Timmytour

Seems to have been a cool February - March in Alaska......

#StopTheCount !!!!

Looking at some of the model runs it would seem as if, although the clocks have gone forward an hour, the calendar has gone back three months!

Last time I remember snow hanging around in April was 2013, but it was snow that had fallen in March! Looks to me like fairly similar conditions being modelled in that it won't be cold enough to generate snow (down south anyway) but ,if there had been snow around, it wouldn't have been disappearing too fast

It will probably end up being spot on if you change it though!

The remarkable thing - if we do end getting an Easter freeze - will be the consistency of the modelling.... bringing it home from the far reaches of FI. Something that would never happen in winter!

I'd be doing quite well with my guesses lately I fancy if every month ended 5 days before it actually does!

Easterly Sunday!

At the moment looks like we could be heading for the chilliest first ten days of April since 2013 and maybe even only the second sub 5.5C mean CET in 35 years. The rolling CET for the first 10 days of April doesn't look like a lot of other periods to me where the warming is evident from the early nineties and even a little stalled in later years. Instead it seemed to take until the start of this decade to reclaim the heights that were already reached in the early sixties, and only since then have new heights been established. So, although a cold start to April may be overdue and the models are leaning towards it, another horse in the race with form has to be one that helps push that rolling average ever upwards, or at least maintains it,

Decidedly average would be my opinion. The period Sept 21st to March 20th (projecting a mean 6.6C for March) for 202/21 is in the colder half of this century's mean CET's but not far off the middle.

oops...start again,,,can't delete table below!

Although Easter 1975 was in March, it wasn't until after the first week of April that the school Easter holidays were over. I can well remember how, having not done a stroke of homework until the monday before the return to school, my plans to fill that day by doing homework were wrecked by 5 inches of snow falling. So much that Hertfordshire made it into the national news for the amount of snow we'd had. It was heaven closely followed by hell the next day when it had all melted and much of my homework remained undone as I travelled into school!! I'm guessing this must have been the chart the day before that return to school...

I don't care about Easter, I've got my fingers crossed for it being dry and warm in the gardens of English pubs on 12th April!

This seems to happen very occasionally. Is it possible it's the responsibility of just one person and every time they have a break, it gets left until their return?

We often see historical cold periods of several years of low annual CETs and can assign particular reasons to them, such as significant volcanic explosions. And of course the increase in annual mean CETs over the last thirty years is assigned to climate change and the various contributing factors that sit behind that . For me, the latter period really kicked in during the late eighties. Both 1989 (10.22%) and 1990 (10.76%) had annual CETs that were 10% or more above what the rolling thirty year average had been up until the preceding year. Yet they are the only two years since 1949 to do that. With 1921 there have been four such occasions in the last 120 years. Yet in the 19th century there were 11 such occasions. In fact, if you rank each years by Annual CET of Year x / The 30 year rolling average up to the year X-1 , the only year since 1960 apart from 1989 and 1990 which makes the top 30 is 1997 which scrapes into it at 8.81%. Now I guess it's harder for years to get that degree warmer than a working average when the working average itself is getting so much warmer all the time. But what I'm curious about is the years that were relatively so warm in different times. What was the reasoning behind it, if you like the counter argument to volcanic activity? For example 8 years within a 50 year period in the 19th Century which saw mean CET's above 10C at a time when the normal average was more like 9C. 1834 was remarkable. Only January and May within the year could be regarded as particularly warm (and yet May was 2C down on the previous year!!!) but it rolled in with an annual value of 10.51C, a year that would not look out of place in today's warming climate. In fact it beat the record of 1733 just over a 100 years prior which came in at 10.5C , and not other year came within a tenth of a centigrade until 1921. Do we know why those years were some warm relative to their time?

I can't help reading that in a Marlon Brando On-The-Waterfront-Style voice

Cascadia fault another.... No one realised how big an earthquake threat existed in the American Northwest until finally scientist pieced together the evidence of sea creature fossils found 100s of miles from the sea and strange Red Indian folklore and legends, with the records meticulously kept by the Japanese for centuries and one in particular they had around the 1700 mark of the "tsunami from nowhere!". It turned out that a huge earthquake had hit just off the coast of the Northwest US, measuring over 9 on the richter scale. It's another "anyday now" scenario. Like a lot of these things it will mean disaster on a regional scale. Yes Yellowstone would be a larger regional scale, but it would be the end of Man, just a helluva lot of men, women and children, and comfort levels. I do sometimes wonder what the impact the Boxing Day Tsunami would have had on Europe without any news media? I think hardly any at all!

Months?????

Personally I think not just VEI6 is needed but also a frequency of them. After all the last VEI6 was Mount Pinatubo in 1991 which was the biggest since the Krakatoa eruption in 1883, and temperatures have, if anything, accelerated since then. But that came in isolation in the last 108 years whereas 1912 which saw the last previous VEI6, was the fourth in 104 years. I don't think the relative lack of powerful eruptions is the overriding factor in global warming, but I think it makes a contribution towards it.

That's a long run of 31 successive years. The longest such run in the 20th Century was only 13 which 1970 bought to an end and became the first of five in the next 20 years which went 1961-90 average - 1 below. There were longer runs in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 19th did have a run from 1850 to 1878 in which only 1860 went 1C under the 1961-90 average, with the 18 years after it providing its longest run. The 18th century had a run of 18 such years which ended in 1731. It's also worth noting it took 20 years in the history of recording CETs before an April was measured with such a low mean CET,( 1678 ) though the measuring in the 17th Century days was maybe subject to a measure of salt!

I'm gonna go for a slight buckling of the trend this year with some warm periods in April overcome by cool and even cold periods to produce a relatively cool CET of 7.7C with 77mm of rain

April Mean CETs on the up and up this century.....

800 years since a volcano in that region last erupted. It does make you wonder how climate is modelled against such events.