Self-isolation proves a boon to rainfall project

OCR software isn’t up to the job apparently. Let’s hope they don’t resort to data ‘adjustments’ after all the public’s efforts. Rain is a popular topic in the UK.

Scientists have been amazed at the public’s response to help digitise the UK’s old rainfall records, reports BBC News.

Handwritten numbers on documents dating back 200 years are being transferred to a spreadsheet format so that computers can analyse past weather patterns.

The volunteers blitzed their way through rain gauge data from the 1950s, 40s and 30s in just four days.

Project leader Prof Ed Hawkins had suggested the work might be a good way for people to use self-isolation time.

“It’s been incredible. I thought we might get this far after three or four weeks, not three or four days,” he told BBC News.

England’s water resource muddle

Mixed messages ahead. Can anyone explain the apparent discrepancies?

The UK Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs has issued a warning: large areas of England will face significant risk of drought due to climate change, and water companies need to find billions of extra liters per day by 2050 to keep up, reports New Atlas.

But days earlier we had this from the Met Office Press Office:
Climate change to bring heavier rainfall events.

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.

Met Office forecasters set for ‘billion pound’ supercomputer

A beefier computer is still just a computer. The report says ‘Around half of the processing work – the research devoted to climate change – could be located in countries blessed with easy sources of clean energy. Iceland with its geothermal sources and Norway with its hydropower are both possibilities’.

Ever wondered why your village was suddenly flooded by a thunderstorm the weather forecasters hadn’t mentioned? Or why they failed to warn you about the dense fog shrouding your home in the morning?

The fact is that predicting the “big picture” of future conditions has got a lot better – Storm Dennis was spotted six days before it arrived, says BBC News.

But getting local forecasts right – street by street and hour by hour – is still a massive challenge.

And that might now change as the Met Office secures the help of a supercomputer project costing £1.2bn.

Barometric pressure in London ‘highest in 300 years’ at least

High pressure over the UK

This is happening at the time of the deepest solar minimum for over a century. A Met Office tweet shown in the article states the record was set in January 1902: ‘UK record of 1053.6 hPa, Aberdeen 31.1.1902’.

Wikipedia says: ‘solar cycle [14] lasted 11.5 years, beginning in January 1902 and ending in July 1913. The maximum smoothed sunspot number (SIDC formula) observed during the solar cycle was 107.1, in February 1906 (the lowest since the Dalton Minimum)’.

The obvious similarity between January 1902 and January 2020, and indeed between solar cycles 14 and 24, could be a coincidence – but is it?
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The weather forecasters have just given us an impressive display of their skill by predicting the scale of the current high pressure zone over the UK, says BBC News.

Overnight, Sunday into Monday, London’s Heathrow Airport recorded a barometric pressure of 1,049.6 millibars (mbar).

It’s very likely the highest pressure ever recorded in London, with records dating back to 1692.

But the UK Met Office and the European Centre for Medium Range Forecasts had seen it coming well ahead of time.

UK weather latest: Downpours set to last ‘until end of August’

Credit: BBC

What happened to the ‘unprecedented’, ‘new normal’ hot weather that blew in from north Africa for a few days, then blew away again? Or was that just the media and warmist climate pundits shooting the breeze for yet another opportunistic headline? In any case it looks as if the Great British Summer is now back to its usual erratic self, but becoming somewhat wetter than the seasonal average.

Thunderstorms and heavy downpours are set to hit the UK this week, as Brits face what could be one of the wettest Augusts on record, says the Evening Standard.

Severe thunderstorm warnings are in place for London and the south east on Monday, with the chance of flooding, travel disruption and power cuts, the Met Office warns.

GWPF is Having a Contest To Guess 2019’s Temperature

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Predicting a global temperature rise during a solar minimum might be over-optimistic.

sunshine hours

GWPF is having a contest to guess 2019’s Temperature.

My chart of HADCRUT temperatures is below. Note how close Feb 2018 came to Feb 1878! .403 to .528

With GWPF readers having trounced the Met Office at predicting temperatures for 2018, it will very interesting to see if you can do just as well for 2019.

So we hereby announce the 2019 HadCRUT temperature prediction competition. Once again, the opportunity is there to win some magnificent prizes: more whisky, and your choice of a book from the growing range of GWPF titles.

Of course the real prize on offer is to do better than the boys in Exeter. The Met Office are again being very aggressive on the warming front. They are predicting a 0.19°C warming next year (!), plus or minus 0.12°C. So their predicted range is 0.67-0.91°C.

So will carbon dioxide sweep all before it as they think? Will…

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MET-Office update: There is no update.

In the meantime, here’s how the 2016-2021 forecast (in blue) is doing compared to the latest data (red trace).

Last year, I wrote a short post entitled Met-Office invents infallible climate prediction method, in which I showed how the MET-Office would always update their ‘decadal’ (actually semi-decadal) climate prediction before the data caught up with them.

At the time, they were promising to update their prediction in January of this year. But they haven’t, despite describing themselves as “WMO Lead Centre for Annual-to-Decadal Climate Prediction“. So instead, I’ve done a retrospective update of the data on their 2016 to 2021″decadal” prediction.

Climate silly season continues: UK’s future climate

Hot on the heels of the latest, much-derided US climate report, the UK Met. Office’s crystal ball gazers have waded in with their own prognostications. They offer a ‘range of future scenarios’ which are based on concentrations of trace gases in the atmosphere, because that’s what they believe matters the most. Their predictions, or projections, are…predictable. Look out for words like ‘could be’ and ‘up to’.

The UK’s most comprehensive picture yet of how the climate could change over the next century has been launched today by Environment Secretary Michael Gove.

The UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) include:

— UK’s most comprehensive projections of climate change
— Data gives most detailed picture yet of temperature, rainfall and sea level rise over next century
— Cutting-edge science to help businesses and homes plan for the future

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.”

Met Office fakes the Foehn effect

Descending air in the atmosphere rises in temperature as it is adiabatically compressed in the pressure gradient created by gravity acting on atmospheric mass. This has been known for centuries. However, the MET Office has decided to do away with this fundamental fact of physics in a short video it has produced.

Here is some more information on what we mean by the Foehn Effect pic.twitter.com/h8Zr9XJ2Y2

— Met Office (@metoffice) October 23, 2018

Even their own website page on the Foehn effect (now safely screenshotted and web-cited) tells us:

“ foehn air… becomes warmer and drier on the leeside after it is compressed with descent due to the increase in pressure towards the surface.”

Met-Office invents infallible climate prediction method

The Met-Office has issued a ‘decadal’ climate forecast which runs from 2018 to 2023. Maybe it should be called a ‘semi-decadal forecast’ instead, but we’ll let it pass, as that’s not the most amusing aspect of it by a long chalk.

For starters, there’s the baseline period chosen. 1850-1900. They’ve gone for this so they can scare us with the upper end of the blue prediction envelope exceeding the Dangerous! Global! Warming! politically chosen figure of 1.5C above “pre-industrial”.

Here’s the global measuring station coverage between 1891 and 1920. There was a lot less in 1850.

I thought it would be fun to see how the Met-O forecast is doing after 10 months, so I plotted the latest annually averaged HadCRUt 4 global data using Wood For Trees in red and overlaid it on the Met-O prediction plot:

Is La Niña on the way?

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The latest assessment from the UK Met Office.

Official blog of the Met Office news team

During 2015 and 2016, the planet experienced one of the largest El Niño events in a century.  El Niño (Spanish for the boy) is actually the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and climate scientists are now suggesting that this oscillation in tropical Pacific temperature is likely tipping towards its opposite cool phase, La Niña.

Ensemble members show an increasing likelihood of La Niña conditions developing during October and November. La Niña conditions are said to develop when the sea surface temperature anomaly goes below –0.5°C.

Perhaps less well known than its larger brother, La Niña (Spanish for ‘the girl’) is an event that can trigger significant impacts.  Professor Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal prediction at the Met Office, said: “During El Niño, temperatures in the equatorial Pacific can warm by as much as 3°C. La Niña tends to be smaller and rarely exceeds 2°C, but…

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Met Office tiptoeing round the truth

Credit: NOAA

Air time for climate change sceptic Lord Lawson, critical questioning of Al Gore and the stonewalling Met Office – is the BBC’s support for climate alarmism weakening?

Met Office can’t bear to give facts on hurricanes writes Andrew Montford in the GWPF Newsletter.

It’s normal when somebody like Nigel Lawson appears on the BBC, for the corporation to follow up by giving somebody from the green side of the equation a chance for an unchallenged response. I think this is something to do with the unique way it’s funded. 

Today was no exception, with yesterday’s exchanges between Lawson and Al Gore being given a going over by Roger Harrabin and Peter Stott from the Met Office.

Harrabin had been tasked with looking at the claims about the relative levels of subsidy for fossil fuels and renewables, and this was not too bad.

MET Office ‘adjusts’ the data to bring us the hottest day since 1976

The BBC breathlessly reports a MET-office reported temperature of 34.5C at Heathrow yesterday, but what does the actual data say?

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?

MET Office: Forecasting months/seasons ahead “Still in its infancy”.

Roundup of comment on MET Office performance with UK summer weather forecasting from Benny Peiser at GWPF:

 Image Credit: Cartoons by Josh

The Met Office has defended its forecast for a hot, dry summer despite some areas looking set to have the most rain since records began. As summer officially came to a close amid extreme downpours on Monday, the forecaster was left facing questions about why it predicted a ‘drier-than-average’ season even though a strong El Nino climate event was expected. In May the Met Office said that it ‘wouldn’t expect (El Nino) to be the dominant driver of our weather’ in the summer months. Yet this weekend Met Office chief scientist Professor Dame Julia Slingo said that the El Nino phenomenon had disturbed weather patterns, which might have been predicted. “We all know that forecasting months and seasons ahead is still in its infancy and much more research needs to be done.”–Sarah Knapton, The Daily Telegraph, 31 August 2015

More headwinds for the UK Met Office

[image credit: Richard Austin News Pictures]

Long-time critic Christopher Booker says: THE MORE MONEY THE MET OFFICE GETS, THE MORE INACCURATE ITS DOOM-MONGERING [Date: 07/08/15, Daily Mail]

The performance of the Met Office for which we pay £220 million a year is not just a joke, but a major scandal. And well done the BBC for allowing Quentin Letts, for once, to point this out.

Very surprisingly and somewhat boldly, on Wednesday morning Radio 4 put out a programme by the Mail’s Quentin Letts which ran flatly counter to the BBC’s normal party line on one of its very favourite subjects, global warming.

HADCRUT Cool The Past Yet Again

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The longer the so-called pause – the new normal? – goes on, the more popular ‘cooling the past’ becomes with state-funded organisations like the Met Office. Check the satellite records.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

HADCRUT have just released their latest version 4.4, and guess what? Yes, the past has been cooled again!

This is is how things have changed since version 4.3.

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MET Office: Little ice age ahead – re-arrange deck chairs now!

Via Benny Peiser at the GWPF

Image courtesy of CartoonsbyJosh.com

Britain could be on the verge of a mini Ice Age as the Sun enters a cooler phase, the Met Office warned yesterday. The last big chill was felt hundreds of years ago when Frost Fairs were held on the frozen River Thames. However the Met Office said the new freeze will not be enough to cancel out the effects of global warming. Met Office’s Hadley Centre, which looks at long term forecasts, said there was a 15-20 per cent chance that we could match the temperatures last seen in 1645-1715 – sometimes called the Little Ice Age – when the River Thames froze over. –Colin Fernandez, Daily Mail, 24 June 2015