UKMO

February extremes in the UK

Here are anomaly charts for 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. for extreme rainfall, sunshine and mean temperatures during the month of February, courtesy of 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. Temperature and rainfall anomaly charts are available from 1910, but sunshine charts have only been produced since 2001. Why this is when 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 have all the gridded data to generate them with, is a question only they can answer. Surely it wouldn’t take that much effort to extend the series back to at least 1884 for temperature, 1836 for rainfall and 1910 for sunshine. Perhaps they’re looking for a group of volunteers to do it for them? In a similar way to how a similar group of volunteers digitised the data for them in the first place.😂 Wouldn’t it also be an excellent idea in the spirit of inter Metservice co-operation, to ask Met EireannMet Éireann Met Éireann, the Irish National Meteorological Service, is the leading provider of weather information and related services for Ireland., if they could have their permission to use their climate data to fill in the missing data for the rest of Ireland?

February, Precipitation, Sunshine, Temperature, UKMO

February extremes in the UK Read More »

How are we doing with the forecast for winter 2024-25 [DJF]?

We’re getting onto halfway through winter now, and I wondered just how well 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 were doing with their forecast for this winter they issued on the 25 November 2024.
Well, mean temperatures are +0.7°C above average, that’s despite the ongoing cold spell, but not as mild as the 45% on the mild side of average suggests, so 6/10.
Total rainfall also looks higher than average, and higher than forecast with all these flood alerts around at the moment. December was rather dry, particularly in the S, but a forecast of 30% on the wet side of average still looks a little too low, so maybe only 8/10 for that.
The UKMO provide no LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. for wind speed that I can find to calculate anomalies with, and surprisingly they don’t forecast sunshine, which is pretty important for the nations vitamin D3 levels. 😎

Long Range Forecast, UKMO, Winter

How are we doing with the forecast for winter 2024-25 [DJF]? Read More »

The Grid

When I worked at Strike Command at High Wycombe back in 1972 as an assistant for 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, we had a chart that we had to continually update that everyone knew as ‘The Grid’. The Grid was an A1 sized thick card, with a grid of all the airfields that Strike was responsible for (and there were many back then) down the left hand side, and along the top the hours 00-23 for that day. At the bottom there was an extra grid for any ‘specials’ if memory serves. So each hour it was someone’s job to keep The Grid up to date by plotting all the observations, and any specials that came along. The local forecasters did occasionally look at it, but I think it was as much there to give the assistants something to do, because there were a lot of assistants, and forecasters, down in that underground bunker, and doing the tea round there was no fun, I can tell you!
So this new addition to my 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. application is a homage to The Grid. It plots 18 stations, north to south down across 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. for the latest 24 hours. When a cold or warm front went through the forecasters drew a diagonal coloured line across the chart to mark its passage. How times have changed

Software, SYNOP, UKMO

The Grid Read More »

Central England Temperatures – Raw station data

I noticed recently that 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 have started to publish and maintain on their website, data files of daily mean maximum and minimum temperatures from the stations that they have used to calculate the composite Central England Temperatures since 1878. I had given up hope of ever seeing this data, which gives a better insight on the machinations the UKMO go through to produce the series each day. What would Philip Eden have given to access this CETCET Central England Temperature data! 😜 As you can see from the above screen shot above I’ve added a new viewer to my Daily CET application to download, parse and display the data in tabular form and as plotted charts.

At the moment the CET series uses temperatures from the following stations:

  • Rothamsted in Hertfordshire.
  • Pershore in Worcestershire
  • Stonyhurst in Lancashire.

Each of these site has a buddy site, so if it fails to report, the temperature from the other site can be used in its place. This happens a lot more frequently that I ever realised. The data files do include a file of eight boolean flags to identify which site were used for which day. The table below is for the CET values up to the 4 September 2024. I’ve highlighted the sites that are being used in the table in bold, and used grey text for those that aren’t. The provisional daily CET is in the 2nd from right column, and the difference column on the right, is the difference between the provisional mean and the one calculated from the raw data from stations being used. The difference is probably the adjustment applied to each stations temperature for the effects of urbanisation.

The table below is from 2004, and I think marks the point when Stonyhurst and Pershore replaced Squires Gate/Ringway and Malvern in the series. Whoever in 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 thought temperatures from a coastal site like Blackpool was a good site to represent central England beats me, although that might be down to how Manley constructed his original monthly series. I think the Stonyhurst temperature record is second only to Oxford in England in length, and had been used for many years before this.

The latest sites all have their own peculiarities as you can see from the graph below of 30 day average daily maximum temperatures. Stonyhurst is usually the coldest of the latest three sites being used to calculate daily CET values, with Pershore usually the warmest, with Rothamsted usually trailing a little behind Pershore. All this is obviously weather dependent. So the composite CET for the warmest day in the whole CET series in July 2022 ends up being in no mans land temperature wise.

Similarly in this graph of 30 day average daily minimum temperatures from 2010, Stonyhurst is usually coldest, although the three minimum series are more closely bound than the maximum. You can see that in the cold December of 2010, Pershore is fractionally colder than Stonyhurst for a while.

The table below shows how the CET series has changed at times in recent years, and how the buddy system comes into play when temperature data goes missing.

CET, Software, UKMO

Central England Temperatures – Raw station data Read More »

A new feature in Met Office forecasts

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 have just introduced a new feature to their forecasts you find on their weather app or on their website. As well as including the probable daily maximum and minimum temperatures for the next seven days, they also now include values for the highest and lowest possible temperatures for that day too. The 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. do the same thing in their forecasts, but as far as I know, it remains hidden and unused in the HTML.
Personally, I can’t see what benefit this ‘fudge factor’ is to any forecast, other than adding a degree (pardon the pun) of uncertainty to the end user – which temperature is it going to be today or tonight, probable or possible? It also makes a bit of a nonsense of having fixed hourly temperatures, which remain presumably of the ‘probable’ variety.
I’ve been doing some verification work on forecast three hourly temperatures over the past year, and I’ve found their forecast temperatures vary dramatically from the actual reported values beyond T+36. It’s a little bit early but I’ve not noticed any significant improvement since I started using the new beta data.
All I can say is if that people do complain to them about the accuracy of their temperature forecasts in the future, this will be a very neat way of getting them out of a fix. 🤨

Forecasts, Temperature, UKMO

A new feature in Met Office forecasts Read More »

The Met Office Weather App

I’ve been putting quite a lot of effort into a program I’ve developed that parses forecast data from 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 weather app. I needed to do this because 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 have just updated it to a new beta version, and in so doing have reworked all their HTML, which scuppered my old application which I developed some years ago. As far as I know there is no API that I call to access the raw forecast data with, so it’s all down to downloading and parsing a lot of HTML to extract the forecast data myself. It’s not been easy, and I’m not getting any younger, so at times it’s been a real struggle. Anyway I’ve completed most of the work now, and all that’s left is to update the numerous viewers that I use to display the forecast data in various tables, graphs and maps.

The only new feature I’ve seen that’s different in the beta version when compared to the old version is that as well as including a ‘likely’ maximum and minimum, the Met Office now also include a ‘possible’ maximum and minimum. Don’t ask me why, but it mimics what the 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. do in their app.

The animated GIF is generated from a viewer that builds a bitmap image from all the available three hour forecast data for the coming week. I’ve also added maximum and minimum daily anomalies to it, as well as including an icon to show the phase of the moon and when it rises and sets.

I have a verification form which compares forecast values with 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. At the moment this only works for extreme temperatures, but there is no reason why this couldn’t work with wind speed, visibility and weather.
So much to do, and so little time😢

Software, UKMO

The Met Office Weather App Read More »

State of the UK Climate 2023

I notice that the report State of the UK Climate 2023 that has just issued by the UKMO says that ‘Climate change may be causing dramatic changes’, but eight to twelve days with temperatures >=28°C across Ross-shire in 2023 is NOT one of them. I recorded one such day here in 2023 in StrathpefferStrathpeffer Strathpeffer (Scottish Gaelic: Srath Pheofhair) is a village and spa town in Easter Ross, Highland, Scotland, with a population of 1,469., Easter Ross. I realise that the statistics are from a number of stations across the whole county, but there’s absolutely no way that there were as many as eight of them in 2023, even if you include results from Kinlochewe in Wester Ross. Back to the printers!

Climate, Royal Met Society, Scotland, UKMO

State of the UK Climate 2023 Read More »

Fact Check : Are UV levels higher on a mountain?

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 are going overboard at the moment about high UVUV Ultraviolet (UV) light is electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths of 10–400 nanometers, shorter than that of visible light, but longer than X-rays. levels and the dangers of getting sunburnt. It’s a bit ironic, because so far (June 14th) 2024 has seen the coolest and cloudiest start to a meteorological summer in at least 23 years. What’s puzzling is that they never mention in their forecast that UV levels can be considerably higher on a mountain than on lower ground. I used AIAI Artificial intelligence is intelligence - perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information - demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. in the form of ChatGPT to confirm what I already suspected. I well remember two colleagues at RAF Kinloss coming to work for a night shift, both as red as a beetroots, after a days hillwalking on Ben Wyvis on a sunny day. Back in the 1980’s people weren’t so concerned about the risk of skin cancer from getting sunburnt, but today skin cancer are much more common.😮

Forecasts, UKMO, UV

Fact Check : Are UV levels higher on a mountain? Read More »

Media backlash to warmest May on record

You may have noticed the media backlash to this weeks news that May 2024 was the warmest 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. since at least 1883. I think the ferocity of the backlash surprised most people at the 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. and 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.
For the first half of May, the warmest of the weather occurred across northern Scotland, and because 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 BBC have a seemingly inbuilt reluctance to report extremes for places other than in the south of England, news of +6°C anomalies didn’t get much of a mention, either on Twitter/X, in YouTube videos or in TV forecasts.
Here are just a few of my Tweets from the middle of May to try and highlight the exceptional early warmth across the Highlands:

I believe one of the main reasons for the backlash is the inability of the UKMO and BBC to monitor evolving climate stories across the UK. If the UKMO had incorporated climate news, similar to some of my Tweets, at the start of their ‘Deep Dives’, ’10 Day Trends’ or video forecasts, and the BBC had done the same in ‘Weather For The Week Ahead’, then news of a record warm May might not have come as such a big surprise!

BBC, Climate, UKMO

Media backlash to warmest May on record Read More »

Our changing weather patterns: a tale of abrupt transitions

Our changing weather patterns: a tale of abrupt transitions

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.

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Long Range Forecast, UKMO

Our changing weather patterns: a tale of abrupt transitions Read More »

UKMO Warnings Viewer

I wrote this warnings viewer to display the latest warnings issued by the NSWWSNSWWS The National Severe Weather Warning Service is a service provided by the Met Office in the United Kingdom. The purpose of this service is to warn the public and emergency responders of severe or hazardous weather which has the potential to cause danger to life or widespread disruption. This allows emergency responders to put plans into place to help protect the public and also allowing the public to make necessary preparations. at 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 several years ago. But since then, time and HTML wait for no man, and I’ve spent some time performing radical surgery on it to get it working again. 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 are planning to publish an API for it soon to make this process much easier, but my request for a key has been denied it’s not for personal use, apparently it’s only for ‘business to business’ users whoever they are.
The parsing of the HTML Is rather tricky, but I think I’ve just about got it more-or-less cracked, except for occasions when there are multiple maps for a warning.
Why do it? Because like Everest it’s there!
I can now archive warnings and revisit them. Having access to the shapefile for the warning areas means I can zoom in on the map if needs be, and there’s no reason why in the future I couldn’t overlay snow depths, wind gusts, rainfall & temperature values on it for verification purposes.

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Software, UKMO, Warnings

UKMO Warnings Viewer Read More »

The definition of freezing and what constitutes an air frost

Different types of frost
Inset from the Meteorological Glossary

Did you know that a minimum air temperature of 0.0°C is NOT a frost? An air frostair frost An air frost occurs when the temperature of the air falls below 0.0°C only occurs when the air temperature in a Stevenson screen falls below zero celsius i.e. goes negative and not before. 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 website in an item about the types of frost is wrong. I did inform them of the fact and they have promised to correct it.

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 are in pretty good company not understanding what the exact definition of frost is, neither do the “experts” down at the Royal Meteorological Society either. I informed them about this slip up on their website a while ago, but so far the haven’t bothered to reply.

I notice that the Royal Meteorological Society have now corrected the ‘Touch of frost’ article on their website about the definition of what an air frost is, but not so much as a thank you from them. At least I did get a reply from the Met Office help desk, but it still hasn’t been corrected on their website the last time I looked.

I was astounded to find when I bought the book by the Met Office called ‘Very British Weather’ to add to my collection of books on weather and climate, that they had it wrong too.

On page 181 of the book I notice it states that ‘freezing conditions’ occur ‘when the temperature is at or below 0°C’. There’s no arguing that 0.0°C is the freezing point of water, but ‘freezing conditions’, even an ‘air frost’, surely can’t occur until the air temperature is below that temperature, and not at it. It’s a small even a trivial point, but these three instances are or were all wrong. I’m still trying to understand what the paragraph at the foot of the page is trying to say.😉

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Frost, Royal Met Society, UKMO

The definition of freezing and what constitutes an air frost Read More »

Misleading weather radar

Not a day to be putting too much trust in what the weather radar is telling you. Most, if not all of the precipitation across the northwest of Scotland is obviously falling from medium level altostratus and not reaching the ground. We really do need better radar coverage across the north of Scotland which will certainly help with radar over shooting and picking up medium level rainfall across the northwest Highlands.

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Scotland, UKMO, Weather Radar

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UKMO: 3-Month Outlook Spring 2023

Before I forget to review the 3-Month Outlook for spring 2023, I’ll just include a screenshot of the graphics from the PDFPDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992. to act as a reminder to me. It already looks like they didn’t foresee a wet March, even though the forecast was only published on the 27th of February. I never heard much in their Twitter feed about that. It’s a good job they feel obliged to archive them each month these days.

Long Range Forecast, UKMO

UKMO: 3-Month Outlook Spring 2023 Read More »

UKMO: 3-Month Outlook Winter 2022-23

A bit slow to look back on this one, but in hindsight 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 did a reasonable job with the simple indices of temperature and rainfall, although for December, if I’ve got the hang of the three lower graphs they didn’t do quite as well. It’s a shame they can’t include sunshine in this outlook it’s an obvious omission. It’s also about time they published gridded, regional mean monthly wind speed as well, they obviously have the figures but like to hide them for some reason known only to themselves.

Long Range Forecast, UKMO

UKMO: 3-Month Outlook Winter 2022-23 Read More »

17 February 2023 – Storm Otto

06 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). Analysis

Storm Otto was named by the DMIDMI The Danish Meteorological Institute is the national meteorological service for Denmark and Greenland. because 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 refused to issue an amber warning for strong winds for Scotland on Wednesday (15th). That left the way open for the DMI to step in and claim the storm as their own, despite the strength of the wind across Denmark in the afternoon being no stronger than it was in the early morning across the north and east of Scotland or northeast England. I have no idea what’s going on down at Exeter, but they certainly seem to have it fixed in their heads that amber warnings will only be issued for Scotland if wind speed exceed 90 mph, and because amber warnings trigger the naming of storms, that, and persistent high pressure in the south, is the reason why there’s been a paucity of them this autumn and winter across 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..

Strongest Gusts
Lossiemouth Anemograph
DMI, Named Storms, UKMO

17 February 2023 – Storm Otto Read More »

2022 not the warmest 12 months on record

If you spend some time grubbing around 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. gridded temperature series 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 that extends back to the year 1884 as I do, you might find that the highest mean temperature for a 12 month period didn’t actually occur in the year 2022, but the 12 month period that ended in April 2007. The mean temperature of 10.41°C was considerably higher than that of 10.03°C for 2022 that has been bandied about so much in recents days by the media.
There’s no reason to think that the UKMO weren’t aware of this fact, but they obviously kept shtum about it, not wanting to detract from making an even bigger splash with a headline “Warmest year on record” or the climate crisis version of it “Hottest year ever!“.

Global Temperatures, Temperature, UKMO, Warm

2022 not the warmest 12 months on record Read More »

Christmas Days 1998-2022

Courtesy 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 & Wetterzentrale

You can see how over the last 25 years the analysis from the UKMO has got more and more complicated. This is more than likely due to the fact that the analysis is now done using NWPNWP Numerical weather prediction uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. fields and improved satellite imagery, rather than just surface observations anymore. It’s also shows the influence of Mr Occlusion over the last five years or so. Christmas day itself is usually a mobile affair and sometimes very cyclonic (1999 & 2013). Now and then its anticyclone (2006, 2008 & 2010) and one or two where its blocked (2009 & 2021). Just a rather cyclonic and boring SW’ly once again in 2022.

Analysis, Christmas, UKMO

Christmas Days 1998-2022 Read More »

22 Dec 2022 – Analysis 10 UTC

Dear Diary
Not too difficult to do an analysis on the 10 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). chart with a beautiful satellite image like this one to help. The first dry and bright morning since Saturday up here in the Highlands.

Lets see what the professionals made of it at 06 UTC down at EX1.

Despite these two analyses being just fours apart, It’s quite interesting to see their take on the analysis. No warm sector to explain the conditions across southern England like I have, Mr Occlusion has lived up to his name and has just thrown in an occlusion across the SW of England to explain that away. The occlusion they’ve drawn W-E across Shetland is there to mark the boundary between the sub 528 dm air to the north and the milder air across Scotland (dewpoints of 1 or2°C) I suppose, so why not just call it a ‘cold’ front?

Analysis, UKMO

22 Dec 2022 – Analysis 10 UTC Read More »

UK 3 Month Outlook – Winter 2022-23 [DJF]

Dear Diary,
According to 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 the winter of 2022-23 will basically be drier than average, less windy than average with temperatures slightly above average. Not much of a forecast really is it? Neither is it split into the three individual months, but lumps all of them together, hardly much precision in that. I’d love to know what value ‘contingency planners’ glean from this table of probabilities, in fact I’d just to love to know what they do.
Anyway I’ll keep a note of their predictions, for what they’re worth, and see how they did on the first of March 2023, that’s if I’m still around.
They look to have got off to a good start, but as they issued this outlook on the 28th of November, when 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. model was already going for a spell of continental easterlies followed by an Arctic northerly, that was a given.

Long Range Forecast, UKMO

UK 3 Month Outlook – Winter 2022-23 [DJF] Read More »

No Beast from the East

Dear Diary,
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 are trying their very hardest to dissuade people from thinking that they’re not looking down the jaws of another Beast from the East in the coming few days, temperatures they say will only fall slightly below the seasonal average. It might come as news to them that temperatures have today been lower than the 5°C they promise for this coming Saturday. Today the minimum in the dip here in StrathpefferStrathpeffer Strathpeffer (Scottish Gaelic: Srath Pheofhair) is a village and spa town in Easter Ross, Highland, Scotland, with a population of 1,469., and despite a mainly sunny day, was just 3.9°C so it’s already cold. It may well warm up of course once the easterly gets going and maybe brings some milder air up off the Cromarty Firth.

Temperature, UKMO

No Beast from the East Read More »

It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life

You may remember that quote from the weatherman Bill Murray played in one of my favourite films Groundhog Day and which I was thinking might nicely sum up the first couple of weeks in December 2022 if the GFSGFS The Global Forecast System is a global numerical weather prediction system containing a global computer model and variational analysis run by the United States National Weather Service. model is right, and that’s a big if. They’ve finally come into line with 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. model, at least up to T+240, in the latest midnight run. What does strike me about this sequence, is that despite pressure being high 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., we seem to still find ourselves in the middle of a battleground, with no shortage of showers or frontal systems managing to inveigle themselves into the flow. The one thing which we do have, and which we’ve had for sometime in all reality, is blocking, that has managed to retrogress itself westward from Finland towards the meridian in the last few weeks.

Meanwhile down at Exeter the medium and long range team are just as befuddled as their boss Professor Adam Scaife is about the position of the dominant high pressure will position itself for at least the next 10 days. In AEAE Anticyclonic Easterly situations like this, the one place that is likely to get clobbered is the south or southwest of the country and not the northwest. The only reason that I regularly read the long range forecast from 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 is to see just what the Twilight Zone feels like to a true believer. I wonder how long it will be before they catch onto the fact that there’s a easterly on the way instead of spinning a catch all line “the potential for high pressure to be located close to 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.“.

GFS, Long Range Forecast

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They’re in trouble when Berry Head and the Needles are in the list

It’s certainly been, and still is across the west of Wales, a very windy day with coastal gales and some strong gusts on the cold front, but nothing very exceptional for a late November day. There were gale or severe gale force winds and comparable gusts for several consecutive days last week in the Northern Isles without any warning at all. You know the Met Office are trying to justify their warning when they roll out gusts from non-standard exposure, cliff top sites like Berry Head and the NeedlesNeedles A non-standard WMO class 3 anemograph site, stuck on top of a near 300 foot limestone cliff, on the Isle of Wight. Old battery. What tickles me is 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 are loathed to mention wind speeds from mountain sites such as CairngormCairn Gorm Cairn Gorm (Scottish Gaelic: An Càrn Gorm) is a mountain in the Scottish Highlands. It is part of the Cairngorms range and wider Grampian Mountains. With a summit elevation of 1,245 m (4,085 ft) above sea level, Cairn Gorm is classed as a Munro and is the seventh-highest mountain in the British Isles. but have no qualms at all using readings made atop a 300 foot chalk cliff.

As for today’s rainfall totals [06-18] nothing that excessive either, even if most of it was on the front itself. The warning mentioned 10 to 15 mm in 1 to 2 hours and 20 to 25 mm in a few places, both too excessive. There was just 0.2 mm here in the NENE North East of Scotland.
If the UKMO can take a hard line with the issuing of warnings in Scotland why can’t they do the same for everywhere else?
It seems we’re fast becoming a Nanny State even with regard to weather.

Rain, UKMO, Warnings, Wind

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12 UTC analysis

Intense squall line across the SW of Wales

There may well have been a mini-tornado in Wales this morning, but the highest guts from the stations in the 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. network are rather underwhelming, and none of them higher than the 76 mph gust at the Mumbles yesterday when there was no yellow warning in force. Line convection on a cold front like we’ve seen today is not an uncommon occurrence 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. at any time of the year, but does that mean from now on we’ll see 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 issue a combined Yellow warning for heavy rain and strong winds each time that they do?

Analysis, Rain, UKMO, Warnings, Wind

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