Guest post by Paul Homewood
The UK Met Office report that the UK has just had its coldest autumn for nineteen years, leaving 2012 on course to be second coldest year since 1996.
Mean temperature in November was 0.4C below the 1981-2010 average, the third month in a row when temperatures have been well down on normal.
The average temperature for the autumn in the UK was 8.6C, compared to the long term average of 9.5C and the coldest since 1993. It is also the sixth coldest autumn in the last 50 years.
The year as a whole is currently running as the second coldest since 1996, beaten only by the exceptionally cold year of 2010. Temperatures so far in December are 2 degrees below normal, and the Met Office are forecasting that this will continue for the foreseeable future.
One of the features this autumn is just how persistent the cold weather has been. There have not been any exceptionally cold interludes, as, for instance, we saw with the heavy snow in November 2010. Instead, the weather has just been consistently cold.
Figure 1
Rainfall
Rainfall totals for the UK during the autumn amounted to 374mm, about 8% above normal, but nothing exceptional. For instance, this total has been beaten six times in the last 30 years.
Figure 2
Several areas were affected by floods towards the end of November, particularly in SW England and Wales, and the map below shows rainfall totals were well above normal there during the month.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/anomacts/
However, as Figures 3 & 4 show, the rainfall totals just experienced in that part of the country, during both November and the autumn as a whole, are actually very commonplace. Indeed, it can be seen just how variable the UK’s weather can be!
Figure 3
Figure 4
Met Office Autumn Forecast
At the end of August, the Met Office 3-month outlook forecast:-
The balance of probabilities suggests that September will be slightly warmer than average whilst for the period September-October-November UK-averaged temperatures will be near the 1981-2010 climate mean.
For UK averaged rainfall the predicted probabilities weakly favour below normal values during September. For the period September/October/November as a whole the forecast favours a slightly higher than usual risk of above average rainfall, whilst the risk of dry conditions remains around climatological levels.
Woefully wrong on temperatures, but a bit better on rainfall. I’ll give them a C+ overall!
All Met Office data is available here.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/datasets/
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It may well be that the Landscheidt Grand Solar Minimum is showing its strength…
REPLY: Sorry but it will be named the Eddy minimum, not Landscheidt, if in fact a minimum occurs. This has already been decided by the solar science community. – Anthony
Just as predicted!
“UK Endures Coldest Autumn Since 1993”
Thanks, I know, I lived through it!
So did my fruit and veg, hence crap yields
People talk about drought being an issue, and it is, but my problem is warmth, water I can store accumulate. Too much water and the raised beds fare better.
No sun, no warmth, no growth, simples.
If you are a grower you learn about THE limiting factors
Folks, careful as for for the true believers now anything is now a proof of CAGW. Too cold, Too wet, Too dry you name it. Next will be too average. The flock has been led to believe this by their Climate mullahs and imams through many sermons and fatwas. Too many sheep even in 2012.
I think it had something to do with the almighty storm in the Arctic some months ago, that broke sea ice, thus allowing heat to escape from the oceans, and thus lowering the temperature differential between the Atlantic and the Arctic, pushing the jetstream south, and opening the UK for a very cold winter, on the back of a wet summer
Yes, here in London, it has been chilly for over a month, and consistently chilly
Oh, I really can’t be bothered….
Is it worse than we thought?
WEll, the Met office were predicting in 2007 that the foreseeable future was “hot” and dry summers due to Anthropogenic Global Warming (wow there’s a concept from the past). Now however, they do have more caution.
They now claim that wet summers “…. could be due to natural variability – a bad run of coincidence, if you will – but climate scientists are conducting ongoing research to see if there are other factors at play.
Changes in sea surface temperatures due to natural cycles may be playing a part, but there is more research to be done before anyone can establish how big a role they play.”
which is another way of saying that they simply do not know
Surprising how well things grow here in the Bahamas. I planed tomatoes and snow pea seeds two weeks ago. Both need stakes now. Tomatoes that I planted in Toronto in April may yield a tomato or 2 before fall. This tomato crop will be ready in January,
I have listened and know that we will need to grow our own food soon.
May I add again how easy it is too use less electricity here. I have one computer and a fridge running all day, one light at night. Under $100 a month. I don’t want to do the solar panels thing. We get hurricanes here.
As I read this I realized that they were on track for “the warmest year ever…” a little bit of number crunching and “Voila! — a new high…
I did get that right didn’t I?????
This summer I got my gas-heating fixed after a couple of years of thermometric discomfort.
Dunno where Mr Homewood got his data from but, as long as I don’t venture outside ‘Chez OMR’, this UK Autumn has been markedly warmer than for some time!
Correlation is, I know, not causation but could my experience of recent-warming be due to increasing concentrations of CO2 or is it due to the increasing number of wind-turbines that I see springing up around me?
It’s all very puzzling!
Well, at least those formerly respected industrial scientists of the 17-20th centuries made it slightly less cold then it would have been, if they didn’t invent industrialisation and C02 use. They deserve a posthumous award for that.
Is there a correlation between low temperature and low rainfall?
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
And HuffNPuff Post is already trying to call 2012 the warmest year
“Just as predicted!”
yes, when you have big ice losses in the NP, two of the expected results are colder and more snowy winters in the NH.
This is raw data, please allow for the team to adjust.
Anyway, the snow across the UK is global warming snow not real snow.
Coroners are climate deniers too, they need to be banned from determining “death by hypothermia.”, it proves they are in the pockets of Big Oil.
And HuffNPuff Post is already trying to call 2012 the warmest year
That could possibly be the case for the lower 48 states of the U.S. It is not true globally. If you are interested where the globe stands on 6 data sets so far in 2012, read on.
2012 in Perspective so far on Six Data Sets
Note the bolded numbers for each data set where the lower bolded number is the highest anomaly recorded so far in 2012 and the higher one is the all time record so far. There is no comparison.
With the UAH anomaly for October at 0.33, the average for the first ten months of the year is (-0.13 -0.13 + 0.05 + 0.23 + 0.18 + 0.24 + 0.13 + 0.20 + 0.34 + 0.33)/10 = 0.14. This would rank 9th if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.42. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in April of 1998 when it reached 0.66.
With the GISS anomaly for October at 0.69, the average for the first ten months of the year is (0.32 + 0.37 + 0.45 + 0.55 + 0.67 + 0.56 + 0.46 + 0.58 + 0.61 + 0.69)/10 = 0.53. This would rank 9th if it stayed this way. 2010 was the warmest at 0.63. The highest ever monthly anomalies were in March of 2002 and January of 2007 when it reached 0.89.
With the Hadcrut3 anomaly for October at 0.486, the average for the first ten months of the year is (0.217 + 0.193 + 0.305 + 0.481 + 0.475 + 0.477 + 0.448 + 0.512+ 0.515 + 0.486)/10 = 0.411. This would rank 9th if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.548. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in February of 1998 when it reached 0.756. One has to back to the 1940s to find the previous time that a Hadcrut3 record was not beaten in 10 years or less.
With the sea surface anomaly for October at 0.428, the average for the first ten months of the year is (0.203 + 0.230 + 0.241 + 0.292 + 0.339 + 0.351 + 0.385 + 0.440 + 0.449 + 0.428)/10 = 0.336. This would rank 9th if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.451. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in August of 1998 when it reached 0.555.
With the RSS anomaly for November at 0.195, the average for the first eleven months of the year is (-0.060 -0.123 + 0.071 + 0.330 + 0.231 + 0.337 + 0.290 + 0.255 + 0.383 + 0.294 + 0.195)/11 = 0.200. This would rank 11th if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.55. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in April of 1998 when it reached 0.857.
With the Hadcrut4 anomaly for October at 0.518, the average for the first ten months of the year is (0.288 + 0.209 + 0.339 + 0.526 + 0.531 + 0.501 + 0.469 + 0.529 + 0.516 + 0.518)/10 = 0.443. This would rank 9th if it stayed this way. 2010 was the warmest at 0.54. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in January of 2007 when it reached 0.818. The 2011 anomaly at 0.399 puts 2011 in 12th place and the 2008 anomaly of 0.383 puts 2008 in 14th place.
On all six of the above data sets, a record is out of reach.
Hey! I thought that Dr. David Viner of the CRU said in 2000 that by 2002 winter snows in the UK would virtually disappear and that, “children growing up in the UK wouldn’t even know what snow is.”
Another Warmunista prediction bites the dust….
How long is this stupid hoax/fraud going to continue?????
remember the Met Office hasn’t got any better since the Autumn:
5 Dec: Daily Mail: More traffic chaos on its way as forecasters predict up to six inches of snow and freezing conditions overnight
Forecasters admitted snow across the South had taken them a little by surprise…
Experts wrongly said yesterday that London and the South East would be ‘cold and dry’ with ‘scattered showers – some wintry’ in the South West…
They only predicted that snow would settle in the North, with four inches on high ground and just two inches remaining lower down by morning.
Instead, a band of snow wreaked havoc as it moved down across the south of England, with the unprepared home counties awaking to wintry scenes and travel chaos…
Met Office spokesman Mark Wilson admitted today that forecasters had not expected the extreme weather.
He said: ‘The snow has been heavier than we first thought and it has brought the snow to lower levels. It was in the forecast, but the actual snow that fell was to lower levels than we had earlier forecast.
***’This is in the nature of forecasting. It is difficult. The issue of snow was mentioned in the forecast, but on higher ground.’…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2243251/UK-weather-More-traffic-chaos-way-forecasters-predict-inches-snow-freezing-conditions-overnight.html
yes, forecasting 100 years ahead must be well nigh impossible.
That top chart sure looks like more or less trendless flat from about 1930 to now, but with a couple of warm years in the ‘oughties’ (no doubt helped by a bit of ‘adjusting’)…
Other than the USA (and only ‘east of the Rockes at that) it seems much of the rest of the world is having a bit of cold. Golly… almost like it’s all natural and the weather changes…
[snip . . incoherence leads to content free posts.. .mod]
The data just needs adjusting. Move along…
“Just as predicted!”
Presumably these predictions started about 2008 just after the first big Artic ice melt and when the UK started getting normal winters again?
So much for the UK to expect to have a Mediterranean style climate with droughts becoming more common. Mother Nature just threw a dampener on that one – for now at least.
The Scottish ski industry is doomed and snowfalls are now just a thing of the past. 😉
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/dec/07/snow-freezing-winds-expected-uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/dec/05/uk-weather-snow-transport-disruptions-live-blog
Fear not – “Forecasters Predict More Mild Winter for Europe”
Reuters, Nov 09, 2012
FRANKFURT – European weather in the coming winter now looks more likely to be mild than in previous studies, German meteorologist Georg Mueller said in a monthly report.
“The latest runs are generally in favor of a milder than normal winter, especially over northern Europe,” wrote Mueller, who regularly monitors energy weather on behalf of Point Carbon, a Thomson Reuters company.
“Especially January and February could get quite wet, windy and mild over Scandinavia and parts of northern Central Europe,” he added, concluding that no major cold episodes were likely. December should be the coolest month, he said.
Another energy specialist, Weather Services International (WSI) last month also said it expected mild conditions in western Europe between November and January. WSI forecasters said the likelihood of a “blocking pattern” over the North Atlantic is relatively low this winter, suggesting that Arctic air will not be forced south into Europe on a regular basis.
…. no need to worry then – they’ve got the measure of it obviously.