al78
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Posts posted by al78
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17 hours ago, johnholmes said:
I suppose the definition of 'poor' for each of our own homes is open to a wide variation of expectation. I hardly think the London area over the period you comment on has had 'poor' weather be it temperatures each afternoon, sunshine or rainfall amounts but cel a vie I suppose.
June was average over the SE, and in my area had the odd sunny day interspersed with cloudy days. The first half of the month was dry, the rain arrived in the second half. July has been a poor summer month, not as bad as the NW or Wales, but still poor. Struggling to get to 20C in SE England at the climatologically warmest time of the year, and 50 hours if sun in 15 days is a poor summer month. We've been blessed with two warm/hot sunny days, it is 17C and cloudy this morning, and is forecast to stay that temperature all day with no sun and occasional drizzle. That is characteristic of a tropical maritime air mass in October or November.
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18 hours ago, B87 said:
It's been a poor July in the SE as well though - cool and incredibly cloudy.
I agree. Friday and Saturday just gone is the only time I have felt proper warmth this month. Much of the month has been a clag-fest.
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2 hours ago, DAVID SNOW said:
Sunny spells with temps around average, nothing to moan about.
Apart from no summer storms.
Above average (25-26C) in the south east yesterday and today. Punishment weather comes in tomorrow.
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1 hour ago, Relativistic said:
This argument is slightly flawed since coin tosses are uncorrelated events. A run of poor Augusts, on the other hand, could be a response to a shift in climatic state initiated by, for example, an increase in greenhouse-gas concentrations. In the coin analogy, that could be like weighting the coin on one side so as to favour a particular outcome (i.e. the results become correlated). Equally, a particular climatic state might have no effect whatsoever -- in which case the coin analogy holds -- but there is no way of knowing that for sure.
You could be right if a warming Arctic is leading to more high latitude blocking in summer, which tends to send the jet stream south over the UK or put the UK under a trough. I think the jury is out on whether that can be seen to be happening now though. It does seem that summer Greenland blocking has become more frequent since the very low Arctic sea ice extent in 2007.
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/joc.4673
I would still say that even if UK summer months have become biased towards poorness, it does not justify automatically writing off this August, because the weather can be thought of as probabilistic in nature. A bias towards a poor summer month does not exclude the possibility of a decent summer month, in the same way that a weighted die might be more likely that 1/6 to throw a six, but it won't necessarily always produce a six on any one throw (reminds me of the Bond film Octopussy).
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4 hours ago, B87 said:
Because it's a very safe bet these days.
It's been 17 years since the last hot August, and since the month went downhill in 2006, we've only had 6 that were average or warmer than average. The rest have been cool, cloudy, poor excuses of summer months. 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2017 especially.
This August will need to average 25c+ and 230 hours of sun or more to save the summer.
Just watch it struggle with 21-22c average highs and 150 hours of sun.
If you toss a coin and it comes up heads 10 times in a row, does that mean it will come up heads next time?
What happened last August, the August before that, or any of the previous 17 Augusts has no bearing on what this August will turn out like. The UK weather is not that predictable.
Six out of the last 14 have been average or warmer than average. If you use tercile boundaries to define below average/average/above average, then over a large number of years, you would expect August to fall in each categor one third of the time. For 14 years, you should expect about 4-5 years of poor Augusts, 4-5 years of average Augusts, and 4-5 years of good Augusts. Six average or warmer than average is a bit below 8-10, but not significantly so because of the small sample size. This depends on whether you are defining above-average, average and below-average using objective data (e.g. CET and hadUKP), or subjectively going by your own definition of what a good August means.
Hot Hand Fallacy
WWW.LOGICALLYFALLACIOUS.COMThe hot hand fallacy is the irrational belief that if you win or lose several chance games in a row, you are either “hot” or “cold,” respectively, meaning that the...-
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13 hours ago, B87 said:
It's certainly looking like this summer could rival 2007 for cloudiness. June only managed 175 hours here, and it'll be a miracle if July even reaches 150. I don't want to think about how bad August will be.
A ridiculous 67 hours of sun so far this month, while just 200 miles away Paris is on 115 hours. Both average 212 hours in July.
What makes you so certain that August will be bad?
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38 minutes ago, East Lancs Rain said:
Not really, can you think of a winter where it’s been mild in December and January but cold in February? I can’t.
Going by CET since 1950:
1974/5
2017/8
It doesn't happen very often, that is because you are specifying exactly mild-mild-cold. There are more winters with one mild month and one or two cold or near average months.
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2 hours ago, Sunny76 said:
Yeah, but I’m getting fed up hearing about it. There’s never any good news to having better weather and warmer temps.
Colder weather doesn’t always mean better either. More people die of the cold every year compared to heat related deaths. Even in our milder winters, I would argue, more people still die due to cold damp conditions, but nobody wants to talk about that.
Far from clear: This is the wrong thread for this discussion though.
In any case, sometimes the truth is inconvenient. Ignoring it or denying it doesn't make it go away, so best to deal with it.
Will climate change bring benefits from reduced cold-related mortality? Insights from the latest epidemiological research « RealClimate
WWW.REALCLIMATE.ORGGuest post by Veronika Huber Climate skeptics sometimes like to claim that although global warming will lead to more deaths from heat, it will overall save lives... -
11 minutes ago, Sunny76 said:
I take these stories with a pinch of salt. This summer has been appalling so far.
That article is looking globally, not specifically the UK, and one poor summer does not defy projections.
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I haven't checked to see if someone has already posted this, but the 700mb geopotential height anomaly from 1st to 14th July looks like the anomalous northwesterly pattern, and explains why temperatures have been suppressed.
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2 hours ago, mathematician said:
To be honest, the kind of summer you describe is not our British summer and I don't think it will ever be. If you expect something like that you set yourself up for disappointment.
Like someone else has written our small island is neither Dubai nor Siberia.
The only reason why people get so excited about snow and heat/thunderstorms is because of its rarity in the UK. If we had a continental climate we'd get those every year and no-one would bat an eyelid.
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16 minutes ago, qwertyK said:
I liked autumn last year. November was really cold, at least here in the south. Frost, Maxima in single figures, it was a welcome change
You must have been in a microclimate. Autumn last year was a damp clag-fest, the fifth wettest on record. November was below average in temperature but wasn't really cold.
Record breaking rainfall - for some
WWW.METOFFICE.GOV.UKMany people in England will remember Autumn 2019 as a very wet season, but this hasn’t been the case across the whole of the UK.-
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53 minutes ago, Sunny76 said:
Yeah, but that means another mild winter.
There isn't any significant correlation between the temperature anomaly in September or October and the upcoming winter using the Central England Temperature data, at least from 1950-2019.
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7 hours ago, East Lancs Rain said:
Even the Lake District can expect some warm and sunny weather on some days during the spring and summer. I visited Keswick in early July last year and the weather was cracking, dry, mostly sunny and very warm.
However this summer there has barely been any warm and sunny weather in the north west region.
I don't rank July as a great month for taking a hiking holiday in the UK. I stopped going to Scotland in July because it was inevitably five out of seven days of clag and one of two decent days when I could get a view. I now go to Scotland in May or June, which are climatologically the sunniest months, although last June had little interest in climatology when I was up there.
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1 hour ago, Alderc said:
It’s not a complete N/S split, we are averaging nearly 2c below average for maxes and sunshine is only about 68hrs month to date. Had that in the last 4 days of May.....
You are right, even in the SE it is mediocre to sub par, but I get the impression it is less bad here. My family live in Salford, and going by some of the posts on here, I suspect they've been experiencing late October weather for the last month or so.
You couldn't make it up, COVID restrictions easing, weather turns pants.
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A nice warm sunny day yesterday, now the punishment weather has set in. Another summer day needing the lights on at solar noon. It is noticeablee just how dull many of the days have been, and struggling to get past 20C in the south east at climatologiocally the warmest time of the year is a bit ridiculous.
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15 hours ago, damianslaw said:
Right, I'm going to have a moan. Getting fed up with the cloud - days and days with very little sun. Also cool yet again. This is tiring now.
I thought you'd be used to that in the Lake District. Hilly areas in the west of the UK are always going to catch the cloud and rain, that is why they are the wettest places.
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Forgot to add, a supercell over Earley (Reading) in June 1998. Rain coming down like a waterfall, an inch in 15 minutes at the University weather station. Students union with its entrance located at the bottom of a slope flooded. Housemate came in reporting structural damage in the area. Peak rainfall rates near 160 mm/hr just north of Reading.
TWISTER IN SUBURBIA; Families tell of terror as freak tornado leaves trail of havoc. - Free Online Library
WWW.THEFREELIBRARY.COMFree Online Library: TWISTER IN SUBURBIA; Families tell of terror as freak tornado leaves trail of havoc.(News) by "The Mirror (London, England)"... -
My group predicted a colder than average winter just gone, using QBO and solar cycle as predictors. Unfortunately the normal downward propagation of the QBO cycle was disrupted in autumn, so it never got into the phase conducive for mid/high latitude blocking, and we had one of the least frosty winters I can remember. There was a similar QBO disruption in 2015/16. If these are going to become more common, that is going to throw out whatever marginal skill there is in the winter NAO seasonal forecasts.
I think SSTs in the Pacific also have some effect on the position of the winter jet stream. Warm anomalies can perturb the jet causing a wave train downstream putting the UK under a ridge (positive NAO) or a trough (negative NAO).
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Golf ball sized hail, around the mid 1980's in Salford (I was six years old at the time).
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Says a lot about our modern day climate if we have autumn chat in July. Have we really given up hope of ever having a warm sunny August?
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3 hours ago, Atmogenic said:
I don't know what's worse, it being summer and never having actual good temperatures or it being winter and never having snow
The former by far. Snow is just eye candy, it causes disruption when it gets compressed into ice, and sends the heating bills up. A mild winter has the possible interest of windstorms, although they can also be disruptive. Summer on the other hand is a time when people like to do outdoor activities and enjoy the sun, and if summer arrives and it is a cool clag fest, it is inevitably disappoiting, especially as the next season along is autumn, so climatologically the weather is only going to deteriorate, at least after a grotty winter there is the hope of a nice spring and warm summer.
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7 hours ago, Evening thunder said:
Is this really the worst summer people can remember in places like Yorkshire and Hampshire i.e. worse than 2012?
I suppose the weather can vary a lot around the country.. however here 2012 gave 186mm of rain in June, then 74mm in 24 hours on the 6-7th July with severe flooding, and a max of 14.2C (I was in Holland with 27C and sunshine ironically).
In 2012, a whopping 3 days had exceeded 20C by this date, and only by the 23rd July, did that rise above 4 days.
June 2012 mean max: 17.4C
This year, 13 days above 20C so far, 4 above 25C. 96mm in June, 7.8mm so far in July.
June 2020 mean max: 19.9C.
Not amazing but much better than 2012 here.This summer is not a patch on 2012 so far for grottiness. June 2012 was horrible, dull and very wet. July so far has been dull and cool, but mostly dry. I have an allotment and the weather this summer is good for working outdoors, pleasantly cool enough to not get sweaty, and just enough rain that I don't have the silly situation of having to dump 300 litres of water on my crops every week like I did in April and May. If the second half of summer carries on like July so far I agree it would be a poor one overall, but it is very rare for an entire season to have the same weather throughout, unless we are in a locked in weather pattern.
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1 hour ago, 2010cold said:
I think some, but not all people on these forums need a reality check. The UK isn’t supposed to be a warm and sunny country. In my opinion, whilst it’s reasonable for people to want some dry, sunny and warm weather during Summer, it’s unreasonable to just expect warm, sunny and dry weather to last for the majority of Summer. Warm/hot weather lovers have been spoiled for the last 7 years, so I feel they shouldn’t be complaining as much as coldies who spend umpteen mild winters looking at cold and snowy day 10 model charts that never really materialise. If it wasn’t for the significant snow event in December 2017, I’d have gone over 7 years without a single notable snow event. Winter 2017-18 was a milder than average winter in the CET area, but had cold snaps to keep coldies happy. March 2018 doesn’t count because that was in meteorological spring, and it wasn’t until early in that March that I got heavy snow from storm Emma. However, with climate change, the Winter frustrations of coldies are only going to gradually worsen.
I don't think most people are complaining the weather isn't warm and sunny for weeks on end. They are complaining because the weather is persistently cloudy, damp and cool for the time of year. It is not unreasonable to expect more than the equivalent of a mild November in July.
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Summer 2020 - Moans, Ramps & Chat
in Spring Weather Discussion
Posted
Thereis no correlation between April/May and the following summer weather.