Long-term Western precipitation trends are stable, says atmospheric scientist

California flood control channel [image credit: UC Berkeley]

Looking a lot further back than the satellite era can give a better perspective in weather trends. Nothing for alarmists to see here.
– – –
Although the West has experienced major ups and downs in its precipitation patterns from year to year, over the past 130 years regions that provide the major source for spring and summer runoff have not shown a long-term pattern that indicates a permanent decline in precipitation, according to research by Dr. John Christy, a distinguished professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Earth Science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

The results of Dr. Christy’s construction and analysis of the longest, regional-scale time series of snowfall accumulations for Washington, Oregon and California from 1890–2020 are in a paper in the December 2022 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Hydrometeorology, says Phys.org.

As part of a joint project between UAH and the Department of Energy, Dr. Christy examined archived snowfall data dating back to 1890 from over 700 stations located in the three states.

MET-Office wants your money for a new supercomputer, but has given up decadal forecasting

Well this is a disappointment.

After the fiasco in 2018 when I revealed the data-shifting technique the MET-Office were using to never be wrong about their ‘decadal’ forecast, and the late update in 2019 , the MET-O have now disappeared the ‘decadal’ forecast altogether. This after they promised to update it in January 2020.

EDIT: The forecast has been found! See comments below.

Chinese UHI study finds 0.34C/century inflation effect on average temperature estimate.

New study published by Springer today makes interesting reading. Phil Jones’ ears will be burning brightly.

Abstract:
Historical temperature records are often partially biased by the urban heat island (UHI) effect. However, the exact magnitude of these biases is an ongoing, controversial scientific question, especially in regions like China where urbanization has greatly increased in recent decades. Previous studies have mainly used statistical information and selected static population targets, or urban areas in a particular year, to classify urban-rural stations and estimate the influence of urbanization on observed warming trends. However, there is a lack of consideration for the dynamic processes of urbanization. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (YRD), and Pearl River Delta (PRD) are three major urban agglomerations in China which were selected to investigate the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of urban expansion effects on observed warming trends in this study. Based on remote sensing (RS) data, urban area expansion processes were taken into consideration and the relationship between urban expansion rates and warming trends was investigated using data from 975 meteorological stations throughout China.

Gravesend-Broadness weather station closes

No-one is quite sure why this weather station – which the late Tim Channon featured several times here at the Talkshop – so often came top of UK temperature lists, apart from being close to London. But KentLive News offered this believe-it-or-not clue: ‘The soil at Broadness is also said to heat up rather quickly under direct sunlight, which is part of the reason why it records some record breaking temperatures.’ Having only opened in 1995, its short-lived fame – or was it notoriety? – will now have to pass to somewhere else.
H/T PM

A weather station that has recorded some of the hottest temperatures in the UK is no more, reports KentOnline.

It’s been revealed a weather station renowned for recording some of the UK’s hottest temperatures has closed.

The Met Office has decided to shut the Gravesend-Broadness weather station on the Swanscombe peninsula after “significant changes to the site.”

Tony Heller: Is the global temperature record credible?

Tony Heller, AKA Steve Goddard, has this new video up on youtube. It raises important questions about the way the global temperature record has changed over time.

Climategate Email: UEA’s Phil Jones admits cooling trend (But adjusted data denies it)

From: Phil Jones 

To: John Christy  
Subject: This and that
Date: Tue Jul  5 15:51:55 2005

    John,
       There has been some email traffic in the last few days to a week - quite
   a bit really, only a small part about MSU. The main part has been one of
    your House subcommittees wanting Mike Mann and others and IPCC
    to respond on how they produced their reconstructions and how IPCC
    produced their report.
      In case you want to look at this see later in the email !

      Also this load of rubbish !

       This is from an Australian at BMRC (not Neville Nicholls). It began from the attached

    article. What an idiot. The scientific community would come down on me in no
    uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only
    7 years of data and it isn't statistically significant.

Here’s a curious thing. The current satellite data shows a flat or cooling trend from 1998 to mid 2005, but Phil Jones own HadCRUT dataset shows a warming (though not as much as the uber-manipulated NASA GISS. Is this because HadCRUT has been adjusted so that the 1998-2005.5 trend is upwards since Jones made this admission?

Hourly data store

Tim writes,

Figure 1, hourly data collected from Met Office Datapoint over two years for Heathrow, one of many stations with data.

I’ve succeeded in collecting a massive data store from Met Office Datapoint, hourly data for many UK stations, known errors in the supplied data excepted. Some data is missing, such as the week when I went into hospital and in error had powered off the automatic data collection computer. The poor air, blue tinged when I realised.

I could upload the whole lot as CSV files inside an archive but the sheer size of this is a disincentive unless there is genuine demand. 40 or so MB, 230 MB uncompressed.

https://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/series-2016-07-27.zip 43MB (Megabytes)

There are also daily plots as PDF, a mountain of data. What do people want if anything?

Met Office Scarborough, site 99142

Tim writes

Under can’t make it up comes the Met Office adding Scarborough to Datapoint and Swanage vanishing.

Figure 1, photograph ©2013 Copyright Christopher Hall under CC, annotation, the author, same licence.

Hall’s image legend: –

Springhill Lane
Just above the hedge can be seen the top of a World War II pill box. This was sited to give protective cover to the Royal Navy radio station in Sandybed Lane at the foot of the hill. The fenced flat area in the background is Springhill Reservoir opened in 1928 to augment the town’s water supply at a time when new developments were taking place. Water is pumped to here from Irton Waterworks.

Met Office station data release

I am making available all the data collected from Met Office Datapoint for UK land stations.

Example of data processed to show deviations.

This is hourly from 22nd July 2014 through 28th 31st Dec 2015, missing, etc. excepted. The data has been processed into time series with missing data filled with not available marks and also the verbatim datapoint XML as received.

A Talkshop page has been added, can get to it via top menu Portal, direct link here.

This ought to be a gold mine for those able to work on data. Millions of datapoints. The Met Office do not archive this immediate data for public access so whilst there are defects, you’ll have trouble finding this elsewhere.

Swanage met station

Tim writes, on the way back home from a visit to a secluded bay I visited the small Swanage met site.

Swanage weather station.

This is a report, not a site citicism, it’s fair enough for what it is.

Arriving late in the day as the sun touches the local horizon is a bad time for photography, add in exhaustion from earlier, this was going to be a brief look.

The Swanage Met Office AWS reports hourly temperature and humidity, probably rainfall. As a station it is not synoptic, will be based on an old seaside town site, hence some furniture in the enclosure which has nothing to do with the Met Office.

Figure 1 Swanage met station looking SE, this is two joined images .

The site is about 30 ft above sea level on an unstable sloping terrace then with a steep slope to a road, promenade, and sandy beach with breakwaters. Note the low trees in the background, have that windswept look. The land here is sheltered by a ridge from the south-west gales (setting sun is touching the ridge). The tree there implies a more southerly strength and on-shore summer breezes.

Clickable met site UK map

This article is of minor interest so no header image, save front page space.

The daily met Office site thumbnail plots I do includes a map of the UK showing the site numbers and locations. The red location cross now has a hot spot and can be clicked, taking you to a Bing maps view. Accuracy varies, not all sites have known exact locations, some have no good image, and some have disagreements Bing / Google.

Site 3772, Heathrow, initialises to showing a 747 on the runway. Click once on the + and it moves in to a superb view of the met site. Arrows allow rotation.

Temperature variation at Heathrow over the past year

This article is part of preparing the way for later revelations about instrumentation defects.

Figure 1 (upper), Figure 2 (lower) computed mean insolation for horizontal surface at this exact location and weather parameters, no cloud.

Figure 1 (upper), Experimental work[1] showing nearly daily temperature variation from expected, specifically designed to exclude diurnal but include detail variation at the fastest scale feasible. Time graticule at 10 days, data points at 12 hours. Surprisingly the July 1st hot period has vanished. Plots of other sites show a similar effect. The most frequent warm and cool periods of weather are brief and readily seen.

This computation will produce different values from the mean values computed from thermometer minimum and maximum data because data shape at other times is taken into account, min/max does not. The filter used is also windowed, leakage is negligible.

Guernsey weather station

Few days ago I noted new sites flash up on screen as a daily weather capture took place.

Guernsey is the second largest of the Channel Islands, a group just off the French coast beside the Cherbourg peninsular.

Met Office Datapoint have added Guernsey, Jersey is already in the data. This is surprising they are similar islands, close geographically, climatically similar.

As usual the Met Office only give crude co-ordinates and no other information. Looks like it is at the airport, as is the Jersey station. On looking I learnt there is

Guernsey Met Office
A division of the States of Guernsey Public Services Department

A further surprise is the 2014 Annual Weather Report (58 pages), a very good work, refreshing in this age of newspeak and excesses.

On UHI

The Lihou Island Automated Met Station received a major service and upgrade in the summer. The station is very important in that it measures temperatures in a completely unspoilt environment. The presence of the Met Observatory at Guernsey Airport means that the airfield provides the official temperature record for the island. Since the Met Office moved there in 1947, however, the land use of the airfield and the surrounding area has changed markedly with a notable increase in the acreage of tarmac, concrete, buildings and other man made surfaces. This land use change results in the formation of an “airport heat island” a phenomenon observed around the world where areas of concrete, roads and runways heat up on days with strong sunlight and then slowly release their heat through the night.

Although the Guernsey Airport heat island is small when averaged over the course of a year and only raises average temperatures by a fraction of a degree, it is an unwelcome variable that makes it harder to accurately detect temperature changes caused by genuine climate change. The Lihou record is therefore invaluable in that it measures temperature in an area where no significant development has been undertaken or will be allowed to take place. Over many years, it should therefore be possible to compare the Lihou temperature record with that of Guernsey Airport and gain an understanding of how land use changes on and around the airport are altering our temperature records.

Google or Bing aerial pictures show the airport is a building site (Google Earth timeline is useful for this). A probable meteorological enclosure, near the control tower, seems to have moved quite recently, to where, no idea. Possibly the Guernsey Met Office have a separate site.

Is this FUBAR? Heathrow “record” temperature

The Met Office have some explaining to do.

Why 7 minutes after a claimed hottest ever did the same place publish a safety record at least 1.2C lower? It was lower 7km, away at Northholt and all the surrounding places. Muttering about thunder won’t wash either because CAVOK says no, if it is correct. Plume from France? It was much colder to the south, Met Office data says so. Fohn? Ah yes the snow capped Sussex Alps.

Image from OGIMET, no link given to protect private server from excess traffic.

Someone please cross check me in case this is mistaken.

• METAR
• 13:20 it is 31C
• 13:50 it is 35C
• 14:20 it is 35C
• 14:50 it is 34C

Perhaps aeronatutical services use a different thermometer but the Met Office site is an WMO synoptic station. Why pay for the Met Office site if it isn’t used? If it is a site there for accurate climatic recording why such a poor location? (see other articles)

The 11 figure is dewpoint, also in contradiction.

Then there is the matter of Met Office Support giving the author the runaround since January over wrong meteorological hourly data emitted by the Met Office servers. The similarity is curious.

England and Wales temperature as seen by satellite

This is an experimental work which I am sure has been done far better by professionals who will have proper access to special data and expertise. [updated with corrections]

Figure 1, overlay plots of pairs of almost raw datasets, in each case the Met Office areal mean temperature data for England and Wales, less annual, against gridded UAHTLT V6 beta 2, UAHTLT V5.6, RSSTLT V3.3, Hadcrut4 V4.3.0.0, the latter is unfair because it is gridded at 5 degrees instead of 2.5 degrees. In all cases the geographic area overlap is very approximate.

Click image for larger but preferably download this PDF (106KB) since as a vector plot zoom/enlargement and pan allow examination in great detail.

Australians cool Melbourne

Mr Trewin also noted that the Bureau had recently changed its Melbourne monitoring site from the Royal Society of Victoria on La Trobe Street in the city to Olympic Park, near Rod Laver Arena. Maximum temperatures recorded at the new site were on average 1.2 degrees cooler, particularly on cool days, because air coming from the south and west was travelling over parklands rather than the through the city.

— http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/melbourne-weather-summer-2015-still-hot-just-last-year-was-hotter-20150119-12tbhi.html

h/t to handjive at notricks

Head image from an article by Anthony Watts at Steve McIntyre’s ClimateAudit 2007 article 6 years ago. (I’ve add the red circles)

BOM report it here, no mention of why [wrong, see comment by jdmcl]. Above is how BOM show the station.

Even rainfall data will be wrong with those tall nearby structures and fences.

The Age reported the closure here. No mention of why.

Urban and exposure effects during windless nights near London, RHS Wisley

Maybe not an expected article from me right now but as things turn up…

During a recent cold snap there were at times clear skies and a calm. Here is evidence of a profound difference between Met Office sites when site exposure and UHI thermal mass can upset natural radiative cooling.

The Farnborough site is in my estimation WMO Class 1 whereas RHS Wisley is poor, in an orchard designed to make a microclimate. Wisley however has been cited in literature and government chambers (and by Phil Jones) in relation to UHI in comparison with a record setting London site, specifically a site I have omitted from the surfacestation work. Overloaded with too much information.

Cool weather

Been away for a variety of reasons, has been a horrible few weeks including frenetic work on software workarounds. Several personal matters were far worse. Lets hope that is the end of it, more stuff keeps on dumping on me.

The weather is a tad chilly in England, went down to -6.8C at Katesbridge Northern Ireland last night (27th into 28th) [UPDATE] and what happened next? See comments and link to another blog article with data, went off the bottom of plot shown here –Tim][UPDATE 2, -8.8C ]

It might drop further tonight, flat anti-cyclone calm over the UK, unusually clear skies but there is still humidity to freeze out.

We had a remarkable day today in southern England, clear sunny all day with flat calm, just right to look at insolation and radiation balance.

A part explanation on Gravesend-Broadness, calm at tide turn

I may be boring folks yet detail is what breaks to understanding. This is rather fun, things fit. 

 

UK extremes

 

Parameter	Location	Value
Highest maximum temperature	Gravesend	14.1 °C
Lowest maximum temperature	Pennerley	5.7 °C
Lowest minimum temperature	South Newington	-2.0 °C
Highest rainfall	Redesdale Camp	19.8 mm
Sunniest	Leconfield	6.0 hours

Issued at: 2303 on Tue 04 Nov 2014

 

Hourly data, a peak temperature which elsewhere seems to coincide with a short period of high visibility, probably sunshine. But look at the green wind data trace, falling west wind, calm, east wind then resume west. Humidity drops low.  The station is on a tidal estuary.

The estimate tide from various web sites at Gravesend-Broadness was low tide at 16 hours but the PLA chart for Tilbury which is 2km downstream is  0.76 m @  17:10 hrs

History of Met Office Gravesend-Broadness site

Image OpenStreetMap / Author

New information has appeared so this is based on photographic evidence. The drawings are approximate and simple.

Those who want to look and with access to Google Earth here is a ZIP of Google KMZ files (4kB). Invoke and will go to the image for the date given.
Or
51.464261° 0.310574°

The Met Office station commenced operation during 1996. It is not a full station. I assume it is treated as a minor synoptic station.