I’m sure that there should have been at least one named storm 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. in such a windy month as November 2022 was. Even the French managed to come up with one – storm Claudio (31 October – 2 November).
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.
5 December 2022 – 09 UTC analysis Read More »
Dear Diary,
It’s no wonder that November 2022 was both windy, wet and mild 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.. The Icelandic low was over 19 hPahPa A Hectopascal is the SI unit of pressure and identical to the Millibar lower and a little further to the SW than usual, whilst the Azores high was 2 hPa higher than the LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO., which squeezed the SW flow even tighter. Pressure was close to 10 hPa above average for the month across northern Scandinavia.
November 2022 – Mean Pressure & Anomalies Read More »
Dear Diary,
I thought that I’d post my usual Christmas grid of the last 112 mean temperature anomaly charts for each December from 1910 to 2021.
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to anyone who comes across it.
Mean temperature anomalies – December 1910-2021 Read More »
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.
UK 3 Month Outlook – Winter 2022-23 [DJF] Read More »
Dear Diary,
The days of air frostair frost An air frost occurs when the temperature of the air falls below 0.0°C and ground frost were well down on their respective LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. for all regions, thanks to the very mild weather. I would have like to have added a colour contoured map but 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 don’t seem to generate them anymore for frost. Still plenty of sites still to report their first frost, some of them inland as well. 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. records are never guaranteed to be 100% complete, so I may have missed the odd one because either the value or the whole observation at 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). was missing. I could now, at least 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. that is, generate totals from the 21-09 UTC extremes now that they are finally being included.
Autumn 2022 [SON] – Days of Frost Read More »
Dear Diary,
I thought that I would take a quick look at what the climate has been doing since 2000 closer to home by means of 12 month moving averages of the gridded climate data for the North of Scotland and which I download 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. Mean temperatures have edged fractionally warmer in the last 20 years, whilst annual precipitation has slightly decreased by 6mm per decade, sunshine has increased by 15 hours per decade. Nothing for Greta ThunbergGreta Thunberg Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg (born 3 January 2003) is a Swedish environmental activist who is known for challenging world leaders to take immediate action for climate change mitigation to get overly worked up about there then, but linear trends can be deceptive though, and I really should have used a thirty, and not a twenty year period, but what the hell, no one is reading this anyway.
The Climate of Northern Scotland since 2000 Read More »
Dear Diary,
That warm plume from Algeria to Scandinavia which we’ve seen so much of this year is evident once again in this months anomalies. Central Saharan Africa was colder than average again, I’m certain that there’s some kind of tie in with temperatures in this region and Atlantic tropical cyclones. The Baffin Sea was exceptionally cold thanks to the NW flow that dominated up there for much of the month. And guess what, much of Greenland and the Greenland sea was exceptionally mild once again.
November 2022 – Temperature anomalies Read More »
Dear Diary,
The lowest anomalies at lunchtime, 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. 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.
Temperature Anomalies 12 UTC 2 Dec 2022 Read More »
Dear Diary,
I swear 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 are getting faster at publishing these charts and gridded climate data. You always had to wait at least a couple of days in years gone by but now they’re instantly available.
November 2022 – Weather Summary Read More »
Dear Diary,
2022 proved to be a below average season in the North Atlantic for the first since 2015. The pundits predictions of an above active season were all proved incorrect, and that, despite the SSTSST Sea Surface Temperatures over a large parts of the spawning ground for tropical cyclones being well above the LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.. Combined ACEACE Accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) is a metric used by various agencies to express the energy released by a tropical cyclone during its lifetime. It is calculated by summing the square of a tropical cyclone's maximum sustained winds, measured every six hours. The resulting total can be divided by 10,000 to make it more manageable, or added to other totals in order to work out a total for a particular group of storms. is on the increase, but the linear trend in the bar chart below might be a little misleading, in as much as it’s comparing the pre-satellite era with the increasingly sophisticated satellite era from 1980 onward. The NHC these days don’t miss a thing with their eyes-in-the-sky, and quite a few nascent tropical cyclones life is less than 36 hours. Warmer seas are only one part of the equation in the equation of hurricane frequency, and maybe there are a few factors we don’t even know about that are just as important and have never been considered.
Tropical Cyclone Season – 2022 Read More »
Dear Diary,
Unsurprisingly, Autumn 2022 [SONSON Meteorological 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 LTALTA Long 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.
Autumn 2022 [SON] – Third warmest since 1659 Read More »
Dear Diary,
November 2022 was the joint fifth warmest in Central England since 1659 with a mean temperature of 9.2°C which was 2.8°C higher that the 1659-2020 LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.. November was the eighteenth month with above average mean temperature in Central England.
November 2022 – Fifth joint warmest since 1659 Read More »
Dear Diary,
There’s no getting away from it that no matter which direction cold air will affect the country, be it from the east, northeast or north in the coming days, it will have to come across seas with temperatures that are several degrees above their LTALTA Long Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. for this time of year. Things are starting to cooling down though and it’s good to see the reappearance of the cold blob in mid-Atlantic (see graph of SSTSST Sea Surface Temperatures below) where SST have been falling since the end of September, and the cooler waters in the Norwegian Sea to the north of the Faroes and Shetlands are also managing to hang in there as well.
Latest SST anomalies – 28 Nov Read More »
Dear Diary,
Yet another mild month 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.. 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.
November 2022 – Temperature Read More »
Dear Diary,
A number of wet spots 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., but the wettest of them was Valentia with 348 mm of rain. The north of Scotland had quite a dry month in contrast to parts of Aberdeenshire which were very wet. The above average rain across the south should have finally but paid to the dry spell. The 32 mm at Wick should be treated with some caution as I only received 71% of their observations.
November 2022 – Rainfall Read More »
Dear Diary,
CFCF Chris Fawkes is a BBC Weather Forecaster, presenting across all the BBC’s channels. believes for some reason that the weather station in Aviemore is up at about “three or four hundred metres”. The station height at Aviemore in reality is just 220 metres AMSLAMSL The height Above Mean Sea Level., not on top of a hill, but in the Spey valley and within a kilometre of the river itself. That’s what makes it such a great frost hollow in the shelter and shadow of rising ground the other side of the A9 to its west. In fact only one of the four sites he calls “higher communities” are that high, Merthyr Tydfil is at ~180 M, Buxton ~305 M and Enniskillen ~51 M.
CF, thinking that Aviemore is some kind of hill station will have no doubt coloured is thinking of observations from their over the years, but then again he does suffer from Scotia MyopiaScotia Myopia The inability to recognise the weather in Scotland in any of their forecasts, often preferring to talk about anywhere else in the UK, but usually the SE of England. Often incurable. quite severely.
Is Aviemore on top of a hill? Read More »
Dear Diary,
A lovely Mackerel sky in the form of a sheet of ACAC Altocumulus clouds are generally associated with settled weather and will normally appear white or grey with shading.
Height of base: 7,000 - 18,000 ft
Shape: Bands or areas of individual cells
Latin: altum - height; cumulus - heap
Altocumulus clouds are small mid-level layers or patches of clouds, called cloudlets, which most commonly exist in the shape of rounded clumps. There are many varieties of altocumulus, however, meaning they can appear in a range of shapes. Altocumulus are made up of a mix of ice and water, giving them a slightly more ethereal appearance than the big and fluffy lower level cumulus. to the south this lunchtime looking from the StrathpefferStrathpeffer Strathpeffer (Scottish Gaelic: Srath Pheofhair) is a village and spa town in Easter Ross, Highland, Scotland, with a population of 1,469.-Contin road. Temperature here in the strath at 3 pm still only 2°C. Living as we do in the dip I forget there are some wonderful vistas locally – I need to get out more.
Sheet of AC this lunchtime Read More »
Dear Diary,
Quite a good visible satellite image of Scotland for the archives. That low cloud looks like it’s slowly edging northeastward and would explain those contradictory temperature charts this lunchtime from 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. for 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). tomorrow. Look at the length of the shadow that upper cloud is casting across the Grampians or am I imagining things, and that small vortex to the east of the Orkneys.
Visible satellite image Read More »
Dear Diary,
Temperatures are only just going to manage to get up above freezing for a short while across the Highlands this afternoon. The air temperature at Aviemore was -1.2°C at 1100 UTCUTC Coordinated Universal Time or UTC is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about 1 second of mean solar time (such as UT1) at 0° longitude (at the IERS Reference Meridian as the currently used prime meridian) and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. It is effectively a successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)., and 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. it’s just 2.2°C at 1215 UTC. Just caught the latest forecast from 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. on the News Channel. SKLSKL Sarah Keith-Lucas an English meteorologist and BBC weather presenter reckons that it won’t be quite as cold as last night with only a patchy frost overnight particular across Scotland, and then goes onto show this rather contradictory graphic of temperatures at 06 UTC, with labels of temperature that bare no relation to the NWPNWP Numerical weather prediction uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. blue contoured data that they overlay on the chart which also seems to be missing a few labels as well.
With a maximum of 2°C so far today I would make an educated guess that we’ll see a widespread moderate frost across the Highlands overnight and not at all patchy.
Contradictory temperature charts Read More »
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 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).. 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 StrathpefferStrathpeffer Strathpeffer (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.
Highland temperatures Read More »
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.
No Beast from the East Read More »
Dear Diary
I missed this lovely satellite image today whilst clearing leaves out of the gutters and chopping sticks for the fire. The sharp back edge to the frontal cloud is casting a shadow northward across the Lake District and NENE North East England. Meanwhile troughs within the colder air, containing CBCB Cumulonimbus cloud. Well-developed cumulonimbus clouds are characterized by a flat, anvil-like top and thunderstorms, are running into western Scotland and Ireland from the west. Meanwhile 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 much of southern and eastern Scotland, it’s remained dry with long sunny spells
Back edge of front casting shadow Read More »
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.“.
