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. 😉
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.
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 CSVCSVA 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.
I reworked an old application last week that I use to generate a simple six hourly North Atlantic Oscillation from 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. reanalysis data that I download. It’s simple, nothing complicated using geopotential heights at 500 hPahPaA 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 NAONAOThe 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 CETCETCentral England Temperature series, along with the England Wales rainfall from the daily UKPUKPUKP is a gridded datasets of UK regional precipitation. series, both of which I download from 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. 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.
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 DIYDIYDo It Yourself Global Temperature series on the left, with that from Copernicus and 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). on the right. My series is based on rather crude 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. 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.
Another day another application. This time a viewer to display 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). 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 LTALTALong 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 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. and Copernicus for generating these global estimates from their reanalysis data in the first place.
Atlantic sea surface temperatures [SSTSSTSea 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 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 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 ENSOENSOEl 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.
14 Jan 2024 1400 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). Replete with the observation for 06010
Anyone who loves 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. observations as much as I do, and likes a plotted chart of NW Europe, will bemoan the missing SYNOP observation from Tórshavn. It’s been missing for a good number of years now, and leaves a big hole in a plotted surface chart between Scotland and Iceland. It’s akin to 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 decision to run just one radiosonde station in Scotland, the demise of Stornoway and at Shanwell leave a similar gap in the upper air coverage across the north of 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. too. My running joke on the missing 06011 SYNOP is that the WMOWMOThe World Meteorological Organisation is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. should shellout on buying a Vantage Pro AWSAWSAutomatic Weather Station and just gift it to DMIDMIThe Danish Meteorological Institute is the national meteorological service for Denmark and Greenland. so the Faroese could install it in the capital Tórshavn. It’s not that the Faroese are shy of technology, a good number of it’s 18 islands are now connected by undersea tunnels, which also boast the world’s first undersea roundabout, so they do know a thing or two about engineering, but seem to have very little interest in monitoring the weather. Anyway what I’ve done today is simple enough, I just wrote a new procedure to download the latest METARMETARMETAR is a format for reporting weather information. A METAR weather report is predominantly used by aircraft pilots, and by meteorologists, who use aggregated METAR information to assist in weather forecasting. Raw METAR is the most common format in the world for the transmission of observational weather data. from Vágar, the islands only airport. The ICAO is EKVG, and it’s associated WMO number is 06010. Instead of fetching the METAR from OGIMET, I download it from the ADDs server run by NOAANOAANOAA 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. in America. I can now at a click of button fill the big gap with pseudo SYNOP complete with QNH parsed from the METAR. It’s pure idleness on my part why I didn’t add this functionality many years ago to my old SYNOP application.
I wrote this warnings viewer to display the latest warnings issued by the NSWWSNSWWSThe 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 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 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 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 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.
I’ve developed yet another Windows weather application, one that I have been meaning to write for several years now, it analyses reported hourly wind speed and gusts 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. observations from WMOWMOThe World Meteorological Organisation is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. block #03, and produces a simple daily and hourly gale index [GIGIGale Index] for all available stations below 250M, which usually ends up being around 150 sites 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. and Ireland. I’ve done it to see how viable it would be for an organisation, such as 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, to come up with an objective, rather than a subjective way of naming storms. The screenshot above shows a data grid of hourly GI in the main form, with daily and hourly data from the 26th of September up to the 21st of December 2023. I have now analysed all hourly SYNOP data back to 2015, which is the year naming storms commenced in the UK.
The GI itself is very simple, and is just the sum of the mean Beaufort force for each station plus half the Beaufort force of it’s highest gust, from all stations for that hour. I’ve found that from looking at all previous named storms that an index of 100 equates to a gale and 200 to a named storm event. You can see the seven named storms we’ve seen since the start of the 2023/24 season. Using these values as a guide I can easily list all the named storms. Some of these were named other Met Services other than the UKMO, and a couple of the storms were named for their heavy rain rather that strong winds.
This is where the fun starts, because as you can see Pia, a storm named by the DMIDMIThe Danish Meteorological Institute is the national meteorological service for Denmark and Greenland. on the 21st of December, had a maximum hourly GI of 709 which is at least twice as high as any of the previous named storm so far this season. It was eventually named, but surprisingly not by the UKMO. If you look down the table you’ll also notice storm Ciaran only had a GI of 169, and using the 200 threshold for storms as a guide it should not have been named. There are plenty more named storms like Ciaran that just didn’t make the grade. There are also other times when a GI exceeded 200 but that didn’t result in a storm being named. On looking back I’ve found that this often occurs when a low affects Scotland, and I beleive it’s because the UKMO link the naming of storms with their NSWWSNSWWSThe 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.. Usually, but not always, if they issue an amber warning a storm automatically gets named, sometimes a yellow warning is all that’s required outside Scotland, but because the threshold for an amber strong wind warning is 80 mph (or higher) rather than 70 mph for elsewhere in the UK, amber warnings are rarer in Scotland. That’s the reason why I believe the UKMO didn’t choose to name Pia. The next logical step is to break down the GI regionally because that’s it weakness. Below is a ranked list of all the named storms since 2015 and all the missed events. As you can see I have also assigned each named storn a category from one to five. Ciara, a category five storm, had the highest maximum GI of any of them. In third place you’ll notice is the Ross-shire (or the unnamed) storm of January 2015 which I’ve included because it occurred just before the naming of storm commenced.
This application is still WIPWIPWork In Progress so ignore the mean column for now I will get round to fixing it.
The Oxford Radcliffe Observatory have finally decided to release their daily climate readings they’ve been making since 1815, you can download the CSVCSVA data file using Comma Separated Variable format. file for it from here. I tried emailing them for many years urging them to do this, but I never got a reply. It seems bizarre to me that in a warming world like ours why they would be so protective of what is one of the longest temperature series in the world. They’re not giving that much away just 75,726 days of maximum, minimum, grass minimum, rainfall and sunshine values, but if you like me love climate data, then it’s like you’ve stumbled on the mother lode. They could have included snow days, even perhaps days of thunder, gale or fog. I see that Ed Hawkins has now got a load of volunteers to digitise and add daily pressure readings from 1828 and 1856. It will be interesting to see whether that spurs the observatory on to updating the latest CSV file beyond the 30th of April 2022 to include 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., I know my recent email has fell on deaf ears once again. I’ve kind of worked up with the coding because it’s very disappointing that the data is not updated on a regular basis. Here are some screenshots from some of the other viewers in my Oxford Climate Viewer windows application, it’s amazing what you can do with such little data.😉
Daily Precipitation Viewer and the wet Winter [DJFDJFMeteorological Winter comprising the months of December, January & February] of 2020-21Daily Sunshine and the Summer [JJAJJAMeteorological Summer comprising the months June, July & August] of 1976Daily Temperature viewer and the cold Winter [DJF] of 1962-63January frost frequency 1815-2022365 day average mean temperatures 1991-2022 Showing a warming of 0.12°C per decade in that time *must fix that titleAutumn [SONSONMeteorological Autumn - September, October and November] precipitation 1826-2022 Wetter by 2.7 mm/decade in that timeAnnual mean temperatures 1815-2022 A rise of 0.09°C/decade in the last 207 years Finally an Annual, Seasonal and Monthly Grid viewer.
The observatory Site
These three images from Google show how the enclosure at the observatory looks these days. It appears that they may have been hosting the Great British Bake Off in that marquee when Google came snooping around for these picture. It’s no wonder the temperatures that day were so high, especially when Prue Leith thought she would demonstrate how to flambe one of her deserts. Seriously though the observatory has been surrounded by houses and streets from early Victorian times, so I acn’t see that urbanisation of the immediate site has ever been that big a problem because it’s also been urbanised.
I hadn’t realised how many hourly rainfall reports were available in the 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. reports I download from OGIMET, so I finally decided to write an additional dedicated viewer to my SYNOP application to view them with. The viewer consists of the usual interlinked data grid to view each hourly total, a map to plot those hourly values on, and a chart in the form of a hyetograph for the selected station. I’ve added the ability to produce an animated GIF of the map as it steps through each selected hour. I’ll add an animation when I get a suitable weather situation. I haven’t checked to see how closely the hourly totals match up to the 6, 12, and 24 hourly reported values but you would think if the AWSAWSAutomatic Weather Station software was doing its job right they should be the same. The only trouble is hourly values of one mm or more are in whole numbers. The next logical step would be to add hourly data from the EAEAThe Environment Agency is a non-departmental public body, established in 1996 and sponsored by the United Kingdom government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with responsibilities relating to the protection and enhancement of the environment in England., SEPASEPAThe Scottish Environment Protection Agency is Scotland's principal environmental regulator, protecting and improving Scotland's environment. and whatever the Welsh versions called, I do have separate applications for the EA and the SEPA but it might be quite a task to meld three into one.
One country in Europe that’s bucked the trend of a warm summer in 2023 was Iceland. I’ve noticed this in the monthly anomaly charts for mean temperature that I produce, so I decided to spruce up my chart grid viewer to see if I was right in my assumption, and as you can see in this chart of weekly mean anomalies I was. What caused it is may have been persistent high pressure across the Greenland ice cap to the northwest of Iceland, and a shift southward of the Icelandic low, which in turn allowed more days of northerly or north-westerly flows and hence the lower than average temperatures.
It’s not easy to verify these findings because even the Icelandic 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 site offers no real clues to how they categorised this summer’s temperatures. If you’re by any chance reading this in Iceland, please let me know how you found it😉
I had never heard what an Hovmöller diagram was until I watched the Deep Dive video produced by 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 and put out on their Youtube channel yesterday. The Hovmöller diagram was first introduced by Ernest Aabo Hovmöller (1912-2008), a Danish meteorologist, in a paper that he published in 1949. I had seen charts like it before used to display climate data, but hadn’t realised that they had a name. In reality they’re very similar to a heat map as far as I can see, but I decided to see if I could reproduce one in software that was as similar as possible to the one that Alex Deakin showed. As you can see the X-axis displays values of longitude for a fixed line of latitude, in this case 55° north. The Y-axis displays dates over the last month. In the Hovmöller diagram above I’ve displaid 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. values from six hourly reanalysis data. It clearly shows various anticyclonic spells in red and hot spots of cyclonicity in blue. I think it will come in very handy as another way of looking at global MSLP or temperature climate data over a longer period although I’ve still to write the code for that😉
I have added a new viewer to my 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. climate application to display estimated daily temperatures for the whole of 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.. I use as many daily reported maximum and minimum temperatures from WMOWMOThe World Meteorological Organisation is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics. stations 03001 to 03950 as I can to calculate a UK mean for all stations below 250 M amslAMSLThe height Above Mean Sea Level.. That equates to around 120 observations each day. Nowhere near as accurate as the 1 km x 1 km gridded estimates from 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 good enough for me. As you can see it picks out the two heatwaves that have occurred this year. It does look like my estimates maybe just two high though, because mean temperatures in both July and August were much close to average than this. That’s not really that surprising because its totally dependent on an even spread of site location, but they tend to be further south and coastal sites. I suppose that I could use all available sites, even those on mountains, and adjust their temperatures down to sea level.
I updated my Meteogram viewer yesterday which displays hourly 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. observations for any period in a 4×5 grid of charts. Some values are straight from the SYNOP, others are derived. I think you’ll agree, there’s a lot of observational and climate information locked up in each humble SYNOP. I’ve tried to graph all possible data types from the observation, the degree of windchill will require some further work😉
After the triple dip in the 12 month moving average of global temperature anomalies since their peak in 2016, global temperatures are now back on the march upwards once again. Looking back at the last 20 years a simple linear trend on the monthly anomalies reveals that anomalies are rising at the astounding rate close to 0.25°C per decade or 2.5°C per century. You’ll notice that the two charts from 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. in Europe and 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. & GISSGISSThe Goddard Institute for Space Studies is a laboratory in the Earth Sciences Division of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center affiliated with the Columbia University Earth Institute. in America show similar results. Again, I’ve spent some time smartening up this monthly view of anomalies that include the usual linear trend and a 12 month moving average overlay.
El NiñoEl 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 is anticipated to continue through the Northern Hemisphere winter (with greater than 95% chance through December 2023 -February 2024).
In July, El Niño continued as indicated by above-average SSTSSTSea Surface Temperatures across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Nearly all of the weekly Niño indices in the central and eastern Pacific were in excess of +1.0°C: Niño-3.4 was +1.1°C, Niño-3 was +1.8°C, and Niño1+2 was +3.4°C. Area-averaged subsurface temperatures anomalies decreased compared to June, but remained positive, in association with anomalous warmth across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Tropical atmospheric anomalies were also consistent with El Niño. Starting in mid-July, low-level winds were anomalously westerly over the western equatorial Pacific, while anomalous easterlies prevailed over the eastern Pacific. Upper-level wind anomalies were westerly over the eastern Pacific. Convection continued to be enhanced around the International Date Line and was weakly suppressed in the vicinity of Indonesia. The equatorial SOISOIThe Southern Oscillation is the atmospheric component of El Niño. This component is an oscillation in surface air pressure between the tropical eastern and the western Pacific Ocean waters. The strength of the Southern Oscillation is measured by the Southern Oscillation Index. The SOI is computed from fluctuations in the surface air pressure difference between Tahiti (in the Pacific) and Darwin, Australia (on the Indian Ocean). and the traditional SOI were both negative. Collectively, the coupled ocean-atmosphere system reflected El Niño.
I have smartened up my ENSOENSOEl 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. application a little and downloaded the latest data. The monthly anomaly for August when published (the average of the three months July through to September) will confirm the current El Niño event started in June, but the rules used by NOAANOAANOAA 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., if I remember them correctly, are that you need three of those three month averages above +0.5°C before this happens. The ENSO rules and stats are always a bit murky. Here is another view of the weekly data that my ENSO application also displays.
Summer started in a very anticyclonic mood with negative zonality (E’lies). The rot soon set in, and by the 19th of June the summer had turned when positive zonality (W’lies) was restored, and that’s basically where we’ve been since then. The meridional index has switched between spells of negative and positive, as it tends to do across our part of the world, and generally cyclonic. There were a couple of days with a gale index above the threshold of 30, but neither tie in with the named storms of Antoni (5 Aug) or Betty (18-19 Aug). 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, in their wisdom, decided not to name the deep low on the 15th of July that produced a GIGIGale Index of 40.5, but I reckon it was the equal of either of the two that were named.
You may have noticed that I’ve put some work into smartening up the front end of my application that visualises objective LWTLWTLamb 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., the data for which I download from the CRU at the UEA. I’m quite proud of the app, and it works very well. I am so glad that the CRU have kept the objective series going after H.H.Lamb’s death in 1997. I do have the objective LWT algorithm, which I run on six hourly gridded reanalysis data in a seperate application as well , which gives a more detailed view of how weather types unfold.
How to recreate plotted weather charts with observations from the Daily Weather Report – yes it’s a bit of a mouthful as titles go but it’s what I’ve done over the Christmas holidays. The Daily Weather Reports [DWR] in question are the ones that 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 have very kindly scanned and made available on their website. The daily reports extend back to September of 1860, but for a start I’m only interested in the years from around 1960 to 1972, after that I have my own 6 hourly observational data that I bought from Weather Graphics some years ago and have kept updated by means of OGIMET in recent years. So if you want interested at looking at a plotted synoptic chart for a particular day from January 1963, you could approach the Met Office and ask them to provide you with all the 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. observations for the hour that you’re interested in, I haven’t done that personally, because I think the cost would be prohibitive. But there is another way, and that’s to download the PDFPDFPortable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992. of the DWR for January 1963 and extract the 55 observations that are contained within it and plot your own chart, and that’s exactly what I did:
Figure 1 – Observations for the 2nd of January 1962 at 18 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). – courtesy of the Met Office and Crown Copyright
Download the PDF of the DWR for the month of January 1963 from the Met Office (~67 MB).
Cut and paste the observations for the hour that you are interested in (00, 06, 12 or 18) as a JPEG from the PDF.
Use a good OCR application to create a text file from the JPEG.
Write an application to allow you to edit the text file returned by the OCR application to verify and edit each observation.
Use the application to convert the old format SYNOP into the new format.
Download the reanalysis 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. pressure data for 1963 (~19 MB) from the 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. site, convert the NetCDF format into plain text using NCDUMP, parse that gridded text into individual MSLP data files for each main synoptic hour for that year.
Inject the MSLP 2.5° x 2.5° gridded data values for 18 UTC on the 2nd of January 1963 from the data file you created in step 6 as a background field to improve the MSLP contouring, along with all the SYNOP observations that you created in step 5 into your SYNOP viewer, ensuring that you have all the locations of the old observing sites (such as Spurn Head and Cape Wrath) in your stations database so you can plot them!
Generate a screenshot of the British Isles for 18 UTC and add it into you blog.
And that my friends, is all there is to it.
Optical Character Recognition
I have found one thing from this exercise and that OCR software is not a great deal better than it was 20 years ago when I first used it. None of the free and online OCR web services work at all well, and none of them allowed you to choose numeric only input. Some of the results were so bad that the numeric results have been converted into the equivalent of a piece of Shakespeare in the Infinite monkey theorem! I tried to sharpen and reduce the number of colours to no avail, I cut and pasted and saved as high quality JPEG, PNG, TIFFTIFFTag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images. and PDF without any improvement in character recognition. Just at the point of giving it all up as a bad job I decided to download a trial of Abbyy PDF Creator+ and at first found the results were equally as poor, until I noticed that if I set the language to digits the results were very much better, probably around 90% of the numeric characters in the observations were now correct.
The final result
And so here is the finished product (fig 2), more than 60 years after the observations were made. I was still a little young to be involved with making one of the 55 observations quite yet, but I did spot a typo in the original DWR, it occurred in the 03715 Rhoose observation, and although I would for a bit of fun like to submit a correction to it to the Met Office help desk, they’d probably not see the funny side of it 60 years after the event as I do!
Fig 2 – 18 UTC Observations for 2 January 1963 – courtesy of xmetman
Of course the perfect answer to my conundrum would be for the Met Office to make all their archived SYNOP observations freely accessible, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon, but if you’re as daft as I am, and follow the steps that I’ve outlined above, you too could step back in time and recreate a plotted weather chart from the 1960’s.
Fig 3 2nd January 1962 18 UTC – courtesy of the Met Office and Crown CopyrightFig 4 18 UTC 2 January 1963 – courtesy of NCEP reanalysis
I reworked a graph in my Tropical Cyclone Program to help visualise the state of the hurricane season in the North Atlantic. More tricky than I anticipated but it does show that I was correct in thinking it was indeed a slow start despite the record SSTSSTSea Surface Temperatures in the Atlantic this year. If things follow the climatology, activity will gradually increase during August, reaching a peak in early September.
As you can see the colour scale I use for temperature is dynamic rather than using a fixed set of colours as preferred by the 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. and 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. It may not be transferable and directly comparable to any other month, but I find it much easier to find the hot and cold spots, and I can easily switch back to a fixed scale in software if necessary.
I resurrected from the archives, and reworked one of my old viewers in my Daily CETCETCentral England Temperature application this morning. It can show means, anomalies, extremes, deciles, quintiles and centiles of weekly temperature since 1772 in a heat map style data grid. It looks like I’ve just commenced the 3,606th week of my life, and that image shows all of them.
