The 1920s - least interesting weather decade of the 20th century?

[Summer8906]

Have become generally aware of individual good and bad years from old weather reports and one thing that strikes me is how the 1920s, in particular, marked a long period with very few notable summers or winters.

Only two at all stand out: summer 1921 was predominantly fine (but I think August was duller and wetter, so maybe rather like 1994, 2006 or 2018) and winter 1929 was notably cold and snowy.

From what I gather, all the remaining summers were average-to-poor and all the remaining winters average-to-mild.

Wonder if that was indeed the case or whether there were any other summers which managed to be (even marginally) warmer and sunnier than usual and any other winters (even marginally) colder and snowier than usual?

The sequence extended into the first three years of the thirties, I think, before 1933-34-35 provided a sequence of better summers.

The 1910s were perhaps similar (with 1911 and 1917 providing the exceptions again) but obviously people were having to deal with the war in that decade, so weather wasn't so much on people's mind.

Edited October 9, 2021 by Summer8906

[Weather-history]

5 hours ago, Summer8906 said:

Have become generally aware of individual good and bad years from old weather reports and one thing that strikes me is how the 1920s, in particular, marked a long period with very few notable summers or winters.

Only two at all stand out: summer 1921 was predominantly fine (but I think August was duller and wetter, so maybe rather like 1994, 2006 or 2018) and winter 1929 was notably cold and snowy.

From what I gather, all the remaining summers were average-to-poor and all the remaining winters average-to-mild.

Wonder if that was indeed the case or whether there were any other summers which managed to be (even marginally) warmer and sunnier than usual and any other winters (even marginally) colder and snowier than usual?

The sequence extended into the first three years of the thirties, I think, before 1933-34-35 provided a sequence of better summers.

The 1910s were perhaps similar (with 1911 and 1917 providing the exceptions again) but obviously people were having to deal with the war in that decade, so weather wasn't so much on people's mind.

I'm going through the 1920s currently, up to early 1924 with the newspaper clippings and they have been interesting reading so far, I have to say.  I think that's the problem with stats on paper alone, unless you have experienced it yourself, its hard to gauge whether a year or a decade was really that uninteresting. 

 

[Thundery wintry showers]

I'm aware of some other notable weather events later in the 1920s too, e.g. the very dry June of 1925, snowy northerlies in late November 1925, a warm start to October 1926 followed by an unusually wintry second half, the easterly-dominated December of 1927 with a severe Boxing Day snowstorm, and a cold winter followed by an exceptionally sunny March in 1929.

Indeed, the "raw" monthly statistics don't always give a full picture as you can have a month with several noteworthy weather events but particularly with warm and cold events they can cancel each other out and result in a fairly mild to average month overall.

I can think of plenty of events in the 1910s too, e.g. the long dry sunny summer of 1911, a warm and sunny and in places thundery June in 1914, the dull wet summer of 1912, the very wet winter of 1914/15 (which in many ways was a colder version of 2013/14).  1916 had a record-breaking warm January, cold snowy March, cold June.  1917 and 1919 stick out for me as seemingly having been very eventful years.  1918 had an exceptionally wet September.

Edited October 10, 2021 by Thundery wintry showers

[A Face like Thunder]

According to J H Brazell on London Weather, the differences to Mean (50.9F) in the 1920s were:

1920   - 0.2

1921   + 1.6

1922    -1.6

1923    - 1.0

1924   -  0.4

1925    - 0.9

1926      0.0

1927    - 0.9

1928    -0.2

1929    - 1.1

So just one year above average, a trend which continued to 1933. As suggested, a less-than-interesting decade weather-wise! 

 

[Summer8906]

1 hour ago, A Face like Thunder said:

According to J H Brazell on London Weather, the differences to Mean (50.9F) in the 1920s were:

1920   - 0.2

1921   + 1.6

1922    -1.6

1923    - 1.0

1924   -  0.4

1925    - 0.9

1926      0.0

1927    - 0.9

1928    -0.2

1929    - 1.1

So just one year above average, a trend which continued to 1933. As suggested, a less-than-interesting decade weather-wise! 

 

I do seem to recall 1921 was almost continuously dry and warm, with August being one of the few exceptions. I think one of the spring months was cold though - but can't remember which.

1922 had a terrible summer didn't it? Interesting it was as cold as 1921 was warm - presumably the cold was concentrated in the non-winter months as I don't recall noting 1921/22 winter as a cold one.

[LetItSnow!]

1 hour ago, Summer8906 said:

I do seem to recall 1921 was almost continuously dry and warm, with August being one of the few exceptions. I think one of the spring months was cold though - but can't remember which.

1922 had a terrible summer didn't it? Interesting it was as cold as 1921 was warm - presumably the cold was concentrated in the non-winter months as I don't recall noting 1921/22 winter as a cold one.

The winter of 1922 overall came out close to average but the cold anomalies started to show in March and then particularly in April which was exceptionally cold. It actually turned exceptionally warm in May with record heat so overall it was a very warm May, somewhat like a more pronounced May/June of this year, just a month earlier. The cold came back in June and then the summer was extremely cold, up there with the Maunder minimum summers of the 1690s. No month recorded a C.E.T. higher than the 13s, and June was the warmest month!!! I'm going to do a historic thread on this summer soon. The cold stayed into the autumn of 1922 which was very cold, but just as December came it then flipped to very, very mild. The winter of 1922/1923 was exceptionally mild with a C.E.T. 5.7. Of course in true fashion, the cold returned in Apr. 1923 and pestered through 'til June, though at least we got quite a hot July that year.

Edited October 11, 2021 by LetItSnow!

[Weather-history]

4 hours ago, Summer8906 said:

I do seem to recall 1921 was almost continuously dry and warm, with August being one of the few exceptions. I think one of the spring months was cold though - but can't remember which.

1922 had a terrible summer didn't it? Interesting it was as cold as 1921 was warm - presumably the cold was concentrated in the non-winter months as I don't recall noting 1921/22 winter as a cold one.

1921 was sandwiched between two really poor years of 1920 and 1922, reading reports of the time say that  summer 1920 was worse than summer 1922. That is saying something. 

Edited October 11, 2021 by Weather-history

[Summer8906]

15 hours ago, Weather-history said:

1921 was sandwiched between two really poor years of 1920 and 1922, reading reports of the time say that  summer 1920 was worse than summer 1922. That is saying something. 

Interesting, not sure I'd noted 1920 as a particularly poor one, though I think I had it down as below average - but 1922 I've seen mentioned frequently. Rather reminiscent of 1955 between 1954 and 1956 (still the two poorest post-war summers I believe), and (to a lesser extent) 1959 between 1958 and 1960.

[Summer8906]

18 hours ago, LetItSnow! said:

The winter of 1922 overall came out close to average but the cold anomalies started to show in March and then particularly in April which was exceptionally cold. It actually turned exceptionally warm in May with record heat so overall it was a very warm May, somewhat like a more pronounced May/June of this year, just a month earlier. The cold came back in June and then the summer was extremely cold, up there with the Maunder minimum summers of the 1690s. No month recorded a C.E.T. higher than the 13s, and June was the warmest month!!!

For July to have a CET in the 13s is really shocking and something I don't think we've even got close to in recent times. A 13.5 CET would be equivalent to, for example, 9 min, 18 max (if northerlies dominated with clear nights) or 11 min and a frigid 16 max (if the wind was more W/SW and it was cloudier). Either seems extraordinary for July.

Mind you in a text book I once saw the mean maxima for July 1980 (a month I remember vaguely) for Rogate, West Sussex - somewhere very close to where I lived at the time and one of the warmest parts of the UK in summer. Max barely got to 20 for the first three weeks!

Edited October 12, 2021 by Summer8906

[Summer8906]

1 hour ago, Summer8906 said:

Mind you in a text book I once saw the mean maxima for July 1980 (a month I remember vaguely) for Rogate, West Sussex - somewhere very close to where I lived at the time and one of the warmest parts of the UK in summer. Max barely got to 20 for the first three weeks!

Sorry, daily maxima - not mean maxima.

[Chesil View]

On 09/10/2021 at 12:43, Summer8906 said:

Have become generally aware of individual good and bad years from old weather reports and one thing that strikes me is how the 1920s, in particular, marked a long period with very few notable summers or winters.

Only two at all stand out: summer 1921 was predominantly fine (but I think August was duller and wetter, so maybe rather like 1994, 2006 or 2018) and winter 1929 was notably cold and snowy.

From what I gather, all the remaining summers were average-to-poor and all the remaining winters average-to-mild.

Wonder if that was indeed the case or whether there were any other summers which managed to be (even marginally) warmer and sunnier than usual and any other winters (even marginally) colder and snowier than usual?

The sequence extended into the first three years of the thirties, I think, before 1933-34-35 provided a sequence of better summers.

The 1910s were perhaps similar (with 1911 and 1917 providing the exceptions again) but obviously people were having to deal with the war in that decade, so weather wasn't so much on people's mind.

 I don't think one can really refer to a decade had that produced in 1927  Probabaly the worst Christmas blizzard on record as the least interesting and indeed the xmas 1927 snowstorm stands as one of the very worst of the 20th century as a whole. Much of southern England had 2 feet of level snow  with drifts to 5 metres.  Vehicular traffic was impossible and trains were buried even here in Dorset. Locally, rain turned to snow around teatime on Christmas day and the snow continued to fall without a break until the early hours of the 27th December.  Local seafarers mistook clouds of snow blowing off the cliffs on the south coast for fog.

When the thaw came in the new year of 1928 the meltwater moving down the Thames combined with very high tides to produce some of the worst tidal flooding London has seen. People drowned in  basement flats and the cellars beneath the house of parliament were flooded.

[Weather-history]

Newspaper reports from 1927 are a horror story from that year. Rain and floods was being reported far too often. 

[Weather-history]

I finished going through the 1920s, the one that really caught my eye is an indoor billiards match being stopped by a combination of tobacco smoke and fog because players struggle to see the other end of the table.

 

[trickydicky]

31 minutes ago, Weather-history said:

I finished going through the 1920s, the one that really caught my eye is an indoor billiards match being stopped by a combination of tobacco smoke and fog because players struggle to see the other end of the table.

 

From what I remember of snooker halls back in the day that’s pretty much standard 

[A Face like Thunder]

On 24/10/2021 at 19:26, Weather-history said:

Newspaper reports from 1927 are a horror story from that year. Rain and floods was being reported far too often. 

And not forgetting the Boxing Day blizzard, in Eden's words 'arguably the most extreme of the entire twentieth century'. Surrey weather writer Ian Currie noted that villages such as Chaldon, Tatsfield, Farleigh and Chelsham were marooned for almost a week, the Salvation Army chartered five aeroplanes on the 31st to drop food supplies to isolated communities, and on that day, the temperature was -12C at dawn in Croydon. The mean in London for the month of Dec 1927 was - 4.8F below average. 

[philglossop]

Dartmoor’s Great Blizzard 1927. | Legendary Dartmoor

WWW.LEGENDARYDARTMOOR.CO.UK

I've seen drifts on Dartmoor back in 1979 and more recently in 1987 but not to depths of 15 to 17ft!

 

The reanalysis charts are snowlovers dream over the Christmas period- even if the upper air temps look rather uninspiring at -5 to -10 

[Summer8906]

Thanks for the replies - looks like the 1920s had a good number of extreme individual events, though few of the summers or winters overall were notably warm or cold respectively (summer 1921 and winter 1929 being the exceptions).

 

[Harry's House]

On 10/10/2021 at 18:07, Thundery wintry showers said:

I'm aware of some other notable weather events later in the 1920s too, e.g. the very dry June of 1925, snowy northerlies in late November 1925, a warm start to October 1926 followed by an unusually wintry second half, the easterly-dominated December of 1927 with a severe Boxing Day snowstorm, and a cold winter followed by an exceptionally sunny March in 1929.

Indeed, the "raw" monthly statistics don't always give a full picture as you can have a month with several noteworthy weather events but particularly with warm and cold events they can cancel each other out and result in a fairly mild to average month overall.

I can think of plenty of events in the 1910s too, e.g. the long dry sunny summer of 1911, a warm and sunny and in places thundery June in 1914, the dull wet summer of 1912, the very wet winter of 1914/15 (which in many ways was a colder version of 2013/14).  1916 had a record-breaking warm January, cold snowy March, cold June.  1917 and 1919 stick out for me as seemingly having been very eventful years.  1918 had an exceptionally wet September.

Also in the 1910s, the exceptionally thundery months of June 1912 and July 1918.

[A Face like Thunder]

On 23/10/2021 at 14:29, Chesil View said:

 I don't think one can really refer to a decade had that produced in 1927  Probabaly the worst Christmas blizzard on record as the least interesting and indeed the xmas 1927 snowstorm stands as one of the very worst of the 20th century as a whole. Much of southern England had 2 feet of level snow  with drifts to 5 metres.  Vehicular traffic was impossible and trains were buried even here in Dorset. Locally, rain turned to snow around teatime on Christmas day and the snow continued to fall without a break until the early hours of the 27th December.  Local seafarers mistook clouds of snow blowing off the cliffs on the south coast for fog.

When the thaw came in the new year of 1928 the meltwater moving down the Thames combined with very high tides to produce some of the worst tidal flooding London has seen. People drowned in  basement flats and the cellars beneath the house of parliament were flooded.

Very short notice but the programme about the Thames floods of Jan 1928 is on tonight (Sat) at 9.30pm on Ch 5.