May 2019: Near average temperature, rainfall and sunshine
Surprisingly I’ve found that you very rarely see an average month for temperature, rainfall and sunshine, but May 2019 was such a month across the UK.
Category: Climate
A new way of looking at weather charts
The valuable chart archives on the Wetterzentrale site provides a number of reanalysis series, from CFSR, ERA and NOAA that you can download daily charts from. The CFSR series is at 0.5° resolution, whilst data from ERA is 1° and NOAA 2° resolution. Here’s an example of all the daily charts (00 UTC) for last winter [DJF 2018-19] using CFSR reanalysis data of MSLP and geopotential height at 500 hPa. Trying to find the start and end of any cold or warm spell in a series of weather charts by quantifying just how cold or warm it’s been in any...
This year’s UK extremes so far
Here are this year’s extremes for air temperature, sunshine and rainfall I’ve extracted from the SYNOP data that I download courtesy of the OGIMET site. I forgot I had written this application so this post is as much as a reminder to me to use it every now and again! I could bemoan the fact that the Met Office refuse to release all the climate station data they have, which is why the sunshine coverage is sparser than it need be, but in the spirit of the new look xmetman website I’m just going to thank them for releasing what...