This program will review the primary natural forces responsible for global weather and describe how they interact to produce the complex weather patterns we experience here in New England.  Once those primary forces are understood we will consider a variety of different cloud types and learn how the changes in pattern of clouds over a few minutes or hours can help us predict what our local weather will be over the next period of 12 to 20 hours.

Jim Parmentier retired to Maine in 2012 after a career in research and teaching in the pharmaceutical industry.    He learned about small boats and summer weather as a child on Cape Cod.  In 1963 and ’64 he taught sailing at the Woods Hole Yacht Club, and in 1965 he crewed for a summer on Sea Gypsy, an 81’ topsail schooner out of Oyster Bay, Long Island, which sailed the coast east to Blue Hill and back.  Jim started building small boats about 2004.   He has been a supporter of the Virginia project since its inception in the mid 1990s.