Worryingly Wet & Worryingly Sunless

[Metwatch]

4 hours ago, B87 said:

I want to see some sub-500mm years this decade. It's coming up to 20 years since the last one.

Managed it in 2011 here with 460mm. Central England met office region overall got 444mm. Driest is still 1921 with 420mm locally.

1912 the wettest year in comparison had 940mm. 2023 at 904mm so second wettest slightly ahead of 2007 and 2012 by like 10mm.

[Fen Wolf]

I am thinking of moving away permanently from the uk as the country has seriously gone downhill from my younger years and that’s not just the weather either.  
 

been the wettest relentless winter in a while here.  

Edited March 2 by Fen Wolf

[al78]

 Metwatch I am giving a brief knowledge share to co-workers next Wednesday about the UK's and SE England's rainfall over the last year and I was going to look into rolling 12 month accumulations. The period March 2023 - Feb 2024 has got to be up there as one of the wettest such periods on record.

[Fen Wolf]

Come june-july, there will be a drought and hosepipe ban again as this country doesn’t understand how to create or preserve water the correct way

[stainesbloke]

 Fen Wolf Indeed. Though it’s rather unlikely this year after such a soaking wet 12 months.

I really hope our climate isn’t becoming a choice between months of constant rain, followed by a month or two of no rain at all. The famously changeable nature of our climate seems to have gone. It’s not only the UK affected, much of the continent is having weird weather patterns too.

As a SAD sufferer, this has been a pretty trying period of ‘weather’.

Edited March 2 by stainesbloke

[al78]

The England and Wales 12-month rainfall total (HadUKP data) for the period March 2023-February 2024 is 1327.4 mm.

I can only find two wetter 12 month periods in the records going back to 1766:

April 2012 - March 2013 (1331.5 mm)

April 2000 - March 2001 (1355.4 mm)

The former covers the fourth wettest summer on record and the latter covers the wettest autumn on record (using all records back to 1766).

[Fen Wolf]

 stainesbloke i’m afraid it is sadly.  You either have one extreme of constant humidity and heat or forever wet days. 
 

I am currently looking into where to move as i hate both.  I like warm dry low humidity heat and thunderstorms and of course snow.  All of which, we get very few of.  
 

I get the SAD too I suffer with really bad mental health and this weather has not helped in any way 

Edited March 2 by Fen Wolf

[LetItSnow!]

I think this is probably a good indicator of the future to be honest. As the warming increases the air holds more moisture and for a naturally Atlantic dominated climate it means more chance at heavy rainfall. Our dry spells will become intense but probably shorter and the wet spells more intense and longer. Just my opinion of course. Multi-year droughts happen as part of natural variability and that’s not going to stop but I think the die is loaded in favour of wet by a fair margin now. 

I like the rain so I can’t say I personally have felt too bad in this spell, though his winter just gone is the first in some time I noticed myself rather depressed by the lack of light so gloomy conditions must have helped. The two winters previous were much drier and sunnier overall. 

I don’t want to swing into super dry conditions as I don’t think it would be very helpful to go from flooded out to bone dry for months. Odds increase with every wet month that the pattern will at least relax and I’d be surprised if we don’t have some level of a dryer than average month before June. 

The talk of flipping to La Niña is interesting with comparisons to 1998 and 2007. 1998 remained fairly wet in the second half of the year though July and August (the latter especially in the south) were fairly dry I think. 2007 actually was mostly dry after the May-June deluge and I think the autumn was very dry in parts. I also saw 2010 mentioned which apart from a wet August was dry through the second half. 

 

Edit: Also of interest is that if wet conditions do continue through the spring then it may limit the heat potential if we don’t get any super hot uppers. The latter though is a risky gamble to say in the current era. 

Edited March 2 by LetItSnow!

[stainesbloke]

 Fen Wolf Hopefully a change to something more pleasant soon. I think a much sunnier few months without going into an extreme lack of rainfall would be good. I think the last period of decent sunny weather was in September!

[Fen Wolf]

 stainesbloke well spring is now here so hopefully it will be nice but i always remember uk summers just being oppressive and hot with too much humidity.  Give me the Canary Islands winter sun anytime.  25C with no humidy (dry heat) 

[Metwatch]

35 minutes ago, Fen Wolf said:

I am currently looking into where to move as i hate both.  I like warm dry low humidity heat and thunderstorms and of course snow.  All of which, we get very few of.  

Northern - northeastern interior spain is the place to be for that.

Some parts above 1100-1200m in Navarra and the Pyrenees got around 2 feet of snow a few days ago, then same areas will probably be well into the mid 20s in a few months time with cracking thunderstorms if the UK is under a high. I really envy those who live there. California is similar too, a lot of snow in the Sierra mountains currently.

Edited March 2 by Metwatch

[Fen Wolf]

 Metwatch i will look into that; thanks 

[baddie]

I wonder if we will even have any more sunshine than the pathetic March 2023s total of 65 hours. When was the last completely clear day again??? January 26th?????

[CryoraptorA303]

 Metwatch 2011 is up there as one of the most bizarre years on record. The spring felt like it should've been summer, the autumn felt like spring and the summer felt mostly like early September. If I'm not mistaken, October 1st was the hottest day of the year for some stations in Wales. Nationally there must have only been a small handful of days hotter. There was that single 33°C day in June and perhaps one other 30°C day the entire summer, I think a heatwave in August just about managed it.

I'd hate to think what summer 2011 could've been if it stayed hot and dry like spring, considering 2010 had been dry as well. I actually wrote a hypothetical scenario about western Europe being hit with the same kind of heatwave Russia was in 2010 in June and July 2011 after 2010 and spring had been as dry as they were.

The climate may be getting wetter but we will see bad dry periods again, the timing just has to align. Ask humid subtropical climates like Milan that have experienced bad droughts in recent history if you don't believe me. Overall the dry periods may be getting less dry and the wet periods wetter, however the ambient temperature is also rising so water is going to evaporate from the ground faster as well. Higher moisture capacity also means higher potential humidity so more moisture can be evaporated from the ground in the first place. To put it simply, a dry period now does not need to be as intensely dry to have the same effect as it once did. Once we do get a dry period aligning well with the wettest season of the year, i.e. autumn, we will see the same level of extremely bad aridity as has been seen in the past, if not worse, even if technically more rain is falling than those times.

After this spate of wet years, 2022 aside, we haven't really seen a long dry period since 2010-May 2011, so we are now quite overdue one. When it does eventually come it will probably come with a vengeance.

As for the situation this year, assuming the current wet spell is flushed out in the relatively near future and March-June is much closer to average, a hot summer is far from called off yet. Iberia is now in pretty serious drought conditions (that'll teach them to hog all the HP!), so hot air moving northwards will face no challenge there at all. We will probably be seeing automatically elevated temperatures in southerlies when they do (and already have) happen(ed), so this will be very potent in raising temps here. Combine that with all the spring blooming drinking all of that water and there's the potential for the groundwater to be worked on quite quickly. A very warm month that saw around average rainfall is like an average month that saw low rainfall, as a significant amount of that water will have been evaporated by the warmth. This summer will likely be a backended one, imo, with August and potentially September being the hottest months as they will be working with the driest ground this time as the hottest air is over us. This gives us the possibility of a second consecutive September annual maximum, which would be a historical first. I actually messaged raz.org.rain about a hypothetical late serious heatwave over August and September. This would mean August getting scammed out of an annual maximum again and continuing the longest historical streak without an August maximum, but what is your priority here? An overdue August maximum or the second consecutive September maximum for the first time in known history? Choices...

Also to note is Friday the 13th is in September this year... There's also another record, an electoral one, from 1906 that is set to be challenged this year. Imo there is no better year to have a new September record. But we are getting way ahead of ourselves here.

 Fen Wolf On the contrary, the Canary Islands are actually quite humid, in terms of average RH. However, they are Atlantic islands so they have quite a pleasant sea breeze, so the heat feels far less uncomfortable than you'd otherwise expect. I've been to Lanzarote in August which is among the two most humid months of the year with September and even temperatures in the region of 32°C are quite bearable with the breeze. Aircon is also everywhere so being able to sleep at night isn't remotely a worry unlike in this country when it gets hot.

Note: I only now see that you said "winter" in particular. My bad. I'll still leave the comments though.

 baddie There is no need for that. No, I'm not writing about climate change (specifically) or 40°C heat and I'm not lecturing anyone. If that is your only takeaway from my posts then you are free to ignore me.

[Fen Wolf]

 CryoraptorA303 yes, definitely winter months, I wouldn’t want to venture south in the summer haha

[*Stormforce~beka*]

 Fen Wolf Where you going?

[Fen Wolf]

 *Stormforce~beka* dunno yet but definitely getting out of the uk for  the month as soon as i clear my schedule 

 

 

my friend Mr Dragon owns an island and i have an open invite so i could always return to The Island

Edited March 3 by Fen Wolf

[raz.org.rain]

10 hours ago, CryoraptorA303 said:

I also suspect at this point the models are overanalysing the collapse of the Nino; a Nino rapidly collapsing does not necessarily have to begin a Nina, it could collapse by April or May and then remain at around neutral, or the resultant Nina could be significantly weaker than the models are pointing to.

I'm suspecting the same thing, they're going for a rather abrupt flip to a strong La Niña state. They're likely overestimating that, I'd imagine there will be a neutral period as there usually tends to be.

[Arctic Hare]

The title of this thread? Yeah. As someone who for various reasons (which I won't go into here, but nothing I've done wrong!) simply cannot consider the "leave the country and live somewhere else" option all the people suggesting that are pointless to people like me. We need to find ways to deal with this wetness *in the UK*, or much better to have our hopes for an *extended* dry period (not totally rainless, but clearly below average for maybe six months on the trot) come to pass.

Unfortunately the trend over recent years here has been clear to anyone who looks at the river: rainfall events capable of causing significant flooding are getting more and more common. This winter we've had five, the most I can ever remember. The dullness has just made it worse as even when it stops raining nothing dries out. (The saturated ground is a big part of that of course, but so is the lack of sun, especially as days get longer and the sun gets stronger.)

I am lucky enough not to have serious mental conditions made worse by the weather, but in much less severe way the gloomy damp weather going on and on and on, plus the stress of flooding and its knock-on effects to my town and its people, is certainly making me feel more unhappy and down than I normally would over winter. So if there *is* going to be a flip, let's have it. And let's have a big one!

Edited March 3 by Arctic Hare

[Fen Wolf]

 Arctic Hare there is no way it can change my friend, especially with the tech humans have so the best and really only option is to move somewhere where you can find some peace, if you feel you cannot for whatever reason, I hope you can find a way out or at least find some peace here

[stainesbloke]

Fog and frost in west London this morning! Whatever next 

[CryoraptorA303]

 stainesbloke Looks like we didn't get the inversion further south. Stayed above freezing and no fog or frost here. There must have been a slight wind south of London.

[MP-R]

 Fen Wolf Ever thought of the Alps? Been there a few times in summer and, although it does get hot, it’s rarely humid and the air quality is fantastic. Sometimes you can get naff days too, and some wonderful thunderstorms!

[SunnyG]

 CryoraptorA303 We didn't in North London either.

Edited March 3 by SunnyG

[Fen Wolf]

 MP-R will consider it too, thanks