Yarmy

They still do them, they just don't have a big PR release anymore. That the LRFs aren't very good is no great shame: no-one's are. We ought to be proud of having a world-leading meteorological service in this country, yet somehow...

AAAAARRRGGHHH!

So 'widely around average'. Who says LRFs are useless! Didn't he forecast a below average summer? It's in the seasonal forecast thread somewhere. Here we go: http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/399211/Another-washout-summer-on-its-way-as-forecasters-predict-grey-skies-and-more-rain LOL. And people pay for this stuff.

Christ, that first chart is oMEGA. An LP system bigger than Europe. Is this reanalysis stuff accurate?

Absolutely, especially under a crystal azure sky with a weak milky sun just above the horizon. It really doesn't get better than that.

The Maunder Minimum lasted for 70 years and that seems to be where we're headed. http://www.leif.org/research/apjl2012-Liv-Penn-Svalg.pdf "By extrapolating our sunspot formation fraction to the predicted peak of Cycle 24 (in mid-2013) the sunspot formation fraction would be approaching 0.5. This suggests a rather small SSN for this cycle, in agreement with some recent Cycle 24 predictions (Svalgaard et al. 2005; Hathaway 2012). And while there is no physical mechanism which suggests that we should extrapolate further, it is fascinating to see that the sunspot formation fraction would drop below 0.2 by 2020. This would suggest that although magnetic flux would be erupting at the solar surface during Cycle 25, only a small fraction of it would be strong enough to form visible sunspots or pores. Such behavior would be highly unusual, since such a small solar maximum has not been observed since the Maunder Minimum. During that period from roughly 1645 to 1715, few sunspots were observed, although cosmic-ray studies suggest the Sun did have a functioning magnetic activity cycle (Usoskin et al. 2001); this is consistent with the scenario provided by our fit extraolation. A recent study of sunspot records suggests that the Maunder Minimum began with two small sunspot cycles with roughly the same amplitude as predicted by our extrapolation for Cycle 25 (Vaquero et al. 2011). Finally, it is interesting to note that there seems to be a strange lack of the normal precursors for Cycle 25 as observed with helioseismic and coronal emission line indicators (Hill et al. 2011; Altrock 2011)." Interesting times ahead alright, but I'm not personally convinced that we are heading into the freezer. Will be fun watching, though.

Ok, it just worked for me. It's the Dalton Minimum he shows, not the Maunder. Temperatures certainly dropped over the period, but the excessively cold 1816 (the year without a Summer) was strongly influenced by this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora It's the worth noting too that SC5 has large error bars in its certainty, so a straight comparison with SC24 is a little bit dubious.

I believe the records for SC5 are very sparse, so it's hard to compare really. It looks likely that we are heading into a Maunder-style grand minimum though, and I expect SC25 to be very weak. We'll find out what that means for the climate in the next few decades.

Is that Humberto there sucking all the juice out of the AZH to clear the way for another low to come our way?

15.7, oh dear.

That's why the k-factor was introduced! Did you read the paper? The exact telescope that Wolf used is still being used today to do counts.

That is what the whole paper is about though. There is a small army of solar physicists involved in an ongoing project to get the numbers right: http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home

At face value, it looks cooler, but you'd have to find the overall NH 850hPA temp anomalies (if such a record exists) and compare them.

Video doesn't work for me on Safari on a Mac, Safari on an iPad, IE10 on a Windows 7 machine, or Firefox on an Windows XP machine.

Was it that unusual though (figure 1 right hand panel)? http://www.leif.org/research/IAUS286-Mendoza-Svalgaard.pdf The next few decades will be a good experiment though, there's no doubt about that.

Not all. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.173.2179&rep=rep1&type=pdf The SSN count has probably been suppressed further by the Livingston-Penn effect: http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png It seems possible that SC25 will be very weak indeed. Whether that will have any significant effect on our climate though, I'm not so sure.

They count every speck because that's the right way to do it. A factor of 0.6 is applied to the raw count to calibrate it back to the original Wolf method (who didn't count small spots). The factor was arrived at after about 16 years of observation overlap with Wolf's assistant Wolfer who (correctly) counted every spot he could see using his own telescope. The factor obviously depended on Wolf himself (his eyesight, telescope, etc) and since he is dead it can now never be measured. In general though the historic SSN record is wrong and needs adjusting. This paper explains why and what needs to be done to resolve it: http://www.leif.org/research/IAUS286-Mendoza-Svalgaard.pdf

Just to reiterate yesterday's point, these are the sort of the charts I'm looking for at this stage of the year. Pleasantly warm and settled for us, but Siberia going into the freezer and Scandinavia/Russia getting a taste of it to set the building blocks for Winter. Of course, it won't happen because it's T324, but it would be a useful pattern to get into. Then come late November the AZH can do one and head to Greenland.

I recently had a look through the model and prediction threads for late November 09. It was quite amusing how much doom-mongering was going on: "the Jet's heading North, it's all going wrong", "2008/2009 was just a cold blip"' etc. And a few weeks later...

Agree. If you're chasing a cold winter (and I will be in a couple of month's time) then you really want those cold uppers distributed extensively to Siberia at the moment so that the snowcover can start to build and the continent can cool. Here they aren't going to deliver anything (unless cool grey murk is your thing).

Keep in mind that they change frequently, so Gaz's mild early December is now cold (although not excessively). And by the time you've read this it will probably be showing a full on Bartlett.

The GFS 06z is actually a slight improvement over the 0z from T168 with the AZH adjusted eastwards. Not that it makes a huge difference to us.

That puts the whole Syria thing into perspective.

Most people on here would kill for an above average Canadian winter in the UK!

Looks nailed on now: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCPAT4+shtml/091731.shtml?