There is no doubt that the Met Office will in due course try to paint our weather this year as extreme. They do the same every year in their attempt to link bad weather to global warming.
We know the procedure – highlight a couple of storms with silly names, a mild February, and a wet month sometime during the year, and claim everything is worse than ever. [emphasis, links added]
So far, however, the opposite has been the case: it has been a quiet, unremarkable first few months. We have seen little in the way of extreme cold, and rainfall has been close to normal cumulatively, though as in most years, some months have been dry and some wet.
Things were very different 120 years ago.
In February 1903 arrived one of the strongest storms ever to hit Britain. Scientists have recently reanalyzed the storm, christened Storm Ulysses, and discovered it was even much more powerful than the records of the time suggest.
They say that many places would have experienced gusts of over 100 mph. The cyclone left a trail of death, shipwrecks, smashed infrastructure, uprooted trees, and widespread flooding.
According to Professor Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading, who led the study:
‘We think it is likely that the winds were stronger in some locations than anything in the modern period 1950-2015. The precise values are a bit uncertain as the reanalysis does not produce gust values at the surface, but they would have been pretty high to cause the damage we see in photos from the time – on a par with big storms in 1990, 1997, 1998 and the Great Storm of 1987.’
Ulysses’s ferocity was recognized at the time. But by reanalyzing the raw weather observations from 1903 using the latest numerical modeling techniques like those that produce today’s daily forecasts, researchers have now obtained a new, more detailed appreciation of the event.
What the study shows is that wind speeds were often understated in times past, because limited observational ability meant anemometers were rarely situated where the maximum gusts occurred.
In contrast, nowadays there are thousands of automatic wind speed recorders around the country, and often at the most exposed sites, such as the Needles off the Isle of Wight, which regularly appears at the top of the Met Office’s wind speed charts.
Ulysses was not the only historically significant weather event of 1903. Four months later, London and much of the South East experienced the wettest June for more than 300 years. Writing in 2003, the late weather historian Philip Eden noted:
‘Exactly 100 years ago there was a prolonged downpour and flood without precedent in London’s meteorological history. In over 300 years of rainfall recording in the capital, June 1903 ranks as the wettest individual month, yet there was no rain at all during the first week, nor during the last ten days.’
According to one local historian, the fields between Wanstead Park and Ilford were like an open sea and the railway track at Seven Kings resembled a shallow river.
The Lea Valley was one vast lake, as the Essex County Chronicle reported:
‘In the large area of low-lying ground between Lea Bridge, Ilford, Barking, and East Ham, houses stood in a great inland sea, which was washing over the garden fences and lapping at the lower windows. Upstairs the occupants could be seen moving about or gazing hopelessly out at the dreary waste of black waters. Boats from Barking Creek were rowing about with supplies of milk and bread, and those who wished were taken away.’
If you thought things could not get any worse that year, they did! After a continuation of the miserable, wet weather through the summer, October 1903 turned out to be the wettest of any month by far in England.
The Met Office continues to claim that global warming means that our weather is getting more extreme. The actual data shows the opposite to be true.
Top photo: The June 1903 flood at Empress Avenue at the junction of Wanstead Park Road via Wanstead Meteo.
Paul Homewood is a former accountant who blogs about climate change at Not a Lot of People Know That.
Read the full post at Conservative Woman
Is it really called the Met office… if yes, then ok, if no then please call it by its correct name… at least once. Abbreviations sometimes are not helpful.
The Bureau of Meteorology in Australia has been up to similar tricks. Summed up, they have been playing around with the historical records for temperature to make past temperatures seem cooler to prove that temps today are hotter.
Or, when there is clearly an extreme event in the past, it is not mentioned or low-lighted to put focus on a current terrible event, caused by that awful human induced climate change, formerly known as global warming.
Australian scientist Dr Jennifer Marohasy from the Institue of Public Affairs is working on this and calling for a full independent scientific and mathematical audit of what the BoM has be doing. We are not holding our breath as the BoM refuses to release its data.
I wonder what they have got to hide?