Guest essay by Paul Homewood
For those of us living in the UK, the glorious summer has been much in the news. We seem to have spent half of it listening to the BBC telling us about temperature records that might be broken, and been bombarded with heatwave warnings from the NHS.
But how exceptional has it been? The Met Office have now published their figures, and the answer seems to be “not very”.
Temperatures
UK mean temperature was 15.16C, making it the 9th warmest summer on records going back to 1910.
Perhaps significantly though, maximum temperatures only ranked 11th. The 19.71C recorded this year was well down on the 1976 figure of 20.96C, which still remains by far the highest number on record. This certainly raises the question, just how much the UK temperature record is influenced by UHI, as the minimum temperature graph (and particularly the trend line) suggests.
Central England Temperature Series
As the map indicates, the largest anomalies were in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the smallest in the South East. The effect of this on the CET series is quite startling, as the summer only ranked 44th warmest, going back to 1659. There were many warmer years prior to 1900. Indeed, while the hottest summer was 1976, the next hottest was 1826!
5-Year averages remain close to the long term, (1660-2013), mean.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that the YTD CET is still running about 0.9C below the 1981-2010 mean, and the year as a whole is on target to be the second coldest since 1996.
Precipitation
Much of the summer has been dominated by high pressure systems, so it is no surprise that rainfall has been low. Nevertheless, it is only the 13th driest summer since 1910, and the trend in recent years remains one of wetter summers. Indeed, rainfall in recent summers has been at similar levels to the period of 1910-60, which preceded a much drier interlude culminating in 1995.
Meanwhile YTD rainfall totals are not remarkable.
All in all, I suppose you could say it has been just another British summer!
References
All data from the UK Met Office
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries
An unusually good summer in a somewhat less unusual colder year
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-Dmax.htm
Well here in Spain it was forecast to be the coldest summer for 200 years. Not having lived here for 200 years I cannot tell you if the predictions came true but it was the coldest summer here I can remember!
“…listening to the BBC telling us about (high) temperature records that might be broken, and… bombarded with heatwave warnings from the NHS.”
The Met Office, et al. should be bragging rather than complaining. Within a decade everyone will be longing for summers like this one. Here’s a quote we’ll see within 10 years:
According to Dr. (climastrologist, du jour), a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, “Within a few years children just aren’t going to know what summer is.”
And of course the only cure will be a massive tax.
MattN says:
September 9, 2013 at 4:02 am
“If you keep saying “BARBEQUE SUMMER!!” over and over every year, eventually you will be right…”
I hear London has a brand new communal BBQ apparatus called the Walkie Scorchie.
I had forecast a good summer for this year from 4 years back, and said that July in particular would be hot.
In a couple of years we will start to see the first rumblings of CO2 causing global cooling. A few voices at first, then a crescendo. A few below the fold articles in the NYT and away we go.
In the meantime, all the Europeans (including the UK) better be saving up for a very cold coming winter. Since we all know computer models are 95% accurate, all I see is blue on the prediction maps for Dec – Feb for that area of the world.
Glad you all had a pleasant summer. Payback is coming. Good luck.
Old’un says:
September 9, 2013 at 4:35 am
[…]April and May were cold and cheerless, and June wasn’t much better. The reality is that our collective memory of weather events is very short and this gives the alarmists fertile ground to propogate the myth that CAGW is spawning ‘extreme’ weather on a regular basis.
————————————————————————————————————————
Exactly.
If people have already forgotten, in September, how miserable the late spring / early summer was because of a couple of months of pleasant weather since then what chance is there of the doomsayers being challenged when they tell us that something is “the hottest / wettest / most windy in 100 years”?
People just accept that they must be right because they’re the record keepers.
It’s been a nice summer – a little “too hot, too quickly” at times, leaving little time to acclimatise before it cools again, but that’s what’s always happened in UK weather.
I was in Scotland about three weeks and it felt decidedly chilly. That didn’t stop people in Edinburgh dining out bare-armed in the evening air. Tough, tough, tough!
It’s global weirding. The averageness of the temperatures is unprecedented. It’s been the summeriest summer anyone alive can remember and it’s only going to get worse!
It looks like weather to me.
The map looks to be proving UHI to me.
A few of you will know I take an active part in unravelling Met Office matters.
The Met Office information shown is technically sloppy. Take the temperature map, notice the remarkably fine detail… odd how poor stations influence this where station change has to be taken into account. Quite a few of these have not been published as part of the UK surfacestations project. (creates too much noise where they are normally published).
Paul mentions “high pressure” which is fair enough since the Met Office “believe” that one. (Paul does good work, not a criticism). The problem is what is not explained by bald “pressure”.
The pressure is irrelevant, their words are a symptom of misunderstanding an artefact of their own understanding. There was frequent unusual air flow with east winds and little prevailing airflow from the Atlantic, typically a flow from the south-west. In essence continuing blocking conditions as bring cold winters and brought the cold late spring. [1]
Consider bookmarking the following resource
A few days ago I put together all the Eumetsat geostationary satellite European weather videos in a single list of links. The summer 2013 period is at the top as June, July and August videos.
This is a visual gold mine.
daedalearth.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/collated-eumetsat-european-monthly-weather-videos/
A minder… all that complexity in one small part of globe earth, one video is the time for one monthly dataset point. And we know much?
1. A useful concept is likely to be the late Marcel Leroux’s work and his concept the MPH and this cold polar air movement can be seen in the videos, although this is more commonly clear during the winter season. I now have copyright permission to use some images from elsewhere showing a good example of a recent MPH and that will be a blog article when I am clear to write it up. A change of behaviour seems to be the start of Autumn.
Leroux wrote about the traditional view of ridges of high pressure, persistent lows etc. and how these are explained by airflows from the Arctic and a consequence of averaging. Unfortunately his work is mostly paywalled or in very expensive books ($100+).
Was he correct? It is worth entertaining. We are only today starting to actually see how air moves, still limited by the small number of imaging satellites and at a limited range of wavelengths.
@R Babcock
…In a couple of years we will start to see the first rumblings of CO2 causing global cooling. A few voices at first, then a crescendo. A few below the fold articles in the NYT and away we go….
That’s true! I saw some CO2 in a lab once, and it was very cold. There was ice on the container it was kept in. It’s obvious that if you keep pumping that sort of thing out you will chill everything around in a large radius. The science is settled.
Can I have my Climate Professorship now?
richardscourtney: you should see my walnuts too…………
[but I didn’t grow any melons this year as I didn’t think they’d ripen.]
I live in East Anglia: we’ve had a very dry year with just two or three periods of rain for a couple of days, to keep our trees and gardens (and farmers) from keeling over. The grass has looked extremely parched for much of the summer and it was very hot for the last few weeks. Earlier in the summer we had a long cool spell (several weeks) with no rain, but very dull grey skies – this included all of June iirc.
Reports from round the country (and evidence from watching the racing on tv as I do daily) show that most of the rain this year – some of it very heavy – has been in the west of the country. This is usually the case, but it’s been much more noticeable this year.
As we have been saying for years, nothing remarkable is happening. The runaway greenhouse effect is nonsense. The tide towards reality and away from green advocacy has turned.
Return to your lives.
In October 2003, the U.S. Pentagon released a controversial report, “An abrupt climate change scenario and its implications for United States national security,” that explored how global warming could lead to rapid and catastrophic global cooling, and in 2010, it was being postulated that Global Warming was going to cause global cooling. All bases are covered: whatever – whatever! – happens, it is all the fault of Anthropogenic(-morphic?) Global Warming.
living in scotland and spending much time outside fishing it has certainly been a good summer,not as good as the summers i remember as a teenager in the eighties,but a good one.nicely interspersed with enough rain to keep the farmers happy once the temperature finally started rise in the spring.
one thing is for sure,every good summer i can remember has been followed by by a proper winter.
The Pompous Git @ur momisugly 1:49 am:
I hope your wife enjoyed her visit. However, I must take you to task if by ‘Priceless Ann’ you mean Princess Anne (NB Anne with an ‘e’). I lived in Gloucestershire for some years and she is very well thought of locally. She is involved in lots of charities and works very hard, so I don’t think much of your use of that derogatory term.
I normally enjoy your posts but not this one.
I’m loving the commentary from the UK posters a lot. The diversity in this forum never ceases to amaze and amuse me.
Needless to say the Met Office forecast “near to below average temperatures” in their 3-month outlook at the end of May.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/send-in-the-clowns/
Jimmy Haigh. says:
September 9, 2013 at 1:24 am
Is it only me? Or have the warm-mongers been really quiet for the last few months?
No it’s you Jimmy. They have been going mad trying to build up for the IPCC release.
I wish someone would go look at the weather stations at Heathrow and Northolt (both airports) as I was sick and tired of the Met/BBC telling me that record high temps were being recorded there during our miserably ordinary Summer this year.
The first half of the “summer” was cold, compared with the average, the second half warm.
And the trend? The warming is bigger than we thought!
</sarc>
“Much of the country is on a heatwave alert, at the moment – a Met Office Level 3 Watch is in force in the south-east of England”. So began an item on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 18th July.
There was an interview with Professor Virginia Murray, who is Head of Extreme Events and Health Protection, Public Health England, and also a Contributing Lead Author of the IPCC SREX report on Managing Extreme Events and Disasters. She warned: “For us, summer is wonderful, as you point out, but the real concern is we are not used to heat in this country. We are not, as you point out, aware of the risks.”
What advice to individuals would Public Health England give, during this Extreme Event? “The most important advice is to stay cool yourself, drink plenty of cool drinks, but look out for others. Take care of the most vulnerable, take care of those who are very young, the elderly, those with chronic illnesses who may be particularly vulnerable to the heat, and, really, to protect those as far as we can. And to make sure we reduce the health impacts on them, and the possible worrying risk of increased deaths”.
The BBC’s Justin Webb asked Prof. Murray how often the Heatwave Watch System is invoked. “It’s invoked every year, since we had the really worrying heatwave in 2003, which affected much of Europe”. And, apparently: “We went to a Level 3 last summer, between the Olympics and the Paralympics, for about 10 hours”.
I’m just so glad most of us survived this dreadful Extreme Heat Event, and can look forward to a nice cool and safe winter.