In brief: Adam, a climatologist in flight from America and a sexual indiscretion that has thrown a spanner into his marriage and his academic career, is in London for a job interview. With a murderer and, shortly, the police on his trail, he creates a hidey-hole in an overshadowed piece of rough ground on the Embankment and settles down to a life of subterfuge, vagrancy and killing seagulls for dinner.

As the air flows into and up a tornado, the moisture begins to cool and condense into a cloud allowing the tornado to be seen. His quest will take him all along the River Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the sink estates of the East End, and on the way he encounters all manner of London’s denizens — aristocrats, prostitutes, priests and policewomen amongst them — and version after new version of himself. the cloud to indicate that the updraft air is warmer than the air surrounding the cloud at the same altitude. Such storms are rarely severe and are a result of local atmospheric instability; hence the term "air mass thunderstorm". Ditching his mobile and credit cards, it proves surprisingly easy for Kindred to erase the electronic trail of his identity.

Adam tells Mhouse he has to leave for Scotland and shacks up with Vladimir, who he met at the Church of John Christ. The new cell does not move quite as fast as the under cutting outflow so, the cells position relative to the line, shifts from the front to the back as it matures. Lightning is only a few centimeters thick, but travels at 60,000 mph with a temperature of 54,000 degrees F (five times hotter than the surface of the sun). Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him. He decides to visit the church to get a decent meal and meets others there who are in the same dire situation.

A characteristic feature of the thunderstorm, viewed from a distance, is its cylindrical or slightly hourglass shape capped by an anvil-shaped top; the anvil is caused by air diverging from the upper portions of the storm’s updraft ( Figure T14).Boyd was selected in 1983 as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' in a promotion run by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council. The mature stage is the most likely time for hail, heavy rain, frequent lightning, strong winds, and tornadoes. A developing thunderstorm's updraft in this environment then tilts that horizontal tube of rotating air into the vertical and stretches it, causing the rotation to increase. This U-shaped jet stream plunge – known to meteorologists as a trough – forces a low-pressure system with cold and warm fronts to intensify to the east of it, drawing northward that increasingly warm and humid air we discussed earlier. Ingram has also been feeling strangely ill and it turns out he has a brain tumour that requires an operation.