For a number of years now AMOUK reports have been turning up along with the usual other weather observations in SYNOPSYNOPSYNOP (surface synoptic observations) is a numerical code (called FM-12 by WMO) used for reporting weather observations made by manned and automated weather stations. SYNOP reports are typically mad hourly and consist of groups of numbers (and slashes where data is not available) describing general weather information, such as the temperature, barometric pressure and visibility at a weather station. format. I can only guess they are some kind of mobile AWSAWSAutomatic Weather Station. Most of them produce excellent hourly SYNOP reports. But what are they and to whom do they belong? Does anyone have any idea what AMOUK observations are, and why they are now appearing on land as well as the sea around the UKUKThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.? Answers on a postcard please to the usual address. 😉
AMOUK35 to the SE of Inverness from November 2023Here are 33 of them from the 09 UTCUTCCoordinated Universal Time or UTC is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about 1 second of mean solar time (such as UT1) at 0° longitude (at the IERS Reference Meridian as the currently used prime meridian) and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. It is effectively a successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). on the 7th of April.
I never noticed this rare ‘Heat Burst’ that occurred at Donna Nook in NENENorth East Lincolnshire on the 25th of July 2019. I still have the hourly SYNOPs from the AWSAWSAutomatic Weather Station at Donna Nook so I can construct a crude thermograph for that evening. As you can see the temperature surged to 32.2°C a rise of 10.2°C between 1950 UTCUTCCoordinated Universal Time or UTC is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about 1 second of mean solar time (such as UT1) at 0° longitude (at the IERS Reference Meridian as the currently used prime meridian) and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. It is effectively a successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). and 2050 UTC, at the same time dewpoints fell from 18.3°C to 12.6°C, with the relative humidity falling to just 30%. This was called by a heat burst, the theory behind heat bursts are that they’re the result of a downdraught of very warm and dry air associated with a decaying thunderstorm. Worldwide they are very elusive, and in the UKUKThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. extremely very rare mesoscale event indeed. You can read more about them on Wikipedia. I came across the event after reading about it the book “Very British Weather” from the Met OfficeUKMOThe Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, who says I never give them credit?
I did a search on Twitter and found that the Met Office did tweet about the heat burst the next day and included their own more detailed thermograph.
Now here’s a mystery, after downloading the archived SFERICs from BlitzortungBlitzortungBlitzortung.org is a lightning detection network for locating electromagnetic discharges in the atmosphere (lightning discharges) with very low frequency receivers based on the time of arrival (TOA) and time of group arrival (TOGA) method. for that day, I found there weren’t any! So what’s going on? Did a visiting holiday maker wild camping on the beach start a barbecue under the Stevenson screen just after 9pm? No, on running another query on Blitzortung I find there wasn’t a single SFERIC detected on the whole planet for that particular day! “Vorsprung Durch Technik” as they say in Germany.
No investigation would be complete without a plotted SYNOPSYNOPSYNOP (surface synoptic observations) is a numerical code (called FM-12 by WMO) used for reporting weather observations made by manned and automated weather stations. SYNOP reports are typically mad hourly and consist of groups of numbers (and slashes where data is not available) describing general weather information, such as the temperature, barometric pressure and visibility at a weather station. chart for the hour in question. As you can see despite what Blitzortung believes there were some heat thunderstorms around, and look to have been medium level affairs, after all this was the day that Cambridge set a new UK record for the warmest July day of 38.1°C.
One final curiosity about this heat burst concerns an AMOUK ship that turn up very regularly in the UK SYNOP reports. I say ship, but because occasionally they do report on land 😲. I still don’t know what they are or who they belong to, I guess they are some sort of mobile AWS which usually turn out very accurate observation for extended periods. I could write software to track them, but that’s another story. The reason I mention them here is that AMOUKo5 reported an even higher temperature at sea of 33.1°C with a dewpoint of 9.6°C, just offshore (53.5N 0.2E) of Donna Nook at 21 UTC. Notice too that the old Humber light vessel (03380) reported a temperature of 29.0°C at that time as well.
I saw someone mention this on Twitter/X yesterday, so I thought that I’d take a closer look. A comparison between the maximum temperatures on [A] Easter Day 2024 and [B] Christmas Day 2023. As you can see it was colder on Easter Day in the southeast compared to Christmas Day, but much warmer in Scotland on Easter Day that it was on Christmas day. Not a lot of people know that. 😉
The exceptional heatwave across Belarus, Ukraine & E Russia continued this lunchtime, with anomalies as high as +19°C, the highest I’ve seen. Juxtaposed with the very cold air across Finland, Sweden and northern Norway.
The curious thing in March was that although Atlantic SSTSSTSea Surface Temperatures were at record high levels, the air above it (in the central Atlantic at least) was 2 degrees colder than average.
Look no further for a reason for all the depressing cloudy, mild & wet weather in March 2024. The anomalous Icelandic low that’s a resident feature of anomaly charts in any month of the year, decided to take a holiday.
Here’s a graph of the latest 12 month moving averages of estimated global temperature anomalies since 1994 from seven Met services around the world. All seven series show the 12 month average for February at all time record levels, as usual the JMAJMAThe Japan Meteorological Agency (気象庁, Kishō-chō), abbreviated JMA, is an agency of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. and CRUTEM5 data is running one month behind the rest. The Era5ERAERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). series from Copernicus continues to lead the way as far as the rate of warming is concerned, with a linear trend over the last 30 years of +0.238°C per decade. The overlaid blue and pink bands are La NinaLa NiñaLa Niña is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Niño, as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation climate pattern. The name La Niña originates from Spanish for "the girl", by analogy to El Niño, meaning "the boy". In the past, it was also called an anti-El Niño[1] and El Viejo, meaning "the old man." and El NinoEl NiñoEl Niño 'The Boy' is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific events.
For people who can’t get their heads around anomalies I’ve made a slight variation on just a simple bar chart of anomalies. The twist is that it now displays both daily temperatures and anomalies, temperatures on the left Y axis and anomalies on the right Y axis. My BBCBBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the national broadcaster of the United Kingdom, based at Broadcasting House in London. It is the world's oldest national broadcaster, and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, employing over 22,000 staff in total, of whom approximately 19,000 are in public-sector broadcasting.NWPNWPNumerical weather prediction uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. application downloads forecast data the BBC use in their own weather app, and parses the HTML and extracts hourly and daily forecast values for each site. I’ve kept the same scale for the extremes in each charts Y axis for each site I display in the grid to aid comparison. So you can now quickly see at a glance the forecast temperature and how it compares with the LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO..
I have added some extra functionality to my ERA5ERAERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). application so that I can download and access latest the ERAERAERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). 5 daily SSTSSTSea Surface Temperatures anomalies, as well as the daily 2m temperature data. SST data starts in 1979 but there’s enough of it to draw a scatter graph and see what correlation there exists between the two if you couldn’t already guess that there would be anything other than a very strong one. As you can see from the chart above my guess was correct 😜. I’ve coloured the series red for all dates after the 1 January 2023 to highlight the surge in SST in the last year or so. I will calculate and add the correlation coefficient at a later date, or as the say in this part of the world I’ll do that directly.
I’ve added a chart of 7 and a 365 day moving averages to view the sudden explosive rise in SST over the last 12 months. I would say that most charts I see bandied about regarding this rise in SST use data that is not strictly “global”, extending as the ER5 data does from 60N to 60S. I would have thought that it might be better if the global value would be more accurate if it were calculated for all oceans, regardless of sea ice. It might not be particularly scientific but why couldn’t they use a value of zero for any grid point that had sea ice present?
Now that the Copernicus program has made real-time daily global temperature data available, as well as producing daily graphs I can now also produce monthly, seasonal and annual charts by summing up the daily data. The chart above is of mean February temperatures from 1940 to 2024. The chart below is of February anomalies using the 1851-1900 baseline offset for the pre-industrial era, and shows that as well as being the warmest February on record, it also had a mean anomaly of 1.77°C above that baseline.
I estimate the first day of spring in Central England this year occurred on the 8th of February, that’s 42 days earlier than the accepted date for Spring of around March 21st depending on the exact date and time of the vernal equinox. That made it the joint seventh earliest spring in the CETCETCentral England Temperature record back to 1772. I use the average number of degree days from 1773 to 1802 to calculate a baseline to estimate the date with. Not a brilliant method. let me know if you can think of a better one. The last late spring, and the only one to occur in this century was in 2010. The linear trend reveals that springs are now arriving 24 days earlier than they did in 1772. Apologies for the late arrival of this story 😉
I couldn’t quite believe the new research by Alexandra Jahn, of the University of Colorado that claims that the Arctic could be free of sea ice by the end of this decade 😮. In her research for free of ice read 386,000 square miles, or a million square kilometres, which isn’t exactly what I would describe as “free of sea ice”. I make the date to true zero to be the 7th of June 2071 by extrapolating a simple linear trend for the last 30 years of minima. Even then the Arctic would never be truly free of sea ice I suspect. The date to the one million square kilometres mentioned in the report at the same rate would be around the summer of 2058, which looks far more realistic than the end of this decade. 😉
I was researching Ben Wyvis in Wikipedia for an article that I was writing and came across this incredible picture looking east from Loch Glascarnoch towards Ben Wyvis, with what looks like a shallow layer of fog covering both the loch, the A835 to its south, and the glen beyond. I would guess the picture was possibly taken on high ground to the south of the loch, and judging by the direction of the shadows on the fog layer at around lunchtime.
The credits show that the picture was taken by D.J.MacPherson with a creation date of 2009-01-02. At first I thought that there had been some kind of trickery involved with its production, but when I checked the weather chart for midday on the second of January 2009 and found it had been a frosty, clear anticyclonic day in the northwest Highlands with fog reported at Aviemore and Kinloss which seemed to fit. The only odd thing is that there’s no proper snow cover on Ben Wyvis.
What clinched it was when I checked the NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.EOSDISEOSDISThe Earth Observing System Data and Information System is a key core capability in NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program. Designed and maintained by Raytheon Intelligence & Space, it is a comprehensive data and information system designed to perform a wide variety of functions in support of a heterogeneous national and international user community. Worldview visible satellite image for that day.
So my bit of amateur “meteorological sleuthing” paid off 😉
2024 saw an exceptionally mild February across much of Europe, the warmth centred across the eastern Alps (+7°C). It was a little colder than average across to the northwest of Iceland (-2°C), which help produce a tight SE-NW temperature gradient across the IONAIONAIslands Of North Atlantic.
Yes I know there's an island called Iona, but this is so I don't have to use the term 'British Isles' when referring to the whole of Ireland and the UK. which and was evident for much of the month. It wasn’t just Europe that was very mild, much of North America, away from the extreme west, was also anomalously warm (+6°C) during February.
February 2024 was a rather cyclonic month and a zonal westerly flow for much of the time. Despite this the gale index remained fairly subdued for most of it.
February 2024 was a cyclonic month across the IONAIONAIslands Of North Atlantic.
Yes I know there's an island called Iona, but this is so I don't have to use the term 'British Isles' when referring to the whole of Ireland and the UK., with a strong broad W’SW gradient that stretched from central Atlantic into northeast Russia. The Icelandic low was elongated further east into the northern Norwegian sea (-9 hPahPaA Hectopascal is the SI unit of pressure and identical to the Millibar), and the Azores high displaced to the southeast towards the Canaries (+4 hPa). Mean MSLPMSLPMean sea level pressure is the pressure at sea level, or, when measured at a given elevation on land, the station pressure reduced to sea level assuming an isothermal layer at the station temperature. was below normal across the whole of IONA by as much as -9 hPA in northern Scotland.
Basically a wet and very mild February across the south and southeast of England, but colder and drier further north and west. Dull across England and Wales but brighter further north and east further north and west particularly the northeast of Scotland.
There’s been a steady decline in the number of air frosts occuring in Winter [DJFDJFMeteorological Winter comprising the months of December, January & February] across the UKUKThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. since 1960. In the southeast of England the decline in the last 64 years has been at the rate of 1.8 days per decade or 11.3 days. In the north of Scotland the decline has been somewhat slower at the rate of 1.4 days per decade or 8.6 days overall.
The climate record for air frosts only extends back to 1960 in the gridded form. I’m quite sure it could easily be extended back to at least 1884 by the UKMOUKMOThe Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, but they obviously don’t seem to find the time or enthusiasm to get around to it. You would think that the work would be trivial, since they must already have gridded daily night time minimum data, perhaps they’re hoping for a crowd sourced group of volunteers to step in and do it for them.
The mean global temperature for February 2024 was pipped into second place by February 2016. This brings to an end the incredible eight month consecutive run of record high mean temperatures. The estimates are from my DIY series that I calculate from 6 hourly NCEPNCEPThe United States National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) delivers national and global weather, water, climate and space weather guidance, forecasts, warnings and analyses to its Partners and External User Communities. gridded data. The daily means since the 12th of February took a bit of a nose dive (see image below) and allowed 2016 with a mean of 9.36°C to just nip ahead of 2024 with 9.34°C. I think my maverick calculations are unlikely to be duplicated when Copernicus publish their result in the coming week, but it will be a close run thing.
Now that I finally have some quality real-time global temperature data to work with, courtesy of the ECMWFECMWFThe European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by most of the nations of Europe. It is based at three sites: Shinfield Park, Reading, United Kingdom; Bologna, Italy; and Bonn, Germany. It operates one of the largest supercomputer complexes in Europe and the world's largest archive of numerical weather prediction data., I thought that I would construct a couple of graphs you wouldn’t find in their Climate Pulse web application. The first graph that occurred to me to construct was one that plotted daily anomalies using the 1850-1900 LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. as a baseline for the pre-industrial era, and overlay a 365 day moving average on it. I then overlay a 30 year linear trend over that and extrapolate a linear trend until it meets the y axis at 1.5°C. This gives a date of the 15th April 2031 when 1.5°C is reached. The IPCCIPCCThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations responsible for advancing knowledge on human-induced climate change.
It was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, and later endorsed by United Nations General Assembly. in contrast estimate global temperatures will exceed 1.5°C around 2040. This is what they say In their report:-
Human-induced warming has already reached about 1°C above pre-industrial levels at the time of writing of this Special Report. By the decade 2006–2015, human activity had warmed the world by 0.87°C (±0.12°C) compared to pre-industrial times (1850–1900). If the current warming rate continues, the world would reach human-induced global warming of 1.5°C around 2040.
IPCC Report
To explore the difference I have added another viewer to my application that displays a rolling 10 year mean anomaly, and then do the same as I did in the first graph, that is add a 30 year linear tend and then extrapolate it forward. This gives a date of the 8th February 2040 when 1.5°C is realised and in line with the IPCC estimate.
In light of the significant increases in SSTSSTSea Surface Temperatures in all the world’s oceans in the last year, and the resulting surge in global temperatures it may be that 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels will occur much earlier than the IPCC expected last year. As you can see using the latest global data for the 29th of February 2024 using a linear trend on a 365 day moving average 1.5°C will be reached on the 15th of April 2031, almost seven years earlier than 2040. I think using a 365 day average is much more sensitive and accurate than one based on a longer 10 year rolling average. Thanks to El NinoEl NiñoEl Niño 'The Boy' is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific and the surge in SST over the last 12 months, daily global temperatures have already been above the 1.5°C threshold for much of that time. A La NinaLa NiñaLa Niña is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Niño, as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation climate pattern. The name La Niña originates from Spanish for "the girl", by analogy to El Niño, meaning "the boy". In the past, it was also called an anti-El Niño[1] and El Viejo, meaning "the old man." event is expected later this year, this should help reduce global SST and air temperatures a little you would think, but even if and when this happens global temperatures still won’t be too far off the 1.5°C mark.
The 365 day UKPUKPUKP is a gridded datasets of UK regional precipitation. total precipitation for Central England is still at record levels (149.9% of the LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.) at the end of February 2024, as are the totals in the Northwest, Northeast & Southeast regions of England. Northern Scotland is the driest region and continues to run close to average as it’s done for the last year or more. We passed Loch Glascarnoch earlier this week on our way to Ullapool and I have never seen it as full as it is.
One of the very first articles that I read in the Weather Magazine as a young outstation assistant was entitled “A simple summer index with an illustration for summer 1971” by R. Murray which was published in April 1972. Now over forty years later, as a retired programmer with the Met OfficeUKMOThe Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, I have decided to revisit the summer index and update his record. I have a number of advantages that Murray could only dream of, and they are a powerful personal computer, up to date freely accessible climate data, and of course the Internet to access that data from. The Met Office provide the data in the form of monthly regional and national gridded climate data back to 1910. This provides you with all the temperature, rainfall and sunshine that you require to calculate a summer index, and the advantage of this data is that you can generate a summer index not only for the UKUKThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland., but for England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland as well as any of the other twelve other regional areas. All that was required to access the latest climate data from the Met Office website was internet access. The program converted the text files I downloaded into a data structure to hold each month’s mean temperature, total rainfall and sunshine values necessary to compute each year’s summer index. The slightly tricky bit was to calculate the quintiles of each month’s mean maximum temperature, and the terciles of the total sunshine and rainfall that the formula requires.
The summer index [SISISummer Index]
SI = 3T + 5S – 5R – 9m
where:-
m = number of months
T = sum over m months of quintiles of monthly mean temperature
S = sum over m months of terciles of monthly sunshine
R = sum over m months of terciles of monthly rainfall
Quintiles and terciles are statistical terms used with any series of data arranged in order of magnitude. Rainfall is conventionally divided into three equal classes; the driest third being tercile 1, and the wettest tercile 3. With temperature the data is divided into five equal classes; quintile 1 refers to the coldest and quintile 5 to the warmest. There is a drawback in using the climate data series from the Met Office, although the temperature and rainfall series extend back to 1910, the sunshine series is only available from 1929, so I was unable to reach back quite to 1881 as Murray did originally. Using Murray’s formula the absolute best ‘meteorological’ summer can score a maximum SI of 48, and the absolute worst a SI of -48.
A simple summer index
The summer index was first proposed by Davis in 1968, its beauty lies in its simplicity, but a good summer can be ruined by a wet last week in Autumn, so the index is far from perfect. You could dream up a summer index that looked more closely at daily values of temperature, rainfall and sunshine, but at the moment the Met Office do not make daily regional climate data available, so for now monthly data will have to suffice. How do you define what constitutes a ‘good’ summer? It is very subjective, and as we grow older, it may have less to do with weather, and more to do with other things that are going on in our lives. Keeping it strictly meteorological, and if you’re older than 70, you probably look back at the summer of 1959 as being the best, older than 50 and it’s highly likely that 1976 will be your perfect summer, younger still and it may well be the summer of 1995 or 2003. The worst summer in contrast is not so easy to quantify, and many people if asked will struggle to name the worst summer that they have experienced in their lifetime.
The ‘best’ summers
As you can see from the table of best summers (fig 1), 1976 tops the Summer index back to 1929 for the UK which probably comes as no great to surprise to many. In fact its score is the perfect maximum of 48.
Fig 1
The extended summer index
The beauty of the algorithm is that you can also calculate an extended Summer index (May through to September), which gives an entirely different slant on what was the best summer. The table below (fig 2) shows that 1959 has the highest extended summer index of 62 (out of a possible 80), and that 1976 is only eleventh in the rankings, with an index of 28. So why was the extended summer of 1976 so much worse? If you compare the various quintiles and terciles for 1976 and 1959, you will see that 1976 was in fact duller and wetter than 1959 in May and September so the extended index score was reduced.
Fig 2
Because the data is also split into regional as well as national values, it’s easy to compare what kind of summer other parts of the UK experienced. As you can see in the breakdown of the extended summer of 1959 (fig 3), the northeast of England and the Midlands score a very high 72, whilst somewhat lower down the rankings came the north and west of Scotland.
Fig 3
The ‘worst’ summer
The summer of 1954 has the lowest summer index -48 of all summers in the UK since 1929 (fig 4), you just can’t get a summer index lower than -48. 1954 was the very antithesis of 1976, it was not only wet, it was cold and dull. Even if you compare 1954 using the extended summer index, it’s still has the lowest index of -64 for the UK. Just to show you how poor that summer was, here are the headlines for each month of the extended summer of 1954 that I’ve copied from the Monthly Weather Report.
May 1954 mainly dull and wet, with frequent thunderstorms; large variations of temperature.
June 1954 mainly dull and cool; periods of rain, heavy at times.
July 1954 notably cool and dull; wet in some areas.
August 1954 cool and dull, mainly wet in England, Wales and southern Scotland.
September 1954 cool and unsettled; wet in most areas; sunny on the whole.
Fig 4
Graphical view
Finally, here is a graphical way of looking at the summer’s since 1929 as a whole by means of two scatter graphs. The first graph plots temperature against rainfall (fig 5), whilst the second graph plots temperature against sunshine (fig 6). They show at a glance just how each summer compares with each other, for instance although 1995 was very slightly drier than 1976, it was slightly less sunny and not as warm.
Fig 5Fig 6
Are summers getting any better?
The one remaining question is – are summers getting better? Well with the help of another chart (fig 8) I’ve plotted the summer index and overlaid it with a five-year centred moving average (dashed line with a yellow outline). I’ve also added a simple linear trend (dashed black line), although climatologically this may be frowned upon (because any trend certainly wouldn’t be linear), it does help to highlight the increase in summer index that there has been since 1929. So the short answer to that question is yes, the summer index has increased over the last 87 years, whether that equates to better summers, I will leave that for you to decide.
Fig 7
References
Davis, N. E.1968. An optimum summer index. Weather23: 305-317.
Murray, R.1972.A simple summer index with an illustration for summer 1971.Weather45:161-169.
Footnote
Many of my regular readers may remember that I wrote an article about the ‘Summer Index’ in July 2015. I fully intended to get a fuller version of it published in the Weather Magazine of the Royal Met Society. I lost heart in the end, I don’t think I write in the way that they like, and I’m not good at writing in any other way. I went to a bit of trouble in putting the article together, so instead of it just languishing in a folder named ‘Weather Magazine’ in my Google drive account, I thought that I’d re-publish it in my blog just for posterity. The other thing that I like about a blog is that you can always fix typo’s or mistakes which you can’t do in a printed magazine, hopefully there are not too many of those.
Winter 2023-24 in Central England was a mild affair with only two main cold spells to speak of. One in the first week of December to start, and another in the second and into the third week of January. I made the mean temperature 6.5°C which was +1.68°C above the 1991-2020 LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. making it the fourth mildest winter since 1659, behind the winters of 1868-69, 2015-16, and 1833-34. Despite this three new record low temperatures occurred, along with nine new record maxima and eight new record high minimum temperatures.
