Nothing Unusual About January Storms
By Paul Homewood
There seems to be constant amazement every time we have a gale and bit of wet weather over here in the UK.
Perhaps folks need reminding that this is pretty normal in January, as the following selection of Met Office reports show:
———————————————————————————————————————–
————————————————————————————————————————
————————————————————————————————————————-
——————————————————————————————————————
——————————————————————————————————————
———————————————————————————————————————
————————————————————————————————————————-
——————————————————————————————————-
——————————————————————————————————————
—————————————————————————————————————————
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/library/archive-hidden-treasures/monthly-weather-report
Of course, the Met Office did not give storms cute names in those days.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
What a splendid collection of newspaper cuttings. January 1937 must have been my first winter going to school when I have vague memories of walking in navy mac, shiny black wellington boots and school cap…….but then it wasn’t unusual to have awful weather in the winter and sometimes very hot and dry summers. Oh and then I would have walked on my own to catch the ordinary bus and walked on to the school. Parents weren’t so molly coddling in those days… The whole Global Warming industry trades on the fact that most of the population can remember only some thirty or forty years.
It’s a pity the statistical data on storms, and in particular wind, is so discontinuous.
I was wondering whether it would be possible to form a dataset from daily pressure charts, but that would involve a lot of work?
Sorry that question mark was supposed to be an exclamation mark!
I was looking at the weather reports from Scotland and the Shetlands today and saw a peak gust to 125 kt at Cairngorm and up to 91 kt at Lerwick and Baltasound as of 1500 UTC. The large cold SST anomaly in the North Atlantic interacting with the warm SST anomaly along the Gulf Stream to the south may be the culprit. That sharper than usual gradient apparently works well to help spin up some very intense storms. I’m sure this has happened many times in the past and your articles re-enforce this conviction.
Spot on
Note the 1993 report:
On the 17th and 21st, gusts of 125 and 147 kt at Cairngorm Summit, the latter almost a British record.
(The record was 150kt in 1986; http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/climate-extremes/#?tab=climateExtremes)
But of course we did not have many automatic station like this up mountains like this in the old days – Cairngorm summit BTW is 1245 meters
Yes, I was looking at winter photos of the Cairngorm weather station in winter recently, like this one:
Must be a big challenge to keep it running in the winter.
QV:
If you ignore 1930-1949 where there were 2 stormy Januaries per decade, and the cooler period 1950-1979 when there were 0 per decade, you will see that 1980-1999 had 2 stormy Januaries per decade whereas 1900-1929 only had 1 per decade reported.
My cue to run round in ever decreasing circles squawking hysterically “Climate Change – it is worse than we thought”. Oops! The Met Office claims copyright.
(That was brought on by someone on TV [in Aust.] saying in breathless tones that it had been the hottest day in 93 years therefore…)
I like data I can put on a graph!
I found this website on metcheck.com which appear to show the pressure chart and other data for the UK for every day since 1/1/1871
http://www.metcheck.com/OTHER/birthday_weather_charts.asp
The problem is how to convert that into numeric data which will be useful.
So the 147 knots on Cairngorm at 169 miles clearly beats the recent 135 miles by quite a margin. We certainly live in “unprecedented” times. Thanks Paul for so systematically showing that the weather we are experiencing is anything but “unprecedented”.
Using “unprecedented” in the modern sense of ‘never reported in such alarmingly cherry-picked detail before’ then yes this “unprecedented” reporting is truly unprecedented (old sense).
The only “unprecedented”factor in all of this is the hysteria generated by certain groups for what or who knows reason. At a young 73 I have known and remember weather patterns just as “extreme” as those some folk are slavering over nowadays!
Well, January is a cold and stormy winter, so it’s not unusual to have storms and blizzard. Right now, I’m wondering if Europe contributed to another record cold in US, as presented here: http://1ocean-1climate.com/?
It’s quite surprising that those old reports haven’t been “adjusted”.
The warmists missed a trick there.
I’d grab the whole lot and archive them somewhere safe, if I were you, just in case they are mysteriously “lost” at some point.