passionate about weather
March 2020 was a wet month in the northwest of Scotland, but further south and east rainfall was closer to the seasonal average, and the further east that you came the drier it became, such that counties bordering the North Sea, such as East Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk...
Apologies for having another go but isn’t the digitising of rainfall records like these the responsibility of the UKMO? What have they been doing for the last 50 years since the introduction of mainframe computers and databases to digitise these records? No one, especially Jonathan Amos ever seem...
The wettest spots exposed to the strong to gale force S’SW for the last couple of days look to have seen 60 to 75 mm of rain in the last 39 hours, that’s if my estimates from weather radar images are correct. Accumulations like this due to orographic...
This is a chart of estimated rainfall totals since 12 UTC on Monday that’s a period of almost 26 hours, the estimates look fairly reasonable when compared to the reported totals from the SYNOPs. The highest orographic rainfall totals are in the range 50 to 60 mm over...
The models are predicting a wet start to the week across western Scotland, particularly on the Outer isles and Skye. The totals don’t look quite as dire in the 00 UTC run of the GFS as the 100 to 125 mm predicted in the yellow warning from the...
If you don’t know what the acronym GloFAS stands for then join the club, neither did I until today. Here is an explanation from their own website about who they are and what they do. The Global Flood Awareness System GloFAS is the global flood service of the European...
The freely available gridded data series for precipitation by the Met Office has now been extended back to 1862, so I thought I would take a closer look at it by means of a 12 month moving average of rainfall and linear trend to see if the climate...
A flat warm front wave on the cold front running E’NE across Northern Ireland makes for an interesting plotted chart for 15 UTC today with a sharp temperature contrast north south across the UK. Looking forward to the brief anticyclonic spell this weekend when hopefully we might get...
I am indebted to Helen Willets about news of a low pressure system that formed across Egypt yesterday and which is now running into the eastern Mediterranean sea, and which brought some unusual flooding to Cairo and surrounding areas. It’s not a great part of the world for...
Click on chart to open slide show If you examine the England and Wales series of daily precipitation which started in 1931, you’ll hopefully find as I have, that each of the four ‘meteorological’ seasons have been getting progressively wetter. Winters are now almost 20% wetter than they...
The only reason that I can see why almost identical warnings were issued for heavy rain across central Wales and central northern England, one amber and the other yellow, is that the Met Office thought that river Severn was more sensitive to more heavy rain than the rivers...
These estimates of rainfall from the weather radar for the 18-06 UTC overnight period look a bit on the light side when compared to some of the actual values that fell from the cold front as it crossed the country. No doubt they’ll do their bit in keeping...
A wet, wet, wet 24 hours in the west of Scotland, with a very distinct rain shadow boundary running down the four degrees west line of longitude, it’s a bit of pity that Strathpeffer lies 4.5397° west.
Estimates from weather radar suggest that there has between 60 to 75 mm of precipitation since midnight across the mountains of NW Scotland. The rain shadow effect has been in overdrive for much of the day here in Scotland and so accumulations further east have been mollified by...
In the England and Wales gridded data series from the Met Office, the total for February 2020 turns out to have been the highest since that series started in 1766. The 169.9 mm was 260% of the 1961-1990 long-term average. The EWP series extends back 96 years beyond...
As you can see February 2020 was the wettest on record across six of the ten regional areas, the central slice if you like, of the UK, in the extended gridded monthly values that commence in 1862. The three southern areas of England and Wales and Northern Scotland,...
It look like the Met Office have had done a hasty rejig of their rainfall anomaly scale to cater for values greater than 400% in the record wettest February of 2020. They have done this by spreading the colours they use by increasing the steps from 25% to...
