Weather Eye is proud to announce that Tom O'Connor will give a one-man show tonight in Dublin. Of course you may immediately assume that there will be lots of golf and LOL, this latter expression, I have recently discovered, being cyberspeak for "Ha-HaHa", and an acronym from "laughter on-line", much used on chat-lines on the Internet.
But of course you would be wrong - though maybe not: for all I know there may well be talk of golf and LOL tonight in the Earlsfort Terrace premises of UCD. But the star will not be the comedian of that name, but Dr Tom O'Connor, famous himself in Galway as the primum mobile, suaviter in modo sed fortiter in re, of UCG's atmospheric research station at Mace Head.
Dr O'Connor's talk, the latest in the Irish Meteorological Society's series of winter lectures, is on "Irish Contributions to the Science of Aerosols".
Now an aerosol in this context has nothing to do with the spraycans that we use to polish furniture or kill the flies on the odd occasion when we have a summer. In the scientific sense, an aerosol is a little particle suspended in the air, and it may be of either natural or anthropogenic origin.
At any instant the atmosphere contains many hundreds of thousands of these particles per cubic metre. They are, to quote Milton, "as thick and numberless as the gay motes that people the sunbeams". But like the mote in your brother's eye, they are very small - so small, in fact, that you cannot see them, although they affect both our day-to-day weather and the climatic future of our planet.
The importance of aerosols to the weather lies in the fact that they facilitate condensation, and promote the formation of clouds or fog. But they also affect the transparency of the atmosphere to radiation, so that they may either enhance or diminish the so-called greenhouse effect. The efficiency of aerosols in these respects depends both on their size and on the number of them in the atmosphere at any given time.
This is a topic on which Tom O'Connor is acknowledged as an expert. At the Mace Head station there are instruments that continually monitor our atmosphere, providing detailed information about the concentrations of all the old familiar villains - methane, nitrous oxide, CFCs and ozone, and of course, the aerosols.
If you would like to hear what he has to say upon the subject, you are welcome to come along tonight at 8 p.m.