Astro Seminar: Can you predict the weather by watching aeroplanes fly?

The answer is: perhaps - but you have to watch them very carefully. I will describe Project Humdinger, which aims to measure the refractive bending of aircraft radio broadcasts using long baseline interferometry. The idea behind the project is (1) the atmosphere's refractive index has a small contribution from water vapour; (2) atmospheric refraction is therefore an indirect measure of the water vapour distribution, which is a key ingredient in numerical weather prediction. Disclaimer: at no point in this seminar will I be attempting to predict the weather, but I will describe the technology and recent observations that might allow such a thing to be done. The talk will have a particular focus on exotic atmospheric phenomena seen through the interferometer.