A New Kind of Rain

Environment Agency chief says ‘weather is unpredictable’.

Environment Agency chairman Chris Smith said flooding is getting worse because of a ‘new kind of rain’. (Click image for link to article in Daily Mail)

In an article published in the Sunday Telegraph (and also covered by the Daily Mail – link image right), Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, perpetuates the ‘extreme weather’ meme.

Referring to the recent flooding and last year’s drought:

“Last year taught us that weather patterns are getting more extreme,” says Lord Smith. “If you’d said to me a decade ago that we’d have a year in which the first three months would be facing a serious prospect of very severe drought, but we’d then have nine months of the wettest period since records began, I’d have just said, ‘No, that sort of extreme weather does not happen here in Britain.’ Increasingly, it does.

Oh puhlease!

The weather is highly unpredictable and presents new challenges, he says, adding: “We are experiencing a new kind of rain.”

It may sound like an excuse from a railway company, but Lord Smith insists that it is true. “Instead of rain sweeping in a curtain across the country, we are getting convective rain, which sits in one place and just dumps itself in a deluge over a long period of time. From the point of view of filling up the rivers and the drains, that is quite severe.”

That doesn’t exactly sound like an endorsement of the Met Office.

Tonyb, whose penchant is historical records and texts recording weather, often bemoans the lack of attention paid by the Met Office in Exeter to their own archive records housed there.  If we could go back to a previous period following one of those where Arctic ice was known to be low by historical accounts (as explored by Tonyb; also see detailed poster here: http://acsys.npolar.no/meetings/final/abstracts/posters/Session_1/poster_s1_027.pdf), would we find similar weather patterns to those today in the UK?

Magical Moonrise

Prepare yourself for three minutes of magic as you watch this amazing video of moonrise by photographer & digital visual effects artist Mark Gee.  Mark has worked on many high profile films, including The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and The Hobbit.

Poppycock or Worse than we thought

These men were the faces of nature on the BBC in my youth – heroes you could say. You see I was a greenie then too.  Never a rabid one you understand – I always believed that if you wanted to change something you had to work with those whom you wanted to influence – hence my industrial leanings even then.

Dr David Bellamy – “Poppycock”

David Attenborough  “Worse than we thought”

Flood defence: an army of snowmen

This is too funny.  The Daily Mail reports:

Build a snowman by order of the GOVERNMENT! Environment Agency urges homeowners to pile up ice and prevent flooding by delaying thaw

• Weather forecasters are predicted a sudden thaw when temperatures swing from -13C to 13C at the weekend
• Concerns homes and businesses could be flooded due to melting snow resulting in large areas of standing water

Met Office Accuracy II

Guest Post by Charles Duncan

An update to previous analysis and also this time looking at temperature.

A few days ago I posted an analysis of the Met Office’s rainfall forecasts.  I realised after the event that I had used actuals from England and Wales, not the UK, so here’s the revised version.  This time we are comparing apples with apples!

Using the 3-month outlooks[i], published monthly by the Met Office, I looked at the most likely rainfall and temperature for the first month of each; in other words their forecasts in a window of one to six weeks out.

I then compared these to the actuals, also from the Met Office website[ii],[iii].

Rainfall

Spam, comments and etiquette

Judith Curry’s post Blog commenting etiquette makes very useful reading, except that the people who need to read it and heed it don’t. We’ve few problems in this quiet little backwater (quiet mainly due to the now ever present busyness in my day job), but let me underline one point:

“…put some effort into writing a response that adds to the conversation and/or helps the blog writer [and others]. Your comment is your calling card. The webernet is an open rolodex and as such, how you present yourself through your words will tell people whether or not they want to look you up.“

This one applies to all of us (me too), everywhere, but especially to those who comment here specifically to drive traffic to their site when the post they are directing people to is of only distantly related relevance (such as it is still on the subject of climate).

Met Office: poor accuracy on predicted rainfall

Guest post by Charles Duncan

I have often claimed the Met Office is unable to forecast weather more than two or three days out.

I like to have data to support my assertions, so I thought I would see how well they did predicting last year’s rainfall.

Each month they publish a 3-month outlook, with estimates for rainfall for the first of the three months and the three month total. I took the first month’s data, so the test is of their ability to forecast in a window from one to six weeks out.

An Amusical Diversion

In searching for a version of Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter for the New Year post, this strange-looking instrument  popped up.

Dactilófono (Source: Les Luthiers Online – click for link)

It’s a wonderful sort of Heath Robinson device (for US readers think ‘Rube Goldberg’). 

Happy New Year

This is not so much looking forward to what 2013 will bring as a little musical diversion inspired by a friend and a little overindulgence (as happens at this time of year) – an apt musical representation of a Scotsman heading home late in the evening.

Part of the second movement of English composer Malcolm Arnold’s Four Scottish Dances. This is linked to Youtube, rather than embedded so that it starts at the appropriate spot.

Even the conductor gets in on the act.

An unusual Christmas Eve

Summarised from a translation in preparation of “PAMIR 1955/56″ by Arnd B. Arnd
(an account of his time as a deck hand on the Pamir in his youth).

It was Christmas Eve when we made it past the Canary Islands. After six weeks of gray skies we had sun and fair trade winds to cheer the mood on board. While scrubbing the deck and changing to summer sails the young crew was nervous about preparation of the promised Christmas light chain to be attached over the masts. On a square rigger seasonal lights are very impressive. There were about 30 petroleum lamps on board for emergency lighting but these had been augmented though striking a bargain with a supplier in our home port of Bremen.