Pick your favourite weather or climate photo
by Kirsty McCabe, FRMetS
What makes a good weather or climate photograph? Is it the lighting, the colours, the composition or the subject itself? Our judges have been deliberating for weeks over this year’s entries for our annual Standard Chartered Weather Photographer of the Year competition, and now it’s your turn.
The 2024 shortlist has been revealed and it’s time for you to choose your winner of the Public vote. To help you select your favourite, here’s the shortlist with a quick MetMatters insight to each amazing image. Oh and cast your vote soon, as you’ve only got until 17 October 2024.
African Dust over Athens
Strong southerly winds transported Saharan dust from northern Africa to Greece, giving the Parthenon an eerie orange glow. As well as dust, the southerly winds brought high temperatures, affected the air quality and contributed to a much earlier start to the fire season.
An Incredible Experience
There are lots of optical phenomenon in this beautiful image from Poland’s Tatra Mountains, including a fog bow, a Brocken Spectre and a glory. Fog bows form in a similar way to their rainbow cousins, but aren’t as colourful due to the tiny size of the water droplets.
Circular Rainbow
A rainbow’s shape is actually a circle centred on the point directly opposite the sun from you, but most of the time we can’t see the full circle because the ground gets in the way. If you can get to a higher vantage point with water droplets below, you are more likely to see the complete rainbow.
Evening Shower over the Needles
Although rainbows are fairly common, the correct ingredients need to come together to see one of the most admired meteorological phenomena. Namely, the sun must be behind you and low in the sky, and an array of water droplets must be in front of you.
Freezing Cold
Climbers appear as black specks against the white snow of the Poland’s Wołowiec Peak. Snow cover usually persists in the highest parts of the Tatras until spring, but climate change and warmer winters means that the spring melt is happening earlier, reducing the snow season.
Freezing Mist
Mist (and fog) usually form in the same way as clouds, with the condensation of water droplets onto small particles known as condensation nuclei. Given the sub-zero temperatures at the time this image of the Barnweil Monument in Ayrshire was taken, this freezing mist is most likely composed of supercooled water droplets.
Frozen Shadows
It might take a moment before you realise you are looking at people walking on a frozen sea. This region of the Black Sea freezes regularly, in part because it is fed by freshwaters that freeze at a higher temperature than saltwater, but also when the Siberian high-pressure system brings particularly cold air in winter.
Half-life Lake
Lake Urmia in Iran was once the second largest saltwater lake in the world and the largest wetland in Iran. But severe droughts, along with water extraction for human use, has caused the water levels to fall dramatically. The exposed salt crust is vulnerable to high winds, increasing the frequency and intensity of dust storms.
Halo in Diamond Dust
This stunning display of solar halos is from Genhe, one of China’s coldest places. A sun halo is a ring of light surrounding the sun, formed when light refracts through ice crystals, instead of raindrops, and are often seen during winter. The diamond dust in the title refers to tiny ice crystals falling from an apparently cloudless sky.
Hoarfrost Heaven
In Old English, the word ‘hoar’ is related to old-age, and so this frost gets its name from its resemblance to white hair. Hoar frost differs from ground frost because it occurs when the surface is already below freezing. The water vapour immediately freezes on contact with the object rather than first condensing as liquid water and then freezing.
Li’taami’kooko
The Canadian Prairies and the North American Great Plains are sometimes affected by the interior Chinook or “snow eater” winds which can rapidly raise temperatures. These warm, dry winds can also lead to the “Chinook arch”— a stationary band of clouds due to condensation at the peak and windward side of the mountain range.
Lone Tree
This photo captures the magic of the golden hour, with the orange light highlighting the peaks above the mountain fog. Golden hour is the hour just after sunrise or just before sunset, when sunlight travels through the greatest amount of atmosphere, causing more of the blue portion of the sun’s rays to scatter away, leaving more yellow, orange and red light.
Morning Fog
In autumn, large bodies of water often remain warmer for longer than the surrounding land. Cold air passing over the relatively warmer waters of the loch leads to evaporation from the surface. This increases the dew point, and the water vapour condenses into a type of mist or fog, known as evaporation fog or sea smoke.
Morning Life
In this image, a family hangs dyed cotton cloth to dry as the sun rises in the background. Droughts are common in Myanmar’s Dry Zone, where much of the country’s cotton is grown. As the climate warms and rainfall is predicted to become more variable in Myanmar, good water management will be essential for the cotton industry.
Nature and Boat
A lone fishing boat in the Andaman Sea awaits the strong winds and rougher seas that will accompany the approaching thunderstorm. The most striking feature in this image is the shelf cloud, a common feature of storms with strong wind gusts. The underside of the cloud appears ragged and turbulent because of the gusty wind.
Rain on a Window
Believe it or not, water can be considered sticky or “cohesive”, which is why raindrops keep some shape when they fall on a surface. The shape of water droplets on glass is due to a balance between cohesion, which tends to make the droplet spherical, and adhesion, which tends to flatten the water on the surface.
Resilience in the Rain
A fisherman ventures onto Myanmar’s Inle Lake during a night-time downpour in search of fish to support his family. According to Myanmar’s Department of Meteorology and Hydrology, average rainfall over the lake has decreased over the past few decades due to a shorter monsoon period. However, when it does rain, the intensity has increased.
River Drying in Drought
This image shows the effects of drought and human interference with river flow. Although the River Teesta, which flows through India and Bangladesh, is drying up and groundwater levels fall in periods of drought, climate change means that when it does rain, it pours — especially in the monsoon season — leading to flooding and riverbank erosion.
Rowing
This image was taken in Porto Alegre, Brazil, during the devastating Rio Grande do Sul floods in Spring 2024, as a young man paddled his kayak towards the worst affected areas to help rescue stranded people. World Weather Attribution showed that climate change made the flooding at least twice as likely, and six to nine per cent more intense.
Signs of a Flood
Flooding caused by the River Sow in Stafford’s town centre is now so common that footpaths around the river have signs that can be deployed. But as this image shows, even they end up underwater. This particular flooding event followed Storm Henk in early January 2024, with nearly 300 flood warnings issued in England alone.
Sprites Dancing in the Dark Night
Much like the ethereal, fairy-like sprites of folklore, fleeting red sprites are particularly difficult to see or photograph. Sprites occur due to electrical discharge, but unlike ordinary lightning, they occur well above cumulonimbus clouds, approximately 50 miles (80km) above the ground, in a layer of the atmosphere known as the mesosphere.
The Fireline
In South Africa, firefighting resources are shared between the north and south of the country due to the differing fire seasons, but rising temperatures and reduced rainfall have caused longer fire seasons and unseasonal fires, increasing the probability of wildfires. This photograph was taken as a fire in Cape Town became out of control, forcing the firefighters to flee.
The Rays
When air near the surface cools overnight, water droplets can condense into mist and fog. Because the cool, moist air is dense, it can become trapped in the valleys. A temperature inversion may form, where the bottom of the valley is cooler than the near-surface air of the mountaintops above, further trapping the fog.
The Ice Storm
This smooth, clear ice formation is called glaze, and forms when large supercooled drizzle or rain freezes when it meets any frozen surface, in this case a tree branch. Freezing rain can be incredibly dangerous; the weight of glaze on power lines can cause them to collapse, and glaze on roads can lead to deadly black ice.
Volcanoes
A small pyrocumulus cloud sits atop Mount Semeru as small plumes of smoke and steam are emitted from the crater of Mount Bromo. Pyrocumulus clouds not only form above volcanoes, but above heat sources such as forest fires and power station cooling towers. Once air has risen to a cool enough altitude, moisture will condense to form a cloud.
Now you know a little bit more about our shortlisted images, don't forget to cast your vote for your favourite here.
