Carbon Brief - Analysis: How UK winters are getting warmer and wetter

[WYorksWeather]

Brilliant and highly detailed article this. The TL;DR version is that UK winters are around 1C warmer and 15% wetter than 100 years ago.

Compared to 1981-2000, the central projection for 2081-2100 under the RCP4.5 scenario is that UK winters will be an additional 2.0C warmer and 11% wetter.

Full article:

Analysis: How UK winters are getting warmer and wetter - Carbon Brief

WWW.CARBONBRIEF.ORG

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The average UK winter has become around 1C warmer and 15% wetter over the past century, new Carbon Brief analysis shows.

May be of interest to anyone, but particularly thinking here @CryoraptorA303 @Methuselah @Roger J Smith @Metwatch @raz.org.rain, though of course no doubt I've missed some.

It's a fairly long read though!

[CryoraptorA303]

Hardly surprising.

I found this bit quite telling:

"In addition, with an average winter temperature of 4.64C, the most-recent decade (2013-22) – not shown in the table – has seen a further temperature increase of 0.52C above the 1991-2020 average."

In just 10 years we have already grown half a degree warmer than 1991-2020. 2001-2030 will probably be over a degree warmer at this rate.

The 2001-2030 climate stats will be quite shocking to many, I suspect. Assuming we don't get another aberration before 2040 then 2011-2040 will be even more astounding once the last very cold winters, 2009/10 and December 2010, are removed from the stats. Those two alone will be depressing the overall average slightly. Having them removed and zero cold winters in the averages at all will lead to some horrifying numbers.

[WYorksWeather]

 CryoraptorA303 I think we may also see further increases in winter extremes. I remember a few people saying that 20C in January would still be a tall order when I mentioned it late last year, and we pretty much did it right after.

There is a lot of scope I think to break some of the older extended cold season records (November to March).

First, we have the winter records. This February will either break the CET record or come very close to doing so, and only a few years ago we absolutely demolished the December one in 2015 of course. We're missing a very mild January, but the last one in 2007 (7.0) was close enough to the CET record (7.6) that a similar repeat today might well have broken that as well.

Then we can look at November and March. March 2017 (8.8) if not for the colder third week might well have broken the record (9.2) if not for a colder spell in the third week, and in fact could have been a March version of December 2015, maybe even hitting 10.0C for the CET. And then the November CET record from 1994 (9,9) is just asking to be broken and finally reach double figures, after 2011 (9.5) came fairly close.

Probably more scope to break these records, as the Arctic to our north is warming much faster than the continent to our south, and as borne out by all the models it therefore means that our winters will warm much faster than our summers (ignoring the possibility of AMOC collapse for the purposes of this).

Within the next 10 years I think there's a good chance that we have replacement records for November, January and March in the CET, plus absolute maxes above 20C for all three winter months, as we continue to see a strong tendency for reduced cold availability to our north and east during the cold season.