Met Office Say Britain To Get Hotter

[Lincs Observation]

hi all

forgive me if this has been mentioned, so delete if it has but if not this artical has come from reuters about current thinking at the met office.

LONDON (Reuters) - Heatwaves in Europe are likely to become as much as 10 degrees Celcius hotter and more common over the course of this century, according to new research by the UK Met Office published on Friday.

North and South America and East Asia are also expected to be affected, the research by Met Office scientists at its Hadley Centre said. The research published in the Journal of Climate

said extreme summer temperatures were expected be even higher if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled, as it was expected to do this century.

"Using multiple simulations to quantify uncertainty Met Office scientists obtained some sobering results," the Met Office said in a statement. "These simulations indicate that European heatwaves could become hotter by between 4 and 10 C - an increase greater than that expected for normal summer days."

Heatwaves, like the one that hit Europe earlier this summer, put a strain on power supplies by increasing electricity demand for cooling while reducing power output because of plant cooling problems. The paper said that in the UK, heatwaves lasting more than five days now happen only once every 20 years but that by 2100 they are likely to hit the country almost annually, or even several times a year.

Edited September 1, 2006 by Luton Observation

[The PIT]

hi all

forgive me if this has been mentioned, so delete if it has but if not this artical has come from reuters about current thinking at the met office.

LONDON (Reuters) - Heatwaves in Europe are likely to become as much as 10 degrees Celcius hotter and more common over the course of this century, according to new research by the UK Met Office published on Friday.

North and South America and East Asia are also expected to be affected, the research by Met Office scientists at its Hadley Centre said. The research published in the Journal of Climate

said extreme summer temperatures were expected be even higher if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled, as it was expected to do this century.

"Using multiple simulations to quantify uncertainty Met Office scientists obtained some sobering results," the Met Office said in a statement. "These simulations indicate that European heatwaves could become hotter by between 4 and 10 C - an increase greater than that expected for normal summer days."

Heatwaves, like the one that hit Europe earlier this summer, put a strain on power supplies by increasing electricity demand for cooling while reducing power output because of plant cooling problems. The paper said that in the UK, heatwaves lasting more than five days now happen only once every 20 years but that by 2100 they are likely to hit the country almost annually, or even several times a year.

I'll be dead by then so I won't be able to tell you whetehr it's right or wrong.

Wrong forum by the way. Mods !!!!!

[SNOW-MAN2006]

I think that the trand establishing over the uk is that we will get easterly's more frequently:

-most hot spells this and last year have involved heat from europe (to the east)

-last years below average winter involved easterly's to bring down the temperature

Much more easterlies this year (lot more fog here on east coast)

SNOW-MAN2006

[parmenides3]

This might be the best place to mention that the Hadley centre, the Met's climate prediction group, is running a programme with the public on Climate Prediction net. (Google it). The idea is that they use downtime from online home PC's to run thousands more model runs than they can do on their own machine. I believe at the moment the number is up to about 190,000. The effect of this is that they can test many more variables and uncertainties, thus improving both their predictive skill, and the way in which the master program calculates the relationship between different forcings and feedbacks.

Best of all, if you join the programme, which you do simply by promising to leave your computer online when you are not using it, you are allowed to look at your own, unique, climate model, from the comfort of your own home. You can't change it, but you can compare the results with other model runs all around the world. A recommended bit of fun with a useful serious value.

P

[Guest Viking141]

I have that running and have done for several months now, its quite cool!

[VillagePlank]

Curious,

Most PC's are set to go to sleep in periods of inactivity. So all those interested in developing sound models to further understand climate change are stopping their PC's from going to sleep and running intensive simulations, instead.

A PC is inactive, normally, for >18hrs/dy;so assuming it's being used for 6 hrs (continuously) then if all PC users ran this project we should expect a 3 fold increase in the the amount of energy used, and, perhaps, the amount of CO2 computer users are injecting into the atmosphere.

Self-fulfilling prophecy, anyone?

Edited October 5, 2006 by Wilson

[Dawlish]

I think that the trand establishing over the uk is that we will get easterly's more frequently:

-most hot spells this and last year have involved heat from europe (to the east)

-last years below average winter involved easterly's to bring down the temperature

Much more easterlies this year (lot more fog here on east coast)

SNOW-MAN2006

No S-M, sorry. The heat, this summer, in almost every single case has come from Southerly plumes, with their origin over North Africa.

Paul

[VillagePlank]

No S-M, sorry. The heat, this summer, in almost every single case has come from Southerly plumes, with their origin over North Africa.

It depends on how you measure it.

If you measure W/Ely as some form of index, say W=1, E=0, and subsequent sources of weather are linked to the index (so, between 0..1) then you could measure the frequency, say of 0.5 (which is straight N'lys or S'lys) and compare from year to year.

I would suggest, in this case, that the index over the past, say, 36 months, would have a greater frequency of <0.4 than >0.5's which corroborates the claim that the weather is moving more E'ly.

Of course, I haven't done this exercise, so this is a little spurious . . . B)

Edited October 5, 2006 by Wilson