As we’ve looked at before the BBC claimed….
Weather records: December was ‘wettest month for UK’
and trumpeted that loudly even though the Met. Office stated that…
For the UK as a whole its currently the second wettest on record.
Just been looking at the rainfall totals for December for England and Wales.
You know what…not a record, not a record by a long, long chalk.
In December we had 145.1 mm of rain, the year’s total for 2015 was a meagre 969mm.
1779 we had 144.4mm and in 1803 we had 145.8mm in December, and in May 1778 we had 151.8mm….look through the whole record and you’ll find vast numbers of months across the year that had more rain than this December.
In 1768 we had a total of 1247.3mm of rain for the year….that’s quite a bit more than 969mm I’d propose.
Anyone starting to think that 2015 and December were not ‘records’ at all? Maybe we had a lot of rain in one precise location but if you’re going to claim that that is somehow representative of the climate as a whole I’d suggest you’re talking out of your hat.
2015 ranks at number 167 out of 250 in a ranking of the wettest years...number 250 being the wettest…and which year is the wettest year on record?
1872, followed by 1768.
Scotland had the wettest December on record in 2015 but the wettest year is still 1938, 2015 coming in at 80 out of 85…..85 being the wettest….and if you look at the wettest months on record, ie January to December, only 2009 and 2015 make it into the records…the rest come mainly from the 1980’s and 90’s, with some being from 1935 onward…bearing in mind that the Scottish records only start in 1931 not 1766 as the English and Welsh ones do. In total Scotland had about the same rain in 2015 as it had in 1998…another El Nino year….still vastly less than in 1938.
This is curious from Harrabin…
Wet December 2015 may be trumped by wet Octobr 1903 when
@metoffice rain record is digitised. http://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2016/01/08/reporting-the-weather-across-the-uk/ …@ECIU_UK@CarbonBrief
roger harrabin
So after all that trumpeting by the BBC that December was the wettest month on record for the UK…now not so much….and as Scotland’s data only starts in 1931 that can’t really be included. Clearly he hasn’t had time to look at Met. Office records which show, as mentioned above, that a vast number of months across the centuries have been wetter than this December in England and Wales….so October 1903 is neither here nor there….and the records, digitised or not, already show that England and Wales in October 1903 had a massive 218.1mm of rain…why does Harrabin not know this already?…it might have given him a clue as to the real state of the weather UK wide.
Are the December rains the ‘new normal’ asks Harrabin….I would suggest they are the ‘old normal’….
Is December weather the new normal? Is there a new normal? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35228779 …
@ECIU_UK@CarbonBrief@eciu@Revkin@aDissentient
Harrabon retweets this…..why when the records clearly show the rain was anything but unusual?….
Extreme UK rains (like those seen in Storm
#Desmond) are more likely with global warming http://buff.ly/21UHAk1
ClimateCentral
It’s almost as if Harrabin disseminates agitprop rather than impartial journalism. Surely not?
One test in science is to imagine and then calculate extreme scenarios as a way to gain a correct judgment for a problem.
A sudden Global cooling would cause a fall in water vapour levels, which would be represented by record rainfall, but would be a Global average.
But the carbon dioxide hypothesis effect on weather, given by the IPCC, says that there would be a decrease in temperature contrast between the surface and six miles up, which would produce a reduction of weather events such as hurricanes and rainfall. But of course, there is no evidence for this in the observations. All the evidence points to contrast changes due to changes in Planetary Albedo. So if the North Pole is cooler than it used to be, and an El Nino which represents heat from the past churning back up to the top of the Ocean, then this would produce a much greater temperature contrast. That would be the reason for all this rain, considering that Piers Corbyn predicted that it would not be blocked until the middle of January. But we wont have an El Nino next year, so it would be less wet next year.
That was a Pinder forecast: WARNING: A Pinder forecast is better than a Met Office forecast, but not as good as a Weatheraction forecast.
“2015 ranks at number 167 out of 250 in a ranking of the wettest years…”
Nope, these are ranked by the driest years – “HadEWP ranked driest to wettest from 1766 to 2015” – which means 2015 was the 83rd wettest year on record.
“and which year is the wettest year on record? … 1872, followed by 1768.”
Why stop there, Alan? Why not give us the Top Ten wettest years on record? I’ll do it for you…
At number 10 it’s 1848
At 9 it’s 1877
8: 1882
7: 1903
6: 1960
5: 1852
4: 2000
3: 2012
2: 1768
1: 1872
I’m no mathematician, but I would expect to find one year from each decade in each group of 25 years if I was to assume there was no climate change. However, in the wettest 25 years – according to the data you linked to – there are 3 years listed between 2000 and 2009 and already 2 years listed from this decade (2010 – 2019).
That’s 5 years in the last 15 years listed in the top 25 wettest years since 1766.
Here’s another eye-opener!
In the top 25 DRIEST years, only 1 year from the last 40 years appears – 2003. It just so happens that 2003 is at number 25 in our top ten of DRIEST years. Ain’t that a coincidence?