From Dr. Benny Peiser at The GWPF
Questions Over Met Office Rain & Drought Predictions
The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier-than-average conditions for April-May-June as a whole, and also slightly favours April being the driest of the 3 months. With this forecast, the water resources situation in southern, eastern and central England is likely to deteriorate further during the April-May-June period… This forecast is based on information from observations, several numerical models and expert judgement. —Met Office 3-month Outlook, 23 March 2012
Seventeen counties in South West England and the Midlands have moved into official drought status, after two dry winters have left rivers and ground waters depleted. The news comes as the Environment Agency warned that the drought could last beyond Christmas. While rain over the spring and summer will help to water crops and gardens, it is unlikely to improve the underlying drought situation. —Environmental Agency, 16 April 2012
There’s evidence to say we are getting slightly more rain in total, but more importantly it may be falling in more intense bursts” — Julia Slingo, Met Office, 3 January 2013
The frequency of extreme rainfall in the UK may be increasing, according to analysis by the Met Office. Statistics show that days of particularly heavy rainfall have become more common since 1960. The analysis is still preliminary, but the apparent trend mirrors increases in extreme rain seen in other parts of the world. –Roger Harrabin, BBC News, 3 January 2013
In the wake of the “more rain and more intense rain” story, Doug Keenan sends this graph of England & Wales rainfall records for 1766-2012. Let’s just say the trend towards more rainfall is not obvious. As indeed is any trend towards less rainfall, which is said to be more likely by the UK Climate Impacts Programme. –Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 5 January 2013
Suddenly, after a wet year, which naturally the Met Office failed to forecast, they have reversed their customary fiery slogans to “Après nous le deluge”. Their antediluvian joy has given way to postdiluvian melancholy. They appear to have difficulty with the concept of random sequences of events, such as the precise positioning of the jet stream, and the fact that they produce apparent patterns and records. It was primitive man’s inability to envisage an effect without human cause that gave rise to much of religion. Of course it would have been most impressive if they had predicted all this a year ago, but they did not. Their predictions are as changeable as the weather and the only constant is the putative cause. –John Brignell, Number Watch, 3 January 2013
The Met Office continues to suffer from its recently acquired pretensions about climate. Careless remarks about BBQ summers and snowless winters and droughts in the UK have all been followed by Mother Nature failing to comply with their wishful thinking – the wishful bit being their hope that their faith in the power of CO2 in the system, or at least in computer models giving it a powerful effect, can be relied upon. –John Shade, Bishop Hill, 5 January 2013
My take on all this is that the alarmists are just getting desperate, spinning any weather and data to suit the CO2 thesis. Remember that the record annual rainfall for England is still less than the average annual rainfall for Scotland, hence if the average track of the jet stream is a little further south than usual then England gets a fair bit more rain. It has nothing to do with the alleged warmer atmosphere having more potential to store H20; if it was why did north-west Scotland have a drought in the spring and early summer? More bollocks from the Met Office. The UK weather and climate is determined by the track of the jet stream (and moderated by the Gulf Stream), and CO2 has feck all to do with it. –Lapogus, Bishop Hill, 5 January 2013
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David A. Evans says:
January 5, 2013 at 12:05 pm “Without wishing to appear sexist. Has anyone even noticed how disproportionate the number of female alarmists is?
DaveE.”
Women in piracy and as destroyers of prosperity seems recent but it is quite ancient. Ching Shih – commanded 1800 ships and more than 80,000 pirates — men, women, and even children. Ann Bonny and Mary Read were two of the most famous of women pirates. Hilary Clinton and Lisa Jackson also recently commanding ships of state, and after this season of heavy plunder, planning to step down and vanish from accountability for four years.
Then of note is the fact that many mythical creatures and goddesses of destruction were female; to be dreaded especially are Sirens and witches, skilled in overthrowing men’s intellects using cultural, intellectual, and sensual enticements, and Eris, goddess of waste.
lol 🙂
David A. Evans says (January 5, 2013 at 12:05 pm)
Without wishing to appear sexist. Has anyone even noticed how disproportionate the number of female alarmists is?
——–
Without wishing to appear politically correct, but maybe we should set Judith Curry, Jo Nova, Lucia Liljegren, Donna Laframboise, Tamsin Edwards et al against this ‘monstrous regiment of women’. 🙂
The CO2 blaming cousin of the Met Office the BOM has released its Annual Australian Climate Statement 2012:
http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/climate/change/20130103.shtml
What you will read in the MSM and hear on the ABC is that the last decade has been one of Australia’s warmest on record with an anomaly of 0.44 deg C. And you will be informed of all the other records that were broken such as Birdsville’s earliest Spring 40 degree day and the highest October temperature being recorded for any NSW Coastal site at Evans Head.
But what you will not hear about (unless you delve carefully into the report and find what seems to be written under duress) is that 2011 and 2012 were both cooler than other recent years with the La Niña inspired 2011 being BELOW the average and 2012 finishing just 0.11 deg C above. (Wasn’t CO2 supposed to be driving climate, not the Niño/Niña effect?)
And you will be bombarded from Green and Labor Politicians that the present heat wave in the south of the country and the current Tasmanian bushfires are “extreme events” as a result of CO2 caused global warming. But you will not hear a word that the number of 8 cyclones in the region for 2012 was 3 below the long term average.
Yep, which way the Southern Oscillation Index swings in the coming months is going to have a huge bearing on the political spin leading up to our 2013 Federal election next spring. There is a lot at stake – the future of the carbon tax, the climate bureaucracy, the renewable energy industry, in fact the country’s entire economy. At present the SOI is hovering and keeping us all in suspense which way it is going to turn. The weather is presently favouring the alarmist cause but I do not think they could withstand another year without the temperature anomaly climbing markedly up into the red.
Still waiting for the announcement…
Is this now the wettest drought on reord?
“It’s raining bricks, sixty-six.” “Slingo!”
(I don’t expect everyone to get that.)
cloud development / rain above England runs opposite the Gleisberg solar cycle….
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/#comment-194
I can’t believe that NO one can see this taking place to drive carbon tax My pop used to say one day they will tax the air we breath and here we are .
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/31/64/49/PDF/angeo-16-1212-1998.pdf They carried this out back in the 90’s And they even showed us and Obama while he was picking up his prize in Europe The Norway Spiral http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsiSirIq4SA It was NO rocket and do you think there was a need to sign this back in the 70’s http://www.scribd.com/doc/3436120/UN-1976-Weather-Weapon-Treaty
http://rense.com/general28/deathray.htm If we don’t ask the right questions the right answers will always be hidded from us POWER and CONTROL is the big picture for governing The one thing the average joe knows is what it’s like outside and because of weather modification people see the ever changing climate It’s always to hot or to cold and never just right this drives more money into the verry pockets of the biggest polluters the electrical industry Heating and cooling our homes are driven by OIL ,Coal and Gas .
in the dark days when we had no computers or computer models, the long range weather bureau used the moon, sun, and past records . Indgo Jones forcasted all Australian drought and floods during his life to the month. look up him on the web .SHAME ON OUR WEATHER BUREAU SACK THE LOT
I knew global warming had to figure in this somehow.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_CHINA_COLDEST_WINTER?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-01-05-07-52-05
Brrr! China’s coldest winter in decades at new low
BEIJING (AP) — China is experiencing unusual chills this winter with its national average temperature hitting the lowest in 28 years, and snow and ice have closed highways, canceled flights, stranded tourists and knocked out power in several provinces.
China Meteorological Administration on Friday said the national average was -3.8 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit) since late November, the coldest in nearly three decades.
The average temperature in northeast China dipped to -15.3 degrees C (4.5 degrees F), the coldest in 43 years, and dropped to a 42-year low of -7.4 degrees C (18.7 degrees F) in northern China.
[snip]
The national meteorological administration said China is seeing dropping temperatures partly because of south-moving polar cold fronts, caused by melting polar ice from global warming. It said the air is moist and likely to dump heavy snow in China, Europe and North America.
Someone could really help the Met Office by breaking in one night and carting away their their £66,000,000 computer. Then they would have to fall back on the methods that made successful forecasts for the Normandy Landing on 6 June 1944. Either that or they could buy a copy of the Old Farmers Almanac and work it out from that, or alternatively just employ Piers Corbyn to advise them with his laptop.
heres the met office global land temperature to October 2012
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/monitoring/climate/surface-temperature
basically anyone born this century hasn’t known global warming
tonyb
[The national meteorological administration said China is seeing dropping temperatures partly because of south-moving polar cold fronts, caused by melting polar ice from global warming.]
If the pole is boiling and melting polar ice, wouldn’t south-moving polar air cause a heat wave?
David A. Evans says (January 5, 2013 at 12:05 pm)
Without wishing to appear sexist. Has anyone even noticed how disproportionate the number of female alarmists is?
===================
None of my female friends or I are taken in by this nonsense, I am pleased to say. Mind you, I have persuaded some who were once sitting on the fence. Luckily, I have been researching this subject for the last 6 or 7 years and have cogent answers for those who get their evidence from the print newspapers or the BBC, thanks to WUWT and other sceptical sites.
S. 517 (109th): Weather Modification Research and Development Policy Authorization Act of 2005
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/s517/text It’s this process that is driving climate change And what do you think is happening to the tropopause while this eves dropping process takes place 24/7 day and night http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/5/2/3 is this the driver for El & La nino I see this as a major blocker for the north, south magnetic field line (the tropopause)
Readers might be interested in a transcript I made of BBC’s Horizon programme about “Global Weirding”, shown on 27th March 2012:
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20120327_hz
The following segment features Met Office meteorologists Helen Chivers and Adam Scaife.
Helen Chivers: The point of the weather forecast, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, is getting the extreme weather events – the heavy rainfall, the high temperatures, the forecasts for those – absolutely spot-on, so people can get correct warnings in the right time scales, so that they can take precautions to save themselves if they need to.
Narrator: And the one thing weather forecasters have managed to improve, over the years, is the accuracy of the forecast. The five-day forecast is now as accurate as the one-day forecast was, 30 years ago. That could be vital, in a future predicted to be dominated by extreme weather events. The technological development that’s driven the improved accuracy in the forecast floats thousands of miles above us – satellites.
Helen Chivers: We’ve got so much more information because of all the satellites that are up there. And we know that you need to know what’s going on globally, to get a good forecast of what’s going to happen in the UK and around the world for the next five days. You can’t do it without global coverage, and satellites have given us that global coverage.
Narrator: Satellites provide huge amounts of information about the world’s most extreme weather events. But making sense of them requires one of these. [Scenes of computer banks with flashing lights.] This is the Met Office’s computer behemoth. It only came online three years ago, and it can do a hundred trillion calculations a second. That’s the equivalent of a hundred thousand PCs, and it makes it one of the biggest number-crunchers in the world.
Helen Chivers: We need that power. Partly because we’ve got millions of observations coming into the super computer every day. But it’s also trying to calculate what the weather’s going to be like on that grid, all the way around the globe, up to five days ahead and beyond, because we use the same model that we do our day-to-day forecasts on, for our climate forecasts, that go hundreds of years into the future.
Narrator: And that computing power could be a vital weapon in the coming struggle with global weather extremes, allowing the Met Office to develop new kinds of weather forecasts.
Adam Scaife: The big new idea in climate science is not just to look at the distant future, 100 years ahead. Of course, that’s very important – it tells us what road we’re on. But in the near term, on planning time scales, years or months ahead, when people are making real decisions, then the big thing is to increase the skill of the forecast on those time scales. Maybe give some warning, weeks or months ahead, of impending extremes, perhaps even unprecedented extremes. That’s what we’re really trying to do with this.
I’ve always wondered about orgs that choose the name bureau they should just name it bureaucracy and stop misleading people.
In Maroochydore Qld Australia there was a day in March 2012 where four inches of rain fell in one hour – the rest of the day was pretty wet as well.
I remember 1974 when it rained an inch an hour for almost a day and flooded Brisbane.
I saw records for Mirani Qld where it rained at 2 inches an hour for 48 hours before the data recorder ran out of paper – that also in the 70s.
Match that UK Met. Office.
More frequent heavy rain events wouldn’t surprise me but as a result of the clean air acts. It goes like this, clean air act means there are fewer nuclei (eg SO2) for raindrops to form on so water vapour increases locally until it eventually starts to rain and that causes heavier rain events, of course after taking account of jetstream variations. What is wrong with this hypothesis?
Still making mistakes, so it seems that they did take up Pier’s Corbyns offer of his laptop then
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/14/friday-funny-4/
son of mulder says:
January 5, 2013 at 2:48 pm
More frequent heavy rain events wouldn’t surprise me but as a result of the clean air acts. It goes like this, clean air act means there are fewer nuclei (eg SO2) for raindrops to form on so water vapour increases locally until it eventually starts to rain and that causes heavier rain events, of course after taking account of jetstream variations. What is wrong with this hypothesis?
Fewer cloud condensing nuclei means bigger raindrops that precipitate (fall to the ground) faster, ie heavier rain.
Grumpy Old Man says: (January 5, 8:02 am)
… “The only computer in the world sat at Bletchley Park having been invented by Turing and his associates and was used to decipher German codes.”
And, lest we forget, after WWII, the UK Gov’t happily flogged off all the Enigma machines to anyone who was interested without revealing that the encryption had been cracked, and hoovered up other people’s secret information for years. Misleading people, one way or another, is what they do.
Do I, as a UK citizen, trust “my” Government?
Yes.
Just not enough for anyone to notice.
Met Office Accused Of Misleading Public Over Rainfall Trends
From Dr. Benny Peiser at The GWPF
Questions Over Met Office Rain & Drought Predictions
This is just an attempt to distract from the real story, which is that 2012 saw the second highest recorded rainfall total in the UK and the highest ever recorded in England, since records began in 1910. But more revealing is the fact that 4 out of the 5 wettest years recorded have been since the year 2000.
Forecasts and predictions are just that, but far more important for monitoring climate change are actual measurements. Its not worth paying much attention to weather forecasts in the UK much beyond a few days, occasionally longer (ie a week or so) if a pattern is well established, because we live in one of the most dynamic weather zones in the world.
Also, since when has the GWPF been a reliable source of scientific information ? They cannot even manage to reproduce articles from well respected publications accurately as they feel it necessary to change the titles of some articles to suit their obviously biased agenda.
Now wait a minute, I think I’ve got it, by jove, I think I’ve got it!
The rain in spain falls mainly from the plane. No, not quite right.
The rain in spain falls mainly on the plain. Sort of a catchy little rhyme.
Spain is a suburb of London is it not ? I guess us sixth generation ex-colonists
are a bit geographically and historically challenged
“The national meteorological administration said China is seeing dropping temperatures partly because of south-moving polar cold fronts, caused by melting polar ice from global warming.”
This is the new pet theory that makes no sense because the jet stream is the boundary between polar air and tropical air. When the jet stream is further south it means the planets atmosphere is colder than it was previously. This change can happen quickly, but for the ocean energy changes are much slower. This is the sign of a cooling planet and the spin caused by melting polar ice doesn’t wash with me. Yes, less ice means more energy loss from the ocean, but it doesn’t explain the many milder winters in the NH while the ice had been declining for decades. Why all of a sudden change recently when this pattern has been ongoing for many years? The only thing that has changed was the solar activity declined suddenly around this recent period, so the obvious get’s avoided when there is a political agenda to continue.
The facts are the NH ice is still melting while there has been no global warming for years, so this proves that a trend doesn’t need to continue for contributing to warming or cooling after. This is for especially those that can’t see any warming or cooling without the trend being continuous. I disagree totally here because there are numerous mechanisms where change in energy can be maintained, but the temperature still rise or fall after. The Arctic ice is one of them showing a decline continues after global temperatures had stopped warming. The energy stored from the ocean during the warming period therefore still continues to warm the Arctic from below.
HIstory is chock full of extreme weather events which, were they to happen in these times, would be put down to man-made climate change.
Just over a century ago, much of Norwich (future site of the UEA and CRU) was under water. On Monday 26th August 1912, some areas were said to have had 7 inches of rainfall over 30 hours, and many places ended up with five times the monthly average. Powerful winds caused havoc, rivers burst their banks across East Anglia, 40 bridges were destroyed, railways were blocked and the harvest was lost. After the storm, the river Wensum burst its banks and flood water began to surge into low-lying districts of the city, forcing residents to be evacuated by boat.
Other parts of the UK were affected too. According to one newspaper report: “Owing to the floods, Norwich resembles an island city. The railways and telegraphs are interrupted. The flood is the greatest for a quarter of a century. Harvest fields are submerged. Many houses in Huntingdon are flooded, and the inhabitants of parts of Leicester are living in the upper stories, the lower stories being invaded by water. There have been heavy losses of stock in the Midlands.”
A newspaper report from 26th August 1912: “The entire county of Norfolk is a swamp, and Lincolnshire, Suffolk and the other eastern counties are in alarming conditions. Everywhere crops are being destroyed by the swollen rivers, and there is no sign of cessation of the rains.”
A report from 28th August 1912: “Telegrams dated Norwich, Monday, arrived in London (ninety-eight miles distant) last night. They conveyed the information that it had rained incessantly for seventeen hours, and there were several feet of water in many of the streets, on which boats were plying. Hundreds of people had quitted their houses and taken refuge in the schools on the higher levels, where food was being conveyed to them. Business was at a standstill in the city. The rainfall for twelve hours was 6.32 inches, and it was still raining. The rising waters yesterday stopped the majority of the dynamos on which the electric lighting system is dependent, and the city was plunged into darkness. The flood-waters have washed away a portion of the high mound on which the old Norman castle stands, near the centre of the city. King’s Lynn and the East Coast resorts, Cromer, Sheringham, and Mundesley, are still isolated. A goods train fell through a viaduct which had collapsed near Fakenham, twenty-four miles north-west of Norwich. Several county railway bridges have been destroyed. Further floods are reported in Warwickshire. In the poorer quarters of Norwich yesterday the flood waters reached a depth of thirteen feet. The city is threatened with a shortage of water for domestic purposes, the waterworks pumping station being flooded and the machinery useless. The high-level reservoir contains only sufficient water for two days’ supply.”
Plus ca change!