xmetman

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xmetman

xmetman Blog

Editorial

From the ashes…

This is the new and revamped xmetman site. I’m afraid this will time the blog will be without comments. The reason I disallow comments is because so many of the conversations ended up on the subject of AGW. The continual feuding that ensued to my mind made a complete nonsense of a site that was supposedly about climate and weather not just on this specific subject. Please subscribe if you like what you find. Apologies for asking you do this again but I somehow managed to delete my old list of subscribers.

ENSO

Latest ENSO conditions

I decided to look in more detail at Pacific SST in the four Niño ENSO areas and plot more a more detailed weekly graphs of SST and anomalies rather than rely on the monthly values as I’ve done till now. The weekly data is provided by NCEP, and extends back to January 1990. ENSO calculations are complicated and most countries that have an interest have different approaches for what constitutes an El Niño or a La Niña event. We are at the moment in a weakish El Niño event that started in September of 2018 and which at the moment...

Rainfall / Wild fires

Wet in northeast Scotland

Inland areas of Grampian and the Moray coast seem to have collected a disproportionate amount of rain during the last week. Both Kinloss and Lossiemouth are reporting weekly totals well over 40 mm, whilst Tain just a few miles to the northwest and the other side of the firth, have received little more than 10 mm. It’s hard to put all this down to the rain shadow effect of the northwest highlands because rainfall totals from Wick and Altnaharra with little shelter are also much lower than further south. The gauge on the river Findhorn shows just how water levels...

AGW / Temperature

When will global temperature anomalies be 1.5°C higher than those of 1850?

The IPCC seem to be fixated on when global temperatures will be 1.5°C higher than those in pre-industrial times, no doubt naturally thinking, that there was time left to do something about it. This is what the IPCC report says about when they expect this to happen. Global warming will likely rise to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels between 2030 and 2052 The missing graph The isn’t a single graph of forecast global temperatures in the IPCC report of 2018 illustrating just how world temperatures are forecast to rise in the coming years to achieve the magic value of 1.5°C warmer...

Anomalies / Temperature

A cold day in the northeast

After such a lovely warm and sunny week last week, it’s back to temperatures more similar to those at the start of spring rather than those of mid May in northeast Scotland. The colder than average temperatures are well illustrated in the 12 UTC temperature anomaly chart with most places in the northeast having negative anomalies of -1 to -3°C. Eastern England on the other hand are doing very well with a range of positive anomalies between +2 and +5°C.

DataPoint / Met Office

DataPoint is dead long live DataHub!

The writing has been on the cards for a long time regarding the future of DataPoint. It’s now official that the service will close shortly to be replaced by a new service called DataHub, the big difference is that from the look of things it’s only forecast NWP data that’s being made available and the fact that it will no longer be totally free to download. So much for the movement to free up government data, you know the kind of data that we as taxpayers pay for, so agencies such as the Met Office can sell it back to...

Snow / Winter

Winter 2017-18 snowiest in five years

The winter of 2017-18 was the snowiest since 2012-13 in Central England according to my calculations of daily EWP and CET. It may have been cold in February and March but there was little in the way of precipitation.

Gordon Manley

CET

The warmest and coldest 30 day spells since 1772

Warm and cold spells don’t always correspond with the start and end of any particular month and that’s true of the monthly CET series devised by Gordon Manley. The daily series, which is maintained by the Met Office extends back to 1772, is even more useful, so I set about writing some code to look for the warmest and coldest 30 day spell (or any other arbitrary length period) from within the series. When I did that I found that the table was cluttered with overlapping periods that occurred just prior to and after the coldest 30 days. To do...

Hurricane Katrina

Tropical Cyclones

2018 Hurricane season

The updated HURDAT2 through 2018 for the Atlantic basin is now available to download. Here’s a closer look at the 2018 season. There were eight hurricanes in all but just Michael made it to category five. Hurricane Leslie lasted for twenty two days before dissipating. Four tropical cyclones made landfall in the US of which two were of hurricane strength. As you can see the British Isles was in the firing line for at least two of the tropical cyclones, in what was a slightly above average North Atlantic season. The season started really slowly and didn’t really take off...

Oceans / SST

Recent North Atlantic SST

The cold pool in the central western Atlantic just about managed to survive through the winter of 2018/19. Meanwhile in the eastern Atlantic, North Sea, Baltic and Norwegian SST anomalies are already well above normal by April. This animation I’ve cobbled together from the map room at the IRI.

CET / Summer

Hot summers in Central England

There was a lot of talk in the media last year about the summers heat wave (2018) and comparisons with 1976. Here is a table of the top thirty warmest seven day periods since 1772 that I have extracted from the daily Central England Temperature [CET] series maintained by the Met Office that helps put things into perspective (figure 1). I would normally not display temperature to the nearest hundredth of a degree, but it is useful when doing comparisons using ranking. As you can see this summers heat wave ranked only 21st in a list where any overlapping periods...