Guest post by Paul Homewood
h/t Robuk
A study, by Professor Stuart Lane of Durham University back in 2008, appears to have been remarkably percipient. Written just after the extremely wet summer of 2007, the study suggests that, far from summers in the UK becoming drier as most climate models predict, they are likely to become wetter.
Lane makes the following points.
- The wetter weather in 2007, and which he forecasts will continue to be the pattern, is the result of the movement of the jet stream onto a more southerly track. (This, of course, is exactly what happened in 2012).
- The period 1960-90 was an unusually dry one, especially compared to the 19th and early 20thC.
- Three-quarters of our flood records start in the flood-poor period that began in the 1960’s. As a result, the frequency of flooding has been underestimated, leading to building on flood plains, etc.
- Examining seasonal rainfall data and river flow patterns back to 1753, suggests many other “flood-rich periods” in the past which are comparable to now.
- We have forgotten “just how normal flooding is in the UK”.
- Linking heavier rainfall to global warming was wrong.
News Release
Last summer was the second wettest on record and experts who have studied rainfall and river flow patterns over 250 years say we must prepare for worse to come. Professor Stuart Lane, from Durham University’s new Institute of Hazard and Risk, says that after about 30 to 40 less eventful years, we seem to be entering a ‘flood-rich’ period. More flooding is likely over a number of decades.
Prof. Lane, who publishes his research in the current edition of the academic journal Geography, set out to examine the wet summer of 2007 in the light of climate change. His work shows that some of the links made between the summer 2007 floods and climate change were wrong. Our current predictions of climate change for summer should result in weather patterns that were the exact opposite of what actually happened in 2007. The British summer is a product of the UK’s weather conveyor belt and the progress of the Circumpolar Vortex or ‘jet stream’. This determines whether we have high or low pressure systems over the UK. Usually the jet stream weakens and moves northwards during spring and into summer. This move signals the change from our winter-spring cyclonic weather to more stable weather during the summer. High pressure systems extend from the south allowing warm air to give us our British summer.
In 2007, the jet stream stayed well south of its normal position for June and July, causing low pressure systems to track over the UK, becoming slow moving as they did so. This has happened in summer before, but not to the same degree. Prof. Lane shows that the British summer can often be very wet – about ten per cent of summers are wetter than a normal winter. What we don’t know is whether climate change will make this happen more in the future.
However, in looking at longer rainfall and river flow records, Prof. Lane shows that we have forgotten just how normal flooding in the UK is. He looked at seasonal rainfall and river flow patterns dating back to 1753 which suggest fluctuations between very wet and very dry periods, each lasting for a few years at a time, but also very long periods of a few decades that can be particularly wet or particularly dry. In terms of river flooding, the period since the early 1960s and until the late 1990s appears to be relatively flood free, especially when compared with some periods in the late 19th century and early 20th Century.
As a result of analysing rainfall and river flow patterns, Prof. Lane believes that the UK is entering a flood rich period that we haven’t seen for a number of decades. He said: “We entered a generally flood-poor period in the 1960s, earlier in some parts of the country, later in others. This does not mean there was no flooding, just that there was much less than before the 1960s and what we are seeing now. This has lowered our own awareness of flood risk in the UK. This has made it easier to go on building on floodplains. It has also helped us to believe that we can manage flooding without too much cost, simply because there was not that much flooding to manage.” He added: “We have also not been good at recognising just how flood-prone we can be. More than three-quarters of our flood records start in the flood-poor period that begins in the 1960s. This matters because we set our flood protection in terms of return periods – the average number of years between floods of a given size. We have probably under-estimated the frequency of flooding, which is now happening, as it did before the 1960s, much more often that we are used to. “The problem is that many of our decisions over what development to allow and what defences to build rely upon a good estimate of these return periods.
The government estimates that 2.1 million properties and 5 million people are at risk of flooding. In his review of the summer floods Sir Michael Pitt was wise to say that flooding should be given the same priority as terrorism.” Professor Lane concluded: “We are now having to learn to live with levels of flooding that are beyond most people’s living memory, something that most of us have forgotten how to do.”
Flooding is one of the issues covered by the Institute of Hazard and Risk Research at Durham University where Prof. Lane is a resident expert. The IHRR, which launches this week, is a new and unique interdisciplinary research institute committed to delivering fundamental research on hazards and risks and to harness this knowledge to inform global policy. It aims to improve human responses to both age-old hazards such as volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and floods as well as the new and uncertain risks of climate change, surveillance, terror and emerging technologies. Prof. Lane’s research is funded by the Willis Research Network, an innovative collaboration between universities worldwide and the insurance industry, and The UK Research Councils’ Rural Economy and Land Use Programme.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=6468
Perhaps Julia Slingo should read this paper.
Related articles
- UK Rainfall 2012-The Report The Met Office Should Have Produced (wattsupwiththat.com)
- 2012 second wettest year on record for UK (guardian.co.uk)
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In Heidelberg, in west central Germany, the old bridge (Alte Brucke) has marks on the side it, of flood levels in the past. When I was there nearly 20 years ago, there was a flood, and a great many marks were above that particular flood. Wonder how many old bridges and other structures have marks on them recording floods in the past. There really is nothing new under the sun (or clouds as the case may be).
Dynamic Analysis of Weather and Climate, 2nd English Ed. Leroux, Springer-Praxis, written in 2008, published in 2010, Chapter 3, section 4 page 68 “The floods and heatwave of summer 2007″… anticyclonic agglutination over central Europe and the Mediterranean -+45C in Italy…- and cooler western Europe due to powerful icelandic/Greenland MPHs 1025 hPa penetrating deep southward and advecting large amounts of moist air over the UK on their eastern side. France was divided in two with the SE facing a drought while the NW and North was being washed in rain.
@Patrick Hrushowy:
Yes. We have swings of wet / dry of sometimes extreme range.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/california-extreme-super-flood/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/drought-is-not-a-global-warming-sign/
@Ian W:
Yes! The turn from hotter to colder will be marked by increased evaporation / condensation. That is the mechanism by which heat is transported out / off planet.
@grumpyoldmanuk:
Precipitation is the working fluid of major heat transport on the planet. We get more when a hot / cold turn happens. We get less when a cold / hot turn happens.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/spherical-heat-pipe-earth/
@All:
Somewhere back about 1960 ( I was a wee lad then, so don’t remember it exactly) my Mum went back to England for the first time in 18 years. She complained that even in July and August it was still raining darned near constantly…. just as it had in her youth…
It’s the hot wave lack of rain that was unusual (but even then, likely not all that unusual in a very long time history… I’d wager there were other dry drought decades as well..)
England? The weather changes, it’s often wet. Carry an umbrella.
The idiocy of the urban sprawl throughout the UK over the past 50 years, but particularly in the south of England where I originated, has been twofold: 1. an awful lot of residential suburbia has been built on the valley floors and floodplains of all the major drainage systems, and 2. criminally, it has all been built on the best arable land. Around every village there is now an endless sprawl of tiled roofs, tarmac and concrete, where there used to be fields and crops, and every small stream and waterway now runs in a buried concrete culvert.
The original settlements were built on well-drained, higher ground, usually stony or gravelly valley sides and spurs, often on epiglacial debris, whilst the arable fields and pastures were developed on the low-lying, more level, well watered, richer alluvial soils. This was partly for defensive purposes, but also very much to avoid the flooding, rising damp, and the bone-chilling mists and fogs of English winters, to which the low-lying areas are prone.
But then along came post-war sixties and seventies suburbia, the eighties yuppie overgrowth around every country village within 100km of London, and then more of same again with the proprty boom of the 1990s and 2000s, and most of this was built on the temptingly flat, impermeable, clay-covered, alluvial valley floors and low-lying meadows where for some strange reason nobody had ever thought of building before.
Which was OK as long as the weather stayed relatively dry, as it seems to have done in the 60s and 70s, and which is OK as long as you are happy to air-freight your supermarket beans in from Africa and buy your bacon from a pig factory in Denmark. But if you ever return to the rainfall conditions that laid down (and annually renewed) the alluvium on those valley floors, or if you suddenly decide that you’d rather not import your food from overseas, you’ve got a bit of a problem.
And when it comes to urban development in drainage systems, the urban sprawl of greater London is probably one of the worst examples. The entire lower Thames Valley is now completely built over, with all of that river’s numerous tributaries buried in culverts or confined to narrow, congested channelways, bridged at every street and filled with rubbish. You only have to compare a 1970s copy of the London A to Z with the modern version to see what has been done.
So a significant increase in rainfall in the Thames catchment would be a disaster. It would turn the City into a sort of Jakarta, where every time it pours with rain ten million people find themselves paddling about in each others’ sewage, (most inconveniently to me: all the way down Jalan Thamrin, the main street of the CBD, or knee deep across the Foyer of the once-popular Garden Hotel, where visiting businessmen removed their suit trousers, shoes and socks after heavy rain, in order to wade from the staircase, out of reception, and off down the driveway, up onto the levee bank at Jalan Kemang Raya, passing through the brown flood waters of the Kemang River and the flotsam and shitsam of disintegrating slum-dwellings en route).
Its me AGAIN! This may bore your socks off, but Oz posters – and those others still awake – should go to JoNova’s blog for a much more erudite and comprehensive piece about ‘records’ in Australia. Cheers from still soggy Sydney.
“England? The weather changes, it’s often wet. Carry an umbrella.”
Funny, isn’t it? When Britons were whining about the floods in recent years, I just thought back to spring-time car rides as a kid with my parents, where fields were usually flooded near the river.
Of course in those days they were fields because no-one was stupid enough to build on them. Now they’re exclusive riverside executive housing developments and everyone is shocked that they flood.
Steve B says:
January 27, 2013 at 2:21 pm
pat says:
January 27, 2013 at 1:26 pm
“. . . but until now has mainly been thought to affect only city dwellers, especially in summer heatwaves.”
What a load of carp! This idea was studied in the 1950s, published, and republished in a large book of readings about urban geography. One of the editors of the book was Chauncy D. Harris (1914 – 2003) and he may have been the author of the paper I remember. I think the study city was Gary, Indiana.
Here is a more recent study:
http://www.allgov.com/news/unusual-news/in-a-thunderstorm-its-dangerous-to-live-downwind-from-a-city?news=842752
So this new study, useful, perhaps. New, no.
The weather in England at the moment could be described as a monsoon if the temperature was 30c warmer. Apart from that it is definitely a monsoon. If evolution worked quickly the English would have by now developed web feet and water proof skin like frogs.
Philip Bradley says:
January 27, 2013 at 12:54 pm
It seems from the summary an excellent piece of work, but prediction based on perceived past patterns without understanding the underlying causes isn’t science.
=============
We make predictions about gravity all the time. Yet we don’t understand the cause. We predict the tides based on past patterns, not on first principles for a similar reason.
In fact, few problems in the physical world can be solved by “knowing the cause” due to complexity. We know that the ice ages repeat approximately every 100 thousand years, so we predict another will follow about 100 thousand years after the last. Yet is is poorly understood from first principles why the cycle is 100 thousand years.
Philip Bradley says:
January 27, 2013 at 3:57 pm
A prediction is only a scientific prediction when it derives from a theory that specifies cause. If you don’t know what causes a pattern, you can’t say whether that pattern will continue or not.
============
You can never know the cause. Only what you believe to be the cause. Until the cause for the cause is discovered, in which case the original cause is no longer the cause. It becomes simply an intermediate effect.
In the NW USA it is well understood that the PDO has a direct effect on the jet stream as well as Salmon runs being large in the NW or in Alaska. They build right up to the 100 year flood plain high water mark along the Columbia River not thinking of the 500 year one. In other areas they are even less smart.
Grumpyoldmanuk:
WHat Mike Bromley meant by studying geomorphology is that the word floodplain (geomorphological term for low area around a river) correctly implies it is liable to flood. So dont build there.
This is also part of Mayor Bloomberg’s problem in New York insofar areas previously damaged by hurricanes in the fifties were subsequently built upon. In this case the key phrase is washover fan. When tides are high or there is a storm surge, waves wash over the beach into a lagoonal area behind creating washover fans (splays of sand). Such features indicate that areas behind beaches get flooded periodically.
DaveG has an interesting point about historical sealevels at Harlech Castle.
Thanks to you and others who have fed me information .
This same idea was put forwards in 2002 but I cannot remember just who it was and like most non AGW articles has totally disappeared from the web world. The original article was based round the full data set for rainfall that appeared recently in a few sites to counter the met office claim that the rainfall this year was a record breaking one. Sadly the climate science profession took any attempts as pattern recognition as the rambling of spanner merchants once they found out the methods originated in engineering not science or pure mathematics academia.
@ur momisugly Keith
“Dave G has an interesting point about historical sea levels at Harlech Castle..”
The same historical sea level fall is evident along much of the Sussex coast: eg. at the South Downs river gap towns of Arundel and Bramber, which were originally Roman and Saxon seaports, but now lie many miles inland, as do the former seaports of Winchelsea and Rye (two of the five historical ‘Cinque Ports’), further east along the Kent coast.
I have never been sure whether this was a result of the stripping of forest from the Sussex Weald, with the eroded soils then building out delta’s and coastal plains from what had previously been stable river estuaries, or due to sea level falls that accompanied post-Roman and post-mediaeval climatic cooling/polar ice cap growth, or due to the fact that, as my high school geology master believed it to be back in 1972, the wealden dome as the final outlying fold of the Alpine Foreland, was still being pushed up as southern Europe nudged its way gently northwards.
I forgot to add that i like wandering around historic towns now I have retired and am struck by the number that have plaques showing peak flooding dated around 1600 to 1650 including Abingdon for example. They are nearly all a good three feet above the current so called records.
Latitude says:
January 27, 2013 at 2:30 pm
This has made it easier to go on building on floodplains
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swampland in Florida
A great deal of the “swampland” in Florida is more than 100 feet above sea level. It drains VERY quickly when saturated. You never hear of the swamp itself flooding, what you hear about is the “reclaimed” communities in the FLOOD PLAINS being flooded.
Don’t take this wrong, the swamp does rise in level till the gators are sunning by the porch swing, but even during the worst hurricanes I’ve never seen STANDING floods like what happens in England and the flood plains.
Its why there isn’t actually any “swampland” in Florida. We have pockets of mangrove style land in the lowlands that remains wet most the year but the subsoil and rock strata are great at drainage. The southern third is the Everglades, which is a river sixty miles wide… lots of fast drainage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everglades
England and Wales precipitation since 1776:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/pHadEWP_monthly_qc_mean1a.png
Precipitation variates in waves, and one is due.
You couldn’t make it up if you tried, could you? As I have said before, deja vu, in the mid to late 20th century here in the UK,, after many decades of flooding from un-managed rivers, streams, etc, poor surface water catchment area management, we finally got our heads & fingers out of our arses & realised that we need to manage rivers properly & efficiently, preserve flood plains, manage our surface water run-off catchment areas, to prevent the kinds of flooding that occurred in the past to reduce costs to business & homes up & down the land. It lasted a relatively short period of around 35 years, then well intentioned privatisation took place with limited provisos in place making the water suppliers legally obliged to supply clean water to homes & businesses, the State sector nolonger obliged to carry out adequate flood prevention assessments & defence construction, at the same time as the PDERU/EUSSR started sucking on the teet of Greenalism in which we are to be forced to use less water & have less storage capacity (against all sensible & logical & rational engineering advice), & suffer the consequences ot easily preventable flooding as punishment for living & trying to manage Gaia’s resources, which whilst not infinite, are plentiful for one & all!!! Thanks Greens, thanks Redwar, thanks FoE, thanks WWF, thanks Sir Jonathan (I am all right Jack cos I is rich) Porritt, thanks Big Al (cos I is even richer) Gore, thanks Sir David (I am ok cos I is a deity), Attenborough, thanks as bunch, NOT! When will we get back to listening to real scientists & engineers, before the Sh1T really does starting hitting the fan?
Warmists have inoculated themselves against falsification. No matter what, they have a computer simulation that shows that outcome. If UK gets more drought in the future, they pull out a paper like this one to show it was predicted. If it gets wetter, hey, no problemo there is this one. If winters get warmer there is this one. If winters get colder there is this one…….and so on.
I was pondering the decrease in Arctic sea ice in 2007 and 2012, in particular I was wondering whether we would expect to see greatly increased evaporation of Arctic sea water into the atmosphere as a consequence of the reduced ice cover and the increased absorption of incoming sunlight. If this happens, as seems likely, there would be a strong cooling effect on the surface layers of the Arctic combined with increased moisture in the Northern hemisphere generally, perhaps leading to increased precipitation elsewhere. I Googled a bit but couldn’t find any references on the role of evaporative cooling on the Arctic – any ideas?
Larry Kirk says:
January 27, 2013 at 6:51 pm
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Interesting, especially the observation of the loss of arable land which is a point often over looked entirely.
I was one of those who moved to London in the 1980s.
My dad, who had much experience in water management (being head of water supply for one of the large municipal boroughs in the Midlands and previously having been lead engineer on one of the dam projects built in north India/Pakistan after the war in and around indenpendence and partition) , repeatedly told me not to buy a house ‘there’ or ‘there’ whenever I showed him details of new build houses/developments in and around the subburbs of London, advising me that the houses should never have been built there as there will inevitably be future flooding.
My dad was always severely critical of the claims that water shortages in the South was due to climate change and drier conditions, holding instead the veiw that it was due to poor water management and in particular the large increase in population (largely driven through immagration but also migrating from the north to the south) and the failure to build any new reservoirs in the South East to meet the increased demand.
For far too long, climate change has been used as an excuse to cover up poor management of natural resources.
The Met Office and UK Government having, for as long as I can remember, claimed that it is becoming drier due to climate change and therefore we can expect more droughts and hose pipe bans, whereas in practice there has been no statistical significant alteration in the amount of UK rainfall these past 30 or so years; official figures suggest that there has been a very slight increase (but whether that is above margin of error, is anyone’s guess, so too whether a period of 30 or so years is too short a base period against which to extract a base average). It is only now in the past year or 18 months that one is beginning to hear official sources suggesting that cliamate change will lead to wetter conditions in the UK.
The UK is a small island surrounded by water. No matter from which direction the wind blows, the air will always be moist. The topography does not change, eventually warm moist air meets mountains and rises, cools and precipitates. There has in the past and there always will be copious amounts of rainfall in Wales, North West England (the Lake District), Scottish Highlands etc. It is just a question of proper management of this resource. Inevitably there will be some outlier years but due to its geography and the the fact that ocean temperatures are slow to change, it is likely that rainfall (just like CET temperature) will remain fairly stable over the long term (by which I mean averages measured in more than 100 year periods).
I now live in Southern Spain. You see many large bridges built over dried up river plains. Inevitably you question why there are such huge bridges when you cannot even see a trickle of a river. It can be very dry; last year between January and October there may have been only about 6 or so rainy days. But every now and again there can be very heavy rainfall (varies from year to year) and these dried up river plains suddenly become awash with water and it all makes sense.
The UK is now beginning to pay a heavy price for its imprudence in building in flood plains. Indeed, the flood defences in some areas are causing increased flooding to occur in other not so well defended areas which is distorting perception as to the root of the problem. There is a knock on effect in the flood defences that have been adopted and this partly explains why some areas that have not experienced flooding in 60 or 100 or so years, are now experiencing flooding (ie., it is due to other developments in flood plain areas which other developments have flood defences preventing flooding from occuring in the natural and past flood plain area, instead pushing water to areas which have not previously been flood plains). In some areas, the cost of home insurance is prohibitive, There is now a debate whether people who do not live in flood affected areas should subsidise the cost of insurance for those that do since for many home insurance is unaffordable.
Head really ought to roll with respect to Town Planning and water management, but unfortunately there is no accountability in public office.
Larry Kirk says:
January 27, 2013 at 11:31 pm
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Along the Thames (eg The Tower of London and many of the docks) there is much evidence that in the 16th to 18th century sea water level (the Thames is tidal) was higher than today.
Likewise, the Med is full of examples of higher sea water levels in the not so long ago past. Indeed, there are many notable Greek ports that were ports at the height of the Greek civilisation/Minoan period, which are now far inland and far away from the sea.
Some of this may be due in part to isostatic rebound after the ice age but not all.
Everybody was shown what’s taking place back here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5pNePq9g4g
It was carried out from the same place they carried out this Jet-Stream experiment http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/31/64/49/PDF/angeo-16-1212-1998.pdf This was back in the early 90’s It states how the Jet-Stream reacted when the heater was turned on. They even created a reversal and the Jet-Stream was moved south over Britian. So why aren’t we asking more questions regarding Weather Modification And for those that question why they would use this just think how much money is locked up by the insurance industry world wide and with all the money problems governments are having creating weather disasters is a great way to inject cash back into the system through claims A stelthy process used as a bailout package. Australia spent 10 million on 2013 weather modification program http://www.colinandrews.net/Australian-Weather-Control-Radar-Images-Colin_Andrews.html (watch the video) and Queensland and N.S.W just got bashed by a cyclone that started in the gulf and moved down the entire east coast with major flooding all the way down and up tp 500 k’s inland. Just about every river system has broken it’s banks When you look at the BOM weather map you see how the cyclone tracked just inland along the coast When a cyclone crosses land the presure usualy rises not this one every time it tried to rise it went straight back down not once but many times http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/charts/synoptic_col.shtml Push the start button and watch. Are we just going to sit back and not question this.
Here in Wales living next to another Edwardian Castle, It seems as if has been raining for most of the time for 3 years now. It is a climate change aspect that was not predicted until after it had occurred. One of the impacts of this rain is that we have had to modify what food crops we grow. We used to be able to grow crops like sweetcorn, french beans and even tomatoes outside in sheltered areas. This is no longer possible without the use of polytunnels. We now grow more traditional veg which still seem to do well, Cabbages, Parsnips, sprouts and leeks etc. It’s an aspect of what we all may need to do in the longer term. For whatever the reason, the fact remains that climate always changes and is changing rather more rapidly of late than it has done for some time. While this is not the end of the world, we need to recognise it’s impacts and adapt to meet changing needs.
UK local authorities must bear a large part of the blame for the increase in flood damage. a developer applies to build on a flood plain (spot the clues in the description) . Planning gets approved because..? Nice new Council Tax income stream (excuse the pun)…
Oh – and new developments must include a proportion of ‘affordable housing’ which is code for ‘cheap’ and therefore just built at ground level on a concrete slab….