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 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 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. 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. 🤨
I download the site specific NWPNWPNumerical weather prediction uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. data that resides in the HTML 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 weather application requests whenever anyone looks for a forecast for a location for a number of my applications I’ve written to visualise the forecast data in a table, graph or on a map. Parsing the data was a tricky business, but I persevered, and can now grab a week of one and the three hourly data for any number of elements including temperature. As well as visualising the data, I thought it might be interesting to do a spot of forecast verification by comparing the three hourly forecast data with the actual values from 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. observation for any location in the world. I know that the forecast values although quite accurate, are far from being spot on. The question I was intrigued to find out was just how accurate they are. Here are some recent preliminary results I have produced from the add-on to my 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 NWP application I wrote a number of years ago.
Notice the very warm day on the 6th of April associated with storm Kathleen, and how underestimated temperatures at Kinloss were because of a slight foehnFoehnA 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. effect.
Generally a pretty good result with temperatures +/- 2°C at Heathrow.
Again at Exeter temperatures within +/- 2°C of the forecast, although it didn’t do well with some of the minima, and the 8th of April was a bit of a disaster because heavy rain suppressed temperatures.
I’ve noticed that recently the Met Office are in the process of updating the NWP data their app uses, so they must have some concerns themselves about its accuracy, although the changes in the NWP might have more to do with forecast weather, rather than forecast temperatures. At the moment I am still using the old data and haven’t switched to the new trial data. In the meantime, let me know about what you think about the accuracy of the forecasts the Weather App produces in your area. I’ve still got a bit more testing, tweaking and bug fixes to do to my verification application, but I’ll keep you posted.😉
I never noticed this rare ‘Heat Burst’ that occurred at Donna Nook in NENENorth East Lincolnshire on the 25th of July 2019. I still have the hourly SYNOPs from the AWSAWSAutomatic Weather Station at Donna Nook so I can construct a crude thermograph for that evening. As you can see the temperature surged to 32.2°C a rise of 10.2°C between 1950 UTCUTCCoordinated Universal Time or UTC is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about 1 second of mean solar time (such as UT1) at 0° longitude (at the IERS Reference Meridian as the currently used prime meridian) and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. It is effectively a successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). and 2050 UTC, at the same time dewpoints fell from 18.3°C to 12.6°C, with the relative humidity falling to just 30%. This was called by a heat burst, the theory behind heat bursts are that they’re the result of a downdraught of very warm and dry air associated with a decaying thunderstorm. Worldwide they are very elusive, and in the UKUKThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. extremely very rare mesoscale event indeed. You can read more about them on Wikipedia. I came across the event after reading about it the book “Very British Weather” from the Met OfficeUKMOThe Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, who says I never give them credit?
I did a search on Twitter and found that the Met Office did tweet about the heat burst the next day and included their own more detailed thermograph.
Now here’s a mystery, after downloading the archived SFERICs from BlitzortungBlitzortungBlitzortung.org is a lightning detection network for locating electromagnetic discharges in the atmosphere (lightning discharges) with very low frequency receivers based on the time of arrival (TOA) and time of group arrival (TOGA) method. for that day, I found there weren’t any! So what’s going on? Did a visiting holiday maker wild camping on the beach start a barbecue under the Stevenson screen just after 9pm? No, on running another query on Blitzortung I find there wasn’t a single SFERIC detected on the whole planet for that particular day! “Vorsprung Durch Technik” as they say in Germany.
No investigation would be complete without a plotted SYNOPSYNOPSYNOP (surface synoptic observations) is a numerical code (called FM-12 by WMO) used for reporting weather observations made by manned and automated weather stations. SYNOP reports are typically mad hourly and consist of groups of numbers (and slashes where data is not available) describing general weather information, such as the temperature, barometric pressure and visibility at a weather station. chart for the hour in question. As you can see despite what Blitzortung believes there were some heat thunderstorms around, and look to have been medium level affairs, after all this was the day that Cambridge set a new UK record for the warmest July day of 38.1°C.
One final curiosity about this heat burst concerns an AMOUK ship that turn up very regularly in the UK SYNOP reports. I say ship, but because occasionally they do report on land 😲. I still don’t know what they are or who they belong to, I guess they are some sort of mobile AWS which usually turn out very accurate observation for extended periods. I could write software to track them, but that’s another story. The reason I mention them here is that AMOUKo5 reported an even higher temperature at sea of 33.1°C with a dewpoint of 9.6°C, just offshore (53.5N 0.2E) of Donna Nook at 21 UTC. Notice too that the old Humber light vessel (03380) reported a temperature of 29.0°C at that time as well.
I saw someone mention this on Twitter/X yesterday, so I thought that I’d take a closer look. A comparison between the maximum temperatures on [A] Easter Day 2024 and [B] Christmas Day 2023. As you can see it was colder on Easter Day in the southeast compared to Christmas Day, but much warmer in Scotland on Easter Day that it was on Christmas day. Not a lot of people know that. 😉
The 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.
The number of hours below 0°C in the last 96 hours Please note the CairngormCairn GormCairn 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. and Aonach Mor SIESAWS went offline as soon as the cold spell started😁
The maximum temperature of 46.8°C at Valencia Airport on the 10th of August 2023 was an amazing 15.8°C above the LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.. Anomalies in other parts of Spain where ~6°C above the LTA. It was slightly cooler in the city of Valencia itself with a maximum of 45.1°C and anomaly of 14.4°C. The blisteringly high temperatures were in no doubt helped along by a strong foehnFoehnA 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. wind blowing down from the mountains to the west. At 13 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). they lifted the temperature from 40.5°C to 46.0°C (RH ~10%). By 15 UTC the sea breeze arrived with winds backing into the ENE and dropping temperatures to 34.0°C. Unusual, but you would have thought this must have happened countless other times in the past.
It’s been a beautiful sunny week of weather in StrathpefferStrathpefferStrathpeffer (Scottish Gaelic: Srath Pheofhair) is a village and spa town in Easter Ross, Highland, Scotland, with a population of 1,469.. Mornings have been cold with a touch of frost in more sheltered spots in the Highlands, but days have been clear and sunny with sunshine from dawn till dusk, that sunshine giving warm afternoons. The easterly wind on Wednesday and Thursday did pick up to moderate occasionally fresh during the mornings to take the edge of things out of the sun. There was a short spell of haar on both Thursday and Friday but it quickly burnt off.
Here’s an interesting graph that compares 24 hour mean temperatures between Benson in Oxfordshire and Loch Glascarnoch in the Highlands, and which highlights the differences between the cold frosty continental conditions in the south and the much milder Atlantic air across the north during the fourth week.
Hi Diary The Moray Firth hot-spot is alive and kicking this morning! After dipping to -1°C by midnight, temperatures in StrathpefferStrathpefferStrathpeffer (Scottish Gaelic: Srath Pheofhair) is a village and spa town in Easter Ross, Highland, Scotland, with a population of 1,469. are close to 3°C by 8 am, after a moderate easterly wind picked up at 4 am and blew milder air into the ‘funnel’ that is the Moray Firth. The rumours of a giant alien spaceship crashing into the Firth over 8,000 years ago and causing a massive Tsunami could well be true, and last night they must have fired up the engines. The spread of anomalies across the country this morning is quite impressive across IONAIONAIslands Of North Atlantic.
Yes I know there's an island called Iona, but this is so I don't have to use the term 'British Isles' when referring to the whole of Ireland and the UK. once again, from -12°C across the south, to +1°C across the NENENorth East of Scotland. There’s a good covering of snow on the braes of Ben Wyvis above 200 M, but it’s just sleet or wet snow down in the strath, and very reminiscent of the last few winters in this part of the world.
Dear Diary, The first rather modest signs of the much heralded colder weather arriving in the Shetlands this morning. The cloud from front this will thwart the frost we might have seen tonight, instead of low cloud from the east, it’ll be low cloud from the north. Sometimes you forget that you’re on an island and the weather is dominated by the sea. Temperatures did their usual trick in the strath overnight: 0.1°C at midnight with clear skies, winds back into the east and low cloud rolls up the Cromarty Firth turning it cloudy, temperatures rise to 2°C at dawn, skies clear again as the wind backs more to the north, temperatures fall back to 1°C by 10am. This is a very common occurrence here and must be at least the third occasion it’s happened this Autumn.
Dear Diary, The lowest anomalies at lunchtime, in the UKUKThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. at least, where in the foggy areas across Wales, central and southwest England. Anomalies across Scandinavia were close to average, but it was much colder further across Germany, Poland, Belgium and the low countries.
Dear Diary, Unsurprisingly, Autumn 2022 [SONSONMeteorological Autumn - September, October and November] ended up the third warmest since 1659 in Central England, with a mean temperature of 12.4°C, which was +2.4°C above the 1659-2020 LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.. There were only a few colder than average spells with warm spells dominating for long periods.
Dear Diary, Yet another mild month across IONAIONAIslands Of North Atlantic.
Yes I know there's an island called Iona, but this is so I don't have to use the term 'British Isles' when referring to the whole of Ireland and the UK.. The highest mean anomalies were in the Northern Isles followed by those in the SE of England, colder further west but still above average. Anomalies across the north of Scotland depressed due to the frosts during the last 10 days.
A couple of remarkably warm days on the 11th and 12th of the month.
Dear Diary I don’t know how we managed to avoid a frost last night but we did with a minimum of 0.3°C at 0017 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).. After that I imagine the cloud must have increased because the wind remained very light from the W’SW. The unusual thing is that although you would expect the minima to occur at around sunrise (0831 this morning) it didn’t. Instead the overnight cloud quickly dispersed and we were left with blue skies, but temperatures continued to fall back from 3.9°C at 0700 UTC to just 1.2°C at 1100 UTC. This is because as the name suggests StrathpefferStrathpefferStrathpeffer (Scottish Gaelic: Srath Pheofhair) is a village and spa town in Easter Ross, Highland, Scotland, with a population of 1,469. is in a strath and from about the end of November the sun never gets over the Cats Back (a long ridge to the south of the village). The sun eventually struggle over the ridge but it takes till mid morning to do it. The Highlands are full of glens and straths like this, many of them won’t see direct sunshine again until the end of February.
Dear Diary, 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 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 StrathpefferStrathpefferStrathpeffer (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.
A rather surprising chart of temperature anomalies for North American for the first 20 days of November 2022. Well it was at least for me. The cold air and mountains of snow at Buffalo gave me the impression that the whole of November had been very cold but not so. For the first two weeks of November eastern America was extremely mild with anomalies as high as +8°C. The third week saw the opposite conditions and it was much colder, which reduced the magnitude of the warm high that you can see in the anomaly chart close to New York (+4°C). It’s just how climate is with extremes of temperature cancelling each other out within the space of a year or less.
Another cold day across many parts of IONAIONAIslands Of North Atlantic.
Yes I know there's an island called Iona, but this is so I don't have to use the term 'British Isles' when referring to the whole of Ireland and the UK. and Europe this lunchtime and a little bit colder than it was earlier in the month.
Not quite as cold as 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 expected across large parts of central and eastern England overnight. If you’re not sure what the minimum temperatures will be over the highlands of Scotland, simply don’t add a temperature for Inverness, Braemar or Aviemore and then you can’t be wrong.
Temperatures last week were 7 to 8 degrees warmer than average in many parts of the country. pic.twitter.com/ojUKQ4tGxB
— 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. Weather (@bbcweather) November 20, 2022
Undoubtedly the last couple of weeks in November have been very mild across Iceland, but don’t forget the cold weather back in October that brought the red warning for heavy snow from the IMOIMOIcelandic Meteorological Office (Icelandic: Veðurstofa Íslands) is Iceland's national weather service and as such a government agency under the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources. It is also active in volcano monitoring, volcano seismology, and together with other institutions, responsible for civil protection in Iceland. This is climate in action, some weeks are warmer than average and some are colder. I reckon the 7 to 8 degrees are the result of foehnFoehnA 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. winds at stations in the north of the island like we saw in Snowdonia in the last week. I would like to have produced a thermograph with anomalies for Reykjavik but they don’t publish daily extremes so this will have to do a town on the south coast.
The town of Umm Said in Qatar lies around 60 km to the south of Doha the capital of Qatar where the 2022 World Cup is being held this year.
Umm Saʿīd, also called Musayʿīd or Mesaieed, town and port situated in Qatar, on the east coast of the Qatar Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf. It was established in 1949 as a tanker terminal by the Qatar Petroleum Company on an inhospitable, previously uninhabited site, along the sabkhah (salt flat) terrain characteristic of the coast.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Presumably because it is a busy and important oil terminal 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 are reported from Umm Said, whereas the international airport only reports three hourly. This is a thermograph for the last 48 hours from Umm Said.
Latest Thermo-hygro graph
That weather in Qatar doesn’t look too severe at the moment for playing football, that’s if you can keep out of the sun which is easier said than done. Humidities are certainly higher because coming off the Persian Gulf but football beats coal mining and these are getting mighty well paid for running around kicking a ball for 90 minutes.
I hadn’t realised that the final wasn’t till the 18th of December – so we’ll never hear the end of it on TV for the next four week!!. As for the weather that looks set fair for the start of the completion.
Negative dew pointsDew pointThe dew point is the temperature to which air must be cooled to become saturated with water vapor, assuming constant air pressure and water content. tantalisingly close and edging into East Anglia this afternoon.
Two distinct areas of lower than average temperatures split by the above average warmth of the Baltic Sea this lunchtime. Notice how the fog that’s reluctant to clear over Ireland is depressing the temperature.
