West is Best

Philip has Manley on 8.6C to yesterday, and the NW tracker is currently on 8.74C. We should see NW tracker up to a little over 8.8C today and Manley to near 8.7C. Thereafter it should move upwards on Saturday, but a lot will then depend on the Sat night minima and Sunday maxima as to whether the NW tracker will just creep up to 9C.

Hi John - either you've had a Damascus Road experience or it's a typo? 15.1C would make it the warmest May ever by a mile. 13.9C in 1849 is the hottest ever May. Are you serious?! That would be absolutely astonishing!

Maybe the team could go through some of the easier names and post them up from time to time when appropriate conditions emerge. Roger J Smith might be a bit tricky though! :blink:

Sheer delight to see the NW headline :blink: :blink:

Roger ... absolutely, yes. On the other hand, why not discuss both? Macro and micro ...

We're heading for a major crisis in parts of southern England ... it's all very well wishing the Atlantic dead, but this isn't going to be funny. My heart says I want a long hot summer, but my mind says we badly need a lot more rainfall.

lol - I like the about 8.78C ! Let's see ... though we had something similar at the end of last month. I think it will be at least 8.8C by tomorrow midnight - probably more. Then it's a short hop up to to 9C. May be touch and go, I grant you.

Yes you're quite right - just bet a lot of people on here wouldn't say that for 0.5C below! Even so I'm pretty confident it will be more than 0.5C above average now that Philip has given Manley at 8.5C yesterday (which means at leat 8.6C today).

Nevertheless, above average OP and I bet your bottom dollar if it wound up 0.6C below average you would not be using the words 'close to average'. Don't pretend now! 8.7C on NW tracker now ... heading nicely for 9C by midnight on the 30th I think although Sunday may be a bit of a bummer. As you rightly say OP the official one is looking like it may lag behind the NW tracker. CORRECTION ... Philip is back and has updated climate uk. Up to yesterday he has the Manley CET at 8.5C, so you can add another 0.1C on since then. This means Manley is only 0.1C behind NW. http://www.climate-uk.com/

I agree. But throw out the tried and tested, universally available, surface temps at your peril. Someone uncharitable would just say it seems a convenient way to dodge the fact that the earth is getting alarmingly warmer ...

Well as it's not yet May I'm changing my prediction - and based on the synoptics. I'm going for a 12.6C. Think we might be in for a warm one ...

Well a string of 17C's today. I was completely wrong in thinking we might sneak a 20C - way out. However, in the quest for a 20C (a new fangled desire in my opinion) it's easy to forget that even a 17C is well above the average maximum for the time of year. Still, no getting away from the fact that I was wrong. The NW tracker is now on 8.6C. I really can't see much reason for it not making it up to 9C - but as has rightly been pointed out, it's likely to be a good 0.3C above the Manley figure. So those around 8.7C or 8.8C might be most confident at this stage! WIB

Yes I'm inclined to agree with this (and ChrisL). I do think 9C will be reached on this NW tracker, but I'd really not spotted the difference this month to Manley. It does look a good 0.3C ahead of it. I suspect we're going to see the first proper 20C today somewhere today ...

I don't know Reef. We had all this last month with a sharp rise in the last few days and some decrying the possibility that we'd see it get up close to 5C which it finally did on the Manley figure on the last day (Hadley at 4.9C). I don't really agree about the low minima, at least not at the moment. Mild tonight again and probably tomorrow night too. The temps after that look low for the minima to me on the GFS with all that cloud cover. I think 9C on the NW tracker is a fairly reasonable bet from here, especially with temps soaring tomorrow. Ah yes! Bear in mind though that those figures are 24 hours behind. Even so, it does look as if Manley is running a good 0.2C below the NW tracker. This hasn't happened for a few months.

I cry foul. You know as well as I do that series such as the CET did not have airborne temperature measurements in the mid C17th!!!! Come on - play fair! You can't appeal to a temperature measurement means that is 1. relatively new 2. very localised.

Hi SB - not sure how easy it is, or accurate, to pick his temps from the graph. I'd rather see his frontpage uploaded with the correct figure. The NW tracker has been excellent of late so I'm not expecting Manley/Hadley to be that far from the current 8.46C. Didn't reply to you ChrisL because had to catch a train, but I do think the CET will climb to near 9C from here (between 8.8C and 9.3C). Saturday and Sunday may be important - it will depend if they are as less warm as the latest 12z suggests. Edit - at 6.30 om it's now 8.48C so should easily pass 8.5C by midnight. That will leave 5 days. I think a rise of 0.1C is more than likely, so 9C or thereabouts really should be possible ... although that's on the NW tracker and if Philip's is a tad behind then it may not reach it.

Blast, The Halocene period may have been warmer (unproven), but what is without precedent so far as archaeologists and palaeontologists can tell is the speed of this warm up. I recall an expert suggestion that only the Ipswichian period could even compare, and this is highly contentious. It's unprecedented territory, and unchartered waters ... Were global warming to mean that each year was successively warmer than the previous one in a linear pattern, we would be at the threshold of Armageddon. The required temperature increases required to override all synoptic variation would need to be off the scale – probably something in the region of 10C warmer right across the globe. The point is not whether each year is successively warmer than the previous one, but whether there is a discernible trend – a pattern of rising temperatures through any given decade, or even century. That there is this to this point is of little debate, and you are being selective with your data in declaring with such lack of ambiguity that there has been no temperature increase in the last 20 years. Even the slight dip at the end of the 1990s does not compensate for the general warming trend, and the plain fact that the globabl temp was higher in 2000 than 1980. It has also continued to rise since 2000. The argument validly rages as to the cause of this increase, and whether, if natural, a cyclical correction is possible. To deny its existence entirely is the holding position of what Dave Cameron might call the loony fringe. Think about this logically, Blast. If we take GW as a reality for a moment (not, I believe that you do, but humour me for a moment) do you really think that a temp increase of 1F in the last 100 years would be enough to override all synoptic variations? If so, why? Why should a temp increase rule out the UK ever having a cold winter again? It might be less likely but ... impossible? Why? In some ways, the remarkable thing about winter 2005-6 at this stage for Europe is not that it was average-ish (below in places, above in others) but that given those synoptics it was not so much colder and more snowy. If GW does go on apace I will mark this last winter as one of the most significant pointers. It could be argued that given those synoptics we should have seen so much colder than an average winter. Of course, there is the possibility of a cyclical correction, a position I used to believe in, and if we do start to see a correction in the onward march of GW, with a reversion to ‘normality’ then winter 2005-6 will have been the first toe-dip into the newly chilly seas: the first average winter for a decade for many. My money is, sadly, on the GW position … but I don’t rule out the other. Only time will tell – something too many of us are too impatient to allow to play its hand. Mind you, if GW is really happening, time is also not something we can afford to be complacent with. Ah it's nice to be back!

Really chugging up slowly though Peter on the NW tracker. It's been a long slow haul through this month. The low cloud and fog around is not exactly enabling a fast rise. By the way ... my guess for the month was 9.1C ... but I'm beginning to be doubtful it'll reach that high. (Edit, now I'm properly back we can talk Spurs again. Brilliant last 2 performances 'eh? Fantastic against Arsenal. 4th spot ours ...?!)

Trying to picture this one (as I've not seen a snowflake so far this winter) ... little teeny weeny flakes, but lots of them, right? As opposed to big, big, flakes floating down softly? It's the kind of snow in the Canadian Rockies ... where I'm off in 4 weeks. Yippee. (Off topic, sorry)

Morning Stratos. I've been up nice and early in the big smoke this morning. Travelled from Wandsworth to Clapham to Waterloo, then surfaced at Paddington and ... ... not the faintest sign of snow. Well the rain might have had the vaguest notion of a sort of hint of off-white but I personally blame that on the pollution.

Rain in Wandsworth, Clapham and Waterloo ... I suppose the rain might have had a very very slight whitey sort-of tinge to it.

What a November that was. If we had that now I wonder how people would react? I can remember being in the west country with a biting easterly, sub-zero temps which, with windchill, felt like below -10C, and dry snow cutting into my face. I was doing a course on Listers before going to Africa and had to huddle round the pub fire wrapped up in everything I could lay my hands on (apart from the barmaid). Those were the days ...

Yep - atrocious weather in the west country. Just been on the phone to my other half who is on a train which left Exeter 30 mins ago. They have had to slow to a crawl because of driving torrential rain and winds, and she reports water coming through the roof of the First Great Western carriage

Hi, yes I'm offended. But I'm not a girl so it's fine to be insulting 'eh?

Several problems I think with this line of argument. First, as January Snowstorm pointed out, soil temps are very high. This should not be belittled as a major source of warming. Second, air temps cannot simply switch if there is no serious cold source - as Steve Murr has pointed out. I don't like the look of the way warm air is due to force back the cold pooling over Greenland. Then, third, there are the seas. I agree with people that these look much more interesting in the key GIN-corridor area this year, and these are a sign of hope. Then, fourth, the statistics. They might not mean much, but those three previous points contribute to the fact that it is extremely rare in weather history to have sudden switches of the magnitude required to make this a properly cold winter. In that sense I agree with JS on this. But there are still some signs for hope imho. Not all is quite lost yet.