an award-winning Special Interest Group of the Royal Meteorological Society, is to hold its next event in Exeter.
In collaboration with the University of Exeter, Double Elephant Print Workshop, the Met Office and the Royal Meteorological Society, the WAM Extreme Weather Event will be a diverse day of exploration and interaction for all ages, and an evening of entertainment and discussion.
The Extreme Weather Event will look at our experience of extreme weather in Devon, and how it fits into a pattern of changing climate.
Everything you need to know about the festival can be found at the WAM website www.wamfest.co.uk and you can follow WAM on twitter @wamfestival.
Dr Peter Stott, co-founder of WAM and a world-leading climate scientist from the Met Office: "Climate change can often be thought as something global or distant. But at this event we’re going to look at what this global challenge means for us here in Devon. And it’s not all doom and gloom either. We’ll talk about solutions as well as problems. Weather is such a fascinating topic especially when you bring different perspectives together, involve the experts and the public in a joint conversation, and mix the arts with the sciences. It promises to be a lot of fun.”
Tickets are now on sale from www.wamfest.co.uk for the evening event called A Question of Extremes, which will feature Helen Czerski and Prof Dame Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist of the Met Office.
Physicist Helen Czerski is well known for her science programmes on BBC. The first half of the evening will feature Helen and her guest Dr Peter Stott. Helen and Peter will take our audience on an entertaining and informative journey around the globe to look at extreme weather and its connection to climate change.
The second half of the evening will feature Climate Change Question Time, with its highly interactive format involving questions from the audience. The discussion will be chaired by WAM founding member Prof Paul Hardaker, Chief Executive of the Institute of Physics, and Helen will be joined on the panel by Julia and another world-leading expert on climate change, Prof Peter Cox of the University of Exeter.
Helen Czerski said: “If you look at a painting or read a story, the weather is always there in the background, but no-one ever comments on it. It’s often just seen as a sort of wallpaper, stuck on the ceiling of our lives. But we live in the weather, and here in Britain we’re in a fantastic position on the globe to appreciate the richness that the atmosphere has to offer. I’m really excited about the WAM festival, because every perspective has something to add to our experience of the weather, and giving art and music a place alongside the scientific discussions shows us those connections.”
Our free event during the day, called Extreme Weather and You, will feature talks from leading scientists, workshops with plenty of opportunities to get involved in discussions on extreme weather in our community. The Met Office choir will be entertaining visitors during the lunchbreak. There will be a science fair for the whole family, where visitors can explore key ideas in weather and climate science in a fun way. And to cap it all off, we are offering our audience a unique opportunity to take part in printmaking workshops led by Exeter's outstanding Double Elephant Print Workshop. With the help of Double Elephant's experienced workshop leaders, memories of extreme weather and thoughts about climate change and our future will be transformed into a unique picture of our community experience of extreme weather.
Exeter is a hot bed of weather and climate research with both the Met Office and a world leading University based in the city. Locally based experts involved in the event include Peter Stott, Richard Betts, Peter Cox, Mat Collins, Stuart Barr, Robert Dunn, Felicity Liggins and Ewan Woodley. Early career scientists from the Met Office and the University of Exeter will also be there to facilitate the workshops and give an insight into life on the shop floor of predicting the weather and climate.
WAM - Weather, Art and Music is an initiative founded by musician and artist Pierrette Thomet Stott together with her husband, climate scientist Dr Peter Stott of the Met Office, Prof Paul Hardaker of the Institute of Physics, and a group of committed volunteers from the scientific and arts community.
Since its foundation in 2011, it has held a series of successful events including the first, full weekend WAM Festival in Reading in 2012, a collaboration with Progress Theatre around the Met Office -commissioned play ' Darwin and Fitzroy', and a series of events at the Amateur Meteorologists’ conference of the Royal Meteorological Society. In 2015 WAM received the Outreach and Communication Award of the European Meteorological Society, achieving international recognition for its innovative approach to communicating weather and climate science to a wider public.
Pierrette Thomet Stott said: “WAM started as a big experiment - bring weather and climate science together with the arts and see what happens. Science and the arts have a lot to say to each other, and we've had some very exciting results in the past, including a whole exhibition of specially commissioned artwork inspired by the weather, and new music commissions.”
A key feature of the Extreme Weather Event at the University of Exeter on 5 March this year is the chance for participants to get involved themselves, in interactive science activities, workshops, and question and answer sessions.
As Pierrette Thomet Stott points out, “We're trying to find more engaging and more positive ways of talking about climate change - after all, this is something we need to talk about because it affects our local community. And for this event, we're very excited to be able to bring our community together with the world-leading weather and climate science community that calls Exeter home. It's a great opportunity to get a direct conversation started about one of the great challenges of our time."
