The mean temperature for February 2024 in Central England as far as I can make out was 7.77°C. That wasn’t just quite high enough to beat the mean of 7.9°C in 1779 into second place, but was still a very mild +2.8°C above the 1991-2020 LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. for the month.
February 2024 – second warmest since 1772 Read More »
Despite the launch of the excellent Climate Pulse web application by the ECMWFECMWF The 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., never daunted, I’ve now adjusted my own application global temperature program to download daily global data directly from their site as a CSVCSV A data file using Comma Separated Variable format. file, and you can see the results in the graph above. Although global temps are now lower than they were in early February, they are still well above the +1.5°C IPCCIPCC The 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. threshold. In fact they’ve been above +1.5°C for most of the last year, and on a number of days they’ve even exceeded +2°C.
So why do we hear so little news about it in the media?
Record daily global temperatures – Is no news good news? Read More »
Climate Pulse is a new interactive website that’s just been released by the ECMWF. It’s a wonderful way to visualise global air and sea temperature data in graphs and in a 3D Globe. I may be wrong but the graphs look like they use the plugin from Highcharts, the globe has limited functionality compared to the graphs but is still pretty good. Web applications as good as this are gradually putting me out of a job, and although they do allow you to download the daily data as a CSVCSV A data file using Comma Separated Variable format. file, I can only match the visualisation you get in a Windows application on a PC which is already out there on the web and available to all, and that can only be a good thing.
The 365 day UKPUKP UKP is a gridded datasets of UK regional precipitation. regional precipitation totals are running at record high levels at the moment. Never since the start of the gridded daily records in 1931 have 365 day totals been as high as they are on the 23 February 2024 for Central England, Eastern Scotland, Northern Ireland and England Wales. Anomalies for Central England for example are at 149.3% of the 1981-2010 LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.. Hopefully I’ve got all my maths and my coding right 😉
UKP – Running at record high levels Read More »
Nothing has really changed at the start of 2024, and the acceleration in global warming that we’ve seen since the start of 2023 continues apace in the latest 12 month moving average. The simple linear trend from 2020 to 2023 on the new NOAANOAA NOAA is an agency in the Department of Commerce that maps the oceans and conserves their living resources; predicts changes to the earth's environment; provides weather reports and forecasts floods and hurricanes and other natural disasters related to weather. version 6 series now stands at 0.23°C per decade.
Global Temperatures – January 2024 Read More »
Above is a map of accumulated rainfall on the 21 February from 0000 to 0900 UTCUTC Coordinated 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 estimated from weather radar. Is it evidence of rainfall bunching as mentioned in the recent Deep Dive given by Alex Deakin? Maybe. Here’s the link to the paper “Rainfall enhancement downwind of hills due to standing waves on the melting-level and the extreme rainfall of December 2015 in the Lake District of northwest England” (link).
Evidence of rainfall bunching? Read More »
I reworked an old application last week that I use to generate a simple six hourly North Atlantic Oscillation from NCEPNCEP The 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. reanalysis data that I download. It’s simple, nothing complicated using geopotential heights at 500 hPahPa A Hectopascal is the SI unit of pressure and identical to the Millibar or anything like that, just the pressure difference between 65N 25W and 37.5N 25W. A well as plotting the NAONAO The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is a weather phenomenon over the North Atlantic Ocean of fluctuations in the difference of atmospheric pressure at sea level (SLP) between the Icelandic Low and the Azores High. Through fluctuations in the strength of the Icelandic Low and the Azores High, it controls the strength and direction of westerly winds and location of storm tracks across the North Atlantic. I also add charts of the daily mean anomaly from the CETCET Central England Temperature series, along with the England Wales rainfall from the daily UKPUKP UKP is a gridded datasets of UK regional precipitation. series, both of which I download from the UKMOUKMO The 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. As you can see in winter at least there is a strong correlation between the NAO and CET & UKP. I’ll add more viewers to examine the correlation, so much to do, and so little time, as the Joker said.
North Atlantic Oscillation – A simple version Read More »
The daily Central England Temperature series is running a little hot at the moment. As of the 18th, this February is currently the warmest back to 1772 with an anomaly of +4.64°C, this meteorological winter [DJFDJF Meteorological Winter comprising the months of December, January & February 2023-24] is the 5th warmest to date with an anomaly of +2.61°C, and this year is the 9th warmest with an anomaly of +2.5°C all with respect to the 1991-2020 LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.. There’s a good chance that February will be the warmest on record possibly since 1659 when the series started, the winter record looks unlikely to be broken, but who knows about 2024 which is already off to a flying start.
Central England Temperatures running a little hot Read More »
I wonder if the current high SSTSST Sea Surface Temperatures off the west coast of Africa will spark off more Cape Verde tropical cyclones than occurred last year? For the record 2023, was a little above average using the accumulated ACEACE Accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) is a metric used by various agencies to express the energy released by a tropical cyclone during its lifetime. It is calculated by summing the square of a tropical cyclone's maximum sustained winds, measured every six hours. The resulting total can be divided by 10,000 to make it more manageable, or added to other totals in order to work out a total for a particular group of storms. index for the year in the North Atlantic. There were a handful of storms that originated from the around the Cape Verde Islands although I am unaware of any correlation between the number of cyclones and SST. As you can see that at the moment the SST is around +3°C and two degree warmer that at the same time last year. SST are fickle, and can change quite quickly, especially close to the coast, so these higher than average SST may well not persist into June.
Cape Verde SST and tropical cyclones Read More »
The blog above was published on the 5th of February by the Met OfficeUKMO The 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, it looks ill timed and a bit of a publicity disaster for both them and their GloSeason seasonal prediction system, especially with this week being exceptionally mild.
Rather than seeing a plunge of “very cold air from the Arctic”, this week has turned out to be an exceptionally mild one, both here in the UKUK The 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. and over a large part of NW Europe. The latest forecast 2M temperature anomaly charts from the ECMWFECMWF The 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. (15 February) doesn’t foresee any cold weather turning up in the next ten days either. Perhaps the very cold weather will arrive in March, who knows, the GloSeason system doesn’t seem to.
I had vaguely heard of the GloSea seasonal forecasting system before, although I have no idea where you can see output from it.
Our changing weather patterns: a tale of abrupt transitions Read More »
Daily global temperatures are still in unchartered territory and still breaking daily records in early February 2024. These two charts are a comparison between my DIYDIY Do It Yourself Global Temperature series on the left, with that from Copernicus and ERA5ERA ERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). on the right. My series is based on rather crude NCEPNCEP The 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. reanalysis 2.5×2.5 gridded data, whilst ERA5 is based on reanalysis data over a much finer 0.1×0.1 grid I believe. The biggest difference is the estimates of the global temperature, my DIY series being around 9.4°C, whilst the ERA5 is 13.5°C. But the shape of the daily temperature line series are quite similar if you take a closer look even though the DIY series is based on a much coarser grid.
Daily Global Temperature | DIY v ERA5 Read More »
Another day another application. This time a viewer to display ERA5ERA ERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). daily global temperature data from Copernicus. So much talk at the moment about how the daily temperatures have been exceeding the 1.5°C threshold a goal that was set in the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal of keeping warming “well below” 2C and aiming to limit it to 1.5C“. As you can see that hasn’t been happening much in the last year, to say the least. The ERA5 data only extends back to 1940, so finding, or more correctly guessing at what the LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. was for the series between 1850 and 1900 was vital to get an accurate anomaly from the pre-industrial age. Reading between the lines of an article I found on the on the Copernicus website I came up with the figure of 0.9°C. That’s the difference between the 1851-1900 and the 1991-2020 LTA and the offset I’ve applied to the first and the third graph in this article. It’s not specified anywhere that I can find that this is what it is, but it’s my best guess.
As you can see the 365 day (leading) running mean has now also exceeded 1.5°C.
The program can also display daily data from the Arctic and Antarctic, Northern and Southern Hemisphere, and the Tropics. Still some work to do on it and some new ways to display the data but that’ll have to do for now.
Again I would like to thank Professor Eliot Jacobson for giving me the link to the raw data on the Climate Reanalyzer web site, and of course to ECMWFECMWF The 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. and Copernicus for generating these global estimates from their reanalysis data in the first place.
Daily Global Temperature Anomalies and +1.5°C | ERA5 Read More »
Atlantic sea surface temperatures [SSTSST Sea Surface Temperatures] have been increasing exceptionally quickly over the last 12 months. Even allowing for the fact that the increases coincide with an El NinoEl Niño El 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 event, what lies behind them in both the North Atlantic and globally remains a mystery. As you can see from the first chart, a 365 day moving average, the linear trend since 1981 has been at the astonishing rate of +0.249°C per decade. To investigate the rise in SST I’ve developed a program to download and visualise the daily SST data from the Climate Reanalyzer site and to plot these three charts that I’ve included. I am thankful to Professor Eliot Jacobson (@eliotjacobson) for the link to the data, and the inspiration for the first two of these three charts. ToDo: It might be very useful if I were to overlay the ENSOENSO El Niño–Southern Oscillation is an irregular periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, affecting the climate of much of the tropics and subtropics. The warming phase of the sea temperature is known as El Niño and the cooling phase as La Niña. events on the first of these two graphs.
As you can see 2024 has picked up where 2023 left off and is considerably higher than 2023 was at this date.
North Atlantic SST | 1981 – 2024 Read More »
The last few weeks have seen temperatures fluctuate from a high of 16.8°C on the 28th of January to a low of -13.8°C on the 8th of February at Altnaharra. Similarly temperatures at Loch Glascarnoch swung from a high of 17.4°C to a low of -10.8°C over the same dates.
Recent temperature fluctuations in the Scottish Highlands Read More »
The “freezing level” is not the height at which snow turns to rain as Ben Rich states in this BBCBBC The 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. Weather video, but the lowest height above mean sea level where the air temperature is 0°C. It’s defined by a specific temperature 0°C and not the change of state of solid into liquid. I don’t see why it proves so difficult to explain.
Definition : The freezing level Read More »
Using gridded monthly climate data from the UKMOUKMO The 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 and a simple linear trend for over the last thirty year, it’s easy to see that annually the UKUK The 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. as a whole has become warmer by 0.29°C per decade, wetter by 26 mm per decade and sunnier by 30 hours per decade. These three charts are twelve month moving averages from 1970, with a thirty year linear trend from 1995 to gauge the change overlaid.
The UK has got warmer, wetter and sunnier since 1995 Read More »
The CRU at the UEA have updated their LWTLWT Lamb Weather Types are often used in UK-based analyses, with individual weather patterns based on the eight primary cardinal directions (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW) plus cyclonic (C), anticyclonic (A) and unclassified (U) types. data series and here’s a look back at how the winter of 2023-24 is shaping up.
Objective LWT | 1 Dec 2023 – 4 Feb 2024 Read More »
A strange old month with some rapid switches in cyclonicity. Mostly zonal but an anticyclonic second week and three named storms. The Gale Index in the objective LWTLWT Lamb Weather Types are often used in UK-based analyses, with individual weather patterns based on the eight primary cardinal directions (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW) plus cyclonic (C), anticyclonic (A) and unclassified (U) types. that I calculate from reanalysis data is not the same as the GIGI Gale Index that I generate from SYNOPSYNOP SYNOP (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. observations.
January 2024 – Objective LWT Read More »
I just had to make a record of these tweets I’ve made yesterday evening and today concerning a series of UKMOUKMO The 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 analysis over the last 24 hours. They include triple warm sectors, non-existent cold fronts, and an existing active cold front that was marked frontogenetic at 12 UTCUTC Coordinated 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 frontolysingFrontolysis Frontolysis in meteorology, is the dissipation or weakening of an atmospheric front. at 18 UTC. Maybe the fronts are added automatically by AIAI Artificial intelligence is intelligence - perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information - demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. these days? If they’re added manually there’s really no excuse, because this is just basic meteorology and watching the observations.
3 Feb 2024 | UKMO shoddy analysis Read More »
Temperatures across IONAIONA Islands 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. were close to average in January. I suspect the mean MSLPMSLP Mean 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. chart is not telling us the full story, because with a mean flow like this, you might have expected temperatures to have been well above average.
If you turn up the granularity the pentad mean pressure charts reveals why January wasn’t much milder. The 7th to 11th was cold and anticyclonic, the 12th to 16th NW’ly and the 17th to 31st was a milder W or SW’ly.
January 2024 | Circulation Read More »
January 2024 was the warmest on record globally in my DIYDIY Do It Yourself Global Temperature series. That makes it eight consecutive months of record global temperatures. It wasn’t by such as a wide margin as in some of the other months, the January mean of 9.15°C was just was just 0.03°C higher than that of 2016. The 365 day moving average is still skyrocketing as you can see in the chart below.
In January daily global temperatures have struggled to be the highest on record, vieing at times with January 2016 to be the warmest, no doubt due to the El NinoEl Niño El 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 fading and helping to bring global temperatures back to some kind of normalcy after eight months of craziness.
The cause of the recent surge in global temperatures looks likely to have been the very high SSTSST Sea Surface Temperatures in the world’s oceans, led in no small part by El Nino in the central Pacific as you can see in this graph.
January 2024 | Global Temperatures | The eighth consecutive warmest month Read More »
January 2024 – Weather Summary Read More »
Sunday the 28th of January 2024 was an interesting day across the Northwest of Scotland. The manual maximum temperature reading of 19.9°C at Achfary in Sutherland caught the UKMOUKMO The 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 out completely, it was only yesterday that they were predicting the highest temperature today would be 16°C in the north of Wales, with a high of only 14°C forecast for the north of Scotland. It seems they have some serious problems forecasting temperatures in foehnFoehn A foehn, is a type of dry, relatively warm, downslope wind that occurs in the lee (downwind side) of a mountain range. It is a rain shadow wind that results from the subsequent adiabatic warming of air that has dropped most of its moisture on windward slopes (see orographic lift). As a consequence of the different adiabatic lapse rates of moist and dry air, the air on the leeward slopes becomes warmer than equivalent elevations on the windward slopes. conditions like these in their mesoscale model. Provisionally, the 19.9°C at Achfary exceeded the old record of 18.3°C by a whopping 1.6°C.
There was also a strange area of moderate/heavy rain which developed across central Scotland on the radar during the early afternoon, well ahead of the cold front that was just coming into the Western Isles at 1455 UTCUTC Coordinated 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).. In StrathpefferStrathpeffer Strathpeffer (Scottish Gaelic: Srath Pheofhair) is a village and spa town in Easter Ross, Highland, Scotland, with a population of 1,469. it produced large spots of rain from 1330 UTC, and a spell of moderate rain just before 15 UTC. The rain seemed to be falling out of blue sky at times, and even at 15 UTC there was only seven oktas of thin CICSCICS A combination of Cirrus Cirrostratus cloud and some thin lenticular ACAC Altocumulus clouds are generally associated with settled weather and will normally appear white or grey with shading. Height of base: 7,000 - 18,000 ft Shape: Bands or areas of individual cells Latin: altum - height; cumulus - heap Altocumulus clouds are small mid-level layers or patches of clouds, called cloudlets, which most commonly exist in the shape of rounded clumps. There are many varieties of altocumulus, however, meaning they can appear in a range of shapes. Altocumulus are made up of a mix of ice and water, giving them a slightly more ethereal appearance than the big and fluffy lower level cumulus. in the sky. The wind in the tops of the trees must have been close to force six from 270° so all I can assume it was being blown a very long way. The only thing I can think that caused it was an upper cold front running ahead and parallel to the cold front.
Sunday, 28 January 2024 | Warmest January day in UK Read More »
