yorkschris

Got back on Wednesday from a week in the south west. Just have to say that it was a glorious sunny experience - we would have been lucky to have that much sun in a summer week. At Salcombe - Wednesday 5th, cloudless and sunny, Thursday 6th 90% sunny, Friday 7th cloudless and sunny. Mid Devon - Saturday 8th - cloudless and sunny, Sunday 9th - sunny am, sunny intervals pm. Bude - Monday 10th sunny, Tuesday 11th sunny. Got back to Yorkshire and was as tanned as if I'd been to the Med - even though temperatures were not that high. Met Office weather forecasts were poor and much too pessimistic - when we arrived they suggested we would have a cloudy week!

But I can remember well the forecasts on the Met Office web-site prior to Doris No1 and we were warned of a potential 'storm' with severe impacts, so you can hardly blame the newspapers for taking up the name - they didn't invent it and must have asked someone what the next name was. The fact that with 24 hours to go it headed south across Biscay and the Met Office didn't officially name it because its impacts didn't affect the UK just goes to show how meaningless it is. And Ewan HASN'T been named and used as such by our Met Office; it has been named and used by the Irish Met Office and any reference on our Met Office web-site makes clear that this storm name and choice is the Irish Met Office only. This further illustrates to me the confusion and farce. Compare the hurricane situation (from which this naming idea came) hurricane 'Camille' doesn't cease to be a hurricane with that name if it misses a particular country, it is a hurricane with that name as long as it is a hurricane.

Don't you think this storm-naming has become a farce. Here in Yorkshire on at least two occasions in the last month we have had the worst gales and rain on days when, apparently, there is no named storm. Then we were told that 'Doris' was arriving about two weeks ago, only it did a 'body swerve' into France and then the Met office denied they had ever officially called it Doris, so re-used the name this last week. Now we have Ewen, but I'm not even sure that the UK Met office is using that name - at least yet - whereas Met Eireann is....????? I'm really not sure this naming process adds anything to the weather forecasts.

Further to the Broadness issue. It's difficult to get a clear picture from the satellite of the nature of the geography of the location but from the large scale OS map it looks as though the Met Office monitoring site at Gravesend Broadness is located within a small 'bowl' of land, enclosed to North and East by embankments and then - across a creek to the south - by more embankments. The creek itself would appear to be dry mudflats at low tide .... A really very strange location for a met office monitoring station and likely to produce some atypical readings I would have thought.

Interesting ideas, 'Evening Thunder". Definitely something odd at this site. My quick examination data on Wunderground of six amateur weather stations close to Gravesend Broadness showed the following: Mean Max of the six stations on 13th 32.1C and on 14th 28.4c; Maxima at Gravesend Broadness 34,4 and 28.2C..... So on the 13th Broadness was 2.3C warmer than the mean for six other sites in the local area, but on the 14th it was 0.2C COOLER?? I still don't understand why such a weird location was chosen by the Met Office and why its rather anomalous readings still get into the official record books..... Seems to me that the Met Office has spent recent years casting aside a lot of historic records that came from stations where it considers the high temperatures anomalous (even if they were measured in Stevenson Screens eg. the record of 35.6c from Gunby, Lincolnshire in July 1959), yet Gravesend Broadness similarly gives these odd readings on certain hot days.

I always think there is something very strange about Gravesend Broadness. It seems to feature an incredibly large amount of times in the list of 'highest' (sic) temperatures in recent years and has done so again this week - 34,4C on 13th. A general concern I have is that instinctively it does not 'feel' like the location you'd expect to see the highest temperatures. Typically in the London area isn't it stations more to the west and 'inland' you'd expect to be the warmest - not least because winds in heatwaves tend to be from the south to east quadrant? The other point is that the location of Broadness is right at the end of a peninsula jutting out into the Thames - where are the 'sea/river' breeze effects you might expect? Viewing the location of the station in 'Bing' appears to show an industrial type location, possibly enclosed in embankments and close to tidal mudflats -not exactly the most neutral location. In addition, it was low tide at the time of the highest temperature on 13th September - coincidence? The other thing that does not stack up is that if you check on 'Underground' there are many amateur stations that typically read higher (some times much higher) than professional Met office stations in warm conditions - yet on 13th September the typical temperatures they were showing close to the Thames in North Kent and South Essex was 30-32C..... There is something very odd if not 'fishy' about this site and the record temperatures it keeps recording

Have to feel sorry for those spending their half-term holiday on the coast. Looking at the maximum temperatures from Fylingdales and Loftus Samos the mean maximum temperature for the last 10 days (24 May to 2 June) has been only 10.7C at both stations. For comparison the mean maximum for the whole of December was 10.5C at Fylingdales and in the 10 day period up to Christmas (16th to 25th Dec) the mean maximum was 11.4C at Fylingdales and 10.9C at Loftus - So It is as cold as Christmas!