French Imports - What went wrong?

[Neilsouth]

^ there were some pretty deadly storms in the 90's for the south and south east, then something changed in the world all that talk of 2003 heat being a common place was utter rubbish

[Phil UK]

Yes, Victor. I can't remember the exact year, but an evening/overnight storm over London caused a massive increase in athsma* atsthma*... Breathing difficulties due to airbourne pollen being washed down. Might have been 1995-96 unless someone can clarify that specific point in time for me. So that could have been very detrimental to many with lung disorders. But I think apart from June 27th/28th this year over London and the south east, it has been somewhat pretty tame compared to a couple of decades ago.

Phil.

[staplehurst]

To put it simply, we never had the conditions to sustain them when they crossed the Channel. SST's in the high teens sustained them initially, but as they got closer to UK shore our surface temps were around 13/14C, whilst warmer at 850mb due to the plume, and this created a shallow inversion at the surface. We can't really expect any good imports when our daytime maxes during the day were just 21C. We were the wrong side of the cold front throughout and thus were not in the proper warm and humid airmass sadly. Always next time I guess!

How I long to see imports like those on 6th Aug 2008...

[Coast]

To put it simply, we never had the conditions to sustain them when they crossed the Channel. SST's in the high teens sustained them initially, but as they got closer to UK shore our surface temps were around 13/14C

I've just selected this set of data from my local monitoring buoy to show the recent and more historic SST's to see if the Channel has become colder in the last few years:

Here's this year and the previous 2 years:

and here is the first 2 years of readings from when the system was put in place:

They seem to be quite consistent and with little variance (+/- 1.5 Dgc ish), but just that smidgen cooler of late - were 2003 and 2004 any better for imported French storms does anyone remember?