UK Record Temperature Stays Intact
By Paul Homewood
The Met Office have been desperate to declare a new UK temperature record this week, but the weather gods said no!
The Cambridge temperature fell well short of the all time record of 38.5C set at Faversham in 2003.
They feebly claim that the Cambridge temperature is still a record for July. Climatologically July is a warmer month than August, when the Faversham record was set, so by all accounts the 2003 heatwave was more extreme than yesterday’s.
The cause of the high temperatures is very clear. Not only was hot air being drawn up from Spain, but a deep area of low pressure to the west powered up the jet stream to bring that hot air north very quickly, before the heat had a chance to dissipate.
I have asked the Met Office for data for a range of sites across the UK, so will be doing a full analysis then.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
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Hmmmp. …. and when , not IF, Journo types hang around for that magic moment, of course the temperature will hit the new record: Funny how the temps are what they are JUST THERE at the measuring Stations, but no one else experiences them. Maybe the weather gods are playing with matches …………………
Not only the Met Office. I had four shrill Sky News alerts throughout the day breathlessly declaring it was getting hotter.
Bought a smile to my face when they could only declare the 2nd hottest day. They really did want it to happen.
Look forward to your analysis of the data Paul.
Channel 4 news mentioned something about helping deprived towns such as Scarborough, moments after spinning the climate propaganda, which brought a smile to my face also.
Brought
They had been declaring all week as a matter of fact that the record would be broken and the UK would have its hottest day evaah!
Their attempts to sensationalise the highest temperature yesterday rather than keep their heads down tells you how shameless and unaccountable these people are.
Surprised that a backdraft from an airplane in Heathrow didn’t come to their rescue! I suppose even they are becoming wary of that source thanks to Paul’s excellent work on this issue.
Cambridge University weather station recorded a high of (only) 36.1 C yesterday, 25 July 2019.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/weather/daily-text.cgi?2019-07-25
Great info, it would be interesting to get some historic photos of the observatory and a current google image.
I can’t imagine that it hasn’t suffered some UHI over the last 100 years.
Do they have historic data as well ie from the 30s and 70s etc?
Looks like it was at the Cambridge NIAB weather station, which was up to 2C warmer than the station at the university down the road:
Location on google map. Some tarmac aound.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B013'31.7%22N+0%C2%B005'59.1%22E/@52.223369,0.0995608,3896m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d52.22546!4d0.0997353
That begs the question if the record wasn’t set at the CU weather station where was it set?
There was mention of an “Observatory”.
I understand the relevant station was recently moved to a concrete courtyard near the Uni. from a bucolic position by the Cam…….
This could explain it. The Cambridge NIAB weather station which recorded the 38.1 — a whole 2 C warmer than the university weather station down the road — is presently a construction site:
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=70362a32-4bc8-4977-8dd1-2b4b42e2d6f2&cp=52.225274~0.097871&lvl=17&style=h&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027
https://www.niab.com/news_and_events/article/425
You are right to be suspicious PM. Here in east Surrey, despite relentless hysteria from the BBC, not only did the temperature only reach 35C briefly in the afternoon, but that was exactly as forecast by the weather apps.
38C+? Very fishy!
Can anyone give me a link to the site that shows how the energy supply is generated, preferably on a daily basis please?
Cheers Paul
kodiak@eml.cc
grid.iamkate.com
Hi Paul, good work as usual. I seem to remember there were problems with accuracy due to UHI at Faversham too. Situated on bitumen behind a hedge ? I have asked the MET office for Google images of Cambridge and Kew gardens to see if there is any UHI . I’d not heard of the Writtle claim.
I’ve seen the Google pics of the Heathrow thermometer which is near one major runway and criss crossed by turning lanes, two massive terminal building’s and jet engine’s passing by. We know Heathrow can obviously be discounted due to it’s ridiculous siting in the biggest concrete jungle in Europe. Would it be possible to post the Google pics for all the other sites with’ record ‘ claims?
Ah well, a new claim has been put forward. Apparently, it was the hottest night evah…somewhere in Scotland!
And that proves man-made global warming catastrophe is here, hooray!
Having been a visitor to Scotland in what the local, redheaded, milk-skinned, natives laughingly call their summer, in each of most of the last seventy years, I can assure people who have not been there, that lying in bed, tossing and turning and sweating would be a welcome novelty.
Actually, my brother got severe heat stroke in July 1953, climbing Ben Nevis. But that was because he did not realise the significance of the fact that the sun was directly overhead and the sky was clear. I stayed in the hotel grounds, by a little stream, and was completely comfortable all day.
They were claiming that 39 would be the most likely, see this post by Jaime Jessop
Poor Stotty must be so disappointed!
Perhaps an ‘adjustment’ can be arranged 😂
I had assumed that the Cambridge temperature had been measured at new location C which is in the corner of a small courtyard surrounded by glass and concrete buildings. The station is right next to the Cambridge University Computing Centre which has a plethora of air condition units on the roof. Beggars belief that this absurd location was chosen as a weather centre. The fact that this station only recorded 36.1C suggests the record reading must have come rom a location even more egregious in its positioning – Chinese laundry vent?
Cambridge might be the Airport, but yes I was watching the live feeds from both and as you say the Uni lab roof live feed was always about 2C less than ‘Cambridge’, it just goes to show what nonsense records are. Great for boasting, useless for anything else like science.
We know Kew is a hot site, it often comes top in the country.
Writtle I think is another airfield.
All top sites showing on Netweather at the peak were airfields or bases (38C top to 37C) :-
Northolt
Cambridge (Airport?)
Heathrow
Cranfield
Luton Airport
London City Airport
Benson
London/Heathrow Airport
Stanstead Airport
Mildenhall RAF Base
Lakenheath RAF Base
Measuring concrete pads and runway tarmac – how useful for science.
Just read post above, not the Airport, but looks like a very bad site with lots of hard surfaces.
Yes Grim they are perfect for they designed for – to inform aircraft of runway air temp for take-off and landing.
There was an extreme record set yesterday, the number of times the BBC said ‘experts say’, ‘climate change’ and ‘global heating’. etc.
PM – Difficult to see exactly where the instrument pack is on this NIAB site.
It certainly looks as though a good exposure would be hard to come by.
Can we home in on the exact citing?
Hmm, my links for google and bing maps above are to the grid ref given by the Met Office for Cambridge NIAB weather station, which is currently a construction site. However, the tweet from NIAB states that the station is at NIAB Farm, which is down somewhat to the North East at another site. Bizarely, there seems to be construction underway at the farm also.
oh, and a complex of green houses whose temperature is controlled by readings from the weather station
I thought there used to be a station in the Cambridge Botanical gardens. Searching for it I found Andrews field as allegedly the nearest, with a max yesterday of just 34.5
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/observation/u120fvs66
Anyone else a bit curious as to how Heathrow – accurately described above and only fields prior to WW2 and therefore the 1930s – is matched by Kew Gardens. Is it in one of the glasshouses? I wonder how much better Syon Park across the river would be as a location. Not the bit that you visit but the pasture to the NW of the house and garden.
I was a bit surprised that the station employee who when asked about the delayed trains replied that it was our fault for going to work wasn’t lamped one on the spot. Thameslink is still reduced today as the overhead cables that sagged in the heat were not fixed last night. I guess the coefficient of expansion is unknown to Network Rail. In other countries I have seen concrete weights keeping a constant tension. Any railway power engineers here?
I live between Heathrow and Kew Gardens (town centre and lots of traffic)
Yesterday (July 25) at home all day, I watched my thermometers assiduously.
Now I’m not saying that I have top scientific instruments but they did track precisely the endless gleeful and hopeful beebrad rising heat reports from Heathrow until early afternoon. Then cloud arrived. My observed temperatures topped out at 35.6 and thereafter wandered around at 34. 33, and 32.
So I was surprised to hear later that Heathrow and Kew Gardens had registered 37.9 degrees.
Great point Barbera. We cannot trust the Met office. I remember them claiming record temperatures for Scotland last year; turned out their thermometer was on concrete in a supermarket car park! This clearly shows they have now become an organisation of environmental activists rather than professional weather experts.
The Met Office’s credibility, already at a low ebb, is now in the gutter. They took to social media excitedly claiming that 39C was ‘the most likely’ maximum temperature for Thursday, raising expectations of an imminent all time temperature record for the UK. Not only that, but they disingenuously connected the ‘record’ which hadn’t even been broken to climate change, linking to a page which declared that a non peer-reviewed, unpublished attribution study by Peter Stott ‘showed’ that summers like 2018 were now 30x more likely. Their disappointment at the failure of the current Faversham record to be broken is palpable. It’s time that the publicly funded Met Office are reined in and instructed to concentrate on core meteorological services. Like the BBC, they have become biased and political and have strayed far from their original remit.
Egg on face again for the puerile climateers at the MetO.
Fried egg, fresh off the sizzling asphalt at Heathrow.
**BREAKING**
BBC Weather
@bbcweather
A new provisional record has come in for yesterday: Cambridge Botanic Gardens reached 38.7C according to the Met Office. If this is validated, it will make yesterday the hottest UK day on record. The previous record was 38.5C at Faversham in Kent on 10th August 2003.
3:14pm · 26 Jul 2019 · SocialFlow
Perhaps it took so long for the bunsen burner under the thermometer, to heat it up?
Probably in a bl***y greenhouse…. ;-p
Link:
Hottest day evah, as today’s Tour de France stage is halted due to snow and hail – is Al Gore in the Alps?!
Met office now claiming yesterday set a new record in Cambridge after having 24hrs to adjust the data. I smell BS
Obviously, the Met Office needs to homogenize and pasteurize the raw data. That takes time and considerable imagination.
Given the page that “It doesn’t add up” linked to at 1:52pm today – how does that work?
If you click on the down arrow under Andrewsfield (top leftish) for nearby observation sites – it gives cambridgeniab as mentioned by PM above as the nearest site at 3.7miles
We had the Heat Burst sudden temp rise after midnight Thursday
My car thermometer dropped 8C yesterday morning.
It was when I went thro the car wash!
That image, and Dan’s explanation, would make a great “What caused this?” question at any Pub Quiz event! 😀
Ooops Met Office’s explanation, rather than Dan’s.
Actually to me the *hottest day” would be the 24 hour period with the hottest average temperature over the whole country
…NOT a day where you cherrypick one location crossing a line for one moment.
Such temporary fluke local HOT readings , just don’t matter
..cos with proper preparation there should be no negative costs. Everyone has access to shade and a fan.
So the standard metric of “show me the bodies” doesn’t apply.
..Neither the metric of counting insurance costs.
Obviously a sustained things over a month like a drought or rains is a different thing, and there are deaths and insurance costs, say cos you lose a whole crop.
In the winter season when a region has a temp close to zero the temporary things might make a big difference say changing an OK road into a frozen road.
I noticed today (in the weather section of the LAT”s) that we didn’t break the record high for yesterday.
July 24-26th of 1891 was a record setting heat wave for Los Angeles, w/ the 25th setting a record high for the entire month of July, a still standing 109F; without any Urban Heat Island Effect boosting it upwards.
The Beeb’s heatwave seems to have gone away
Meanwhile, Oxford proud to boast of its new temperature record:
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/17796922.oxford-smashes-record-hottest-ever-day-36-5c-yesterday/
(In the printed version of the Oxford Mail, there was a reference to an unofficial report of a temperature measurement somewhere in Oxford that was even higher, maybe close to Cambridge’s, but I don’t see it in the online article).
Also, Met Office Benson (an RAF station, of course) wetting itself over its record:
Could anyone point me to the work by Paul mentioned in one comment on back drafts at Heathrow?
Also anyone recommend how to get raw station data as far back as possible?
Thank you
Paul has a Search Box below the word cloud, just enter ‘Heathrow’ 😀
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/?s=heathrow
I cannot but help recalling that in1976 we had continuous dry weather for four months, no intermittent rain at all, surely that was a better indicator of climate than spikes in temperature. But in spite of the “climate emergency”, it has not happened since. And it all went back to normal very quickly!!!
Richard Phillips
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_British_Isles_heat_wave
Quote: “In the Central England Temperature series, 1976 is the hottest summer for more than 350 years. The average temperature over the whole summer (June, July, August) was 17.77 °C (63.99 °F), compared to the average for the unusually warm years between 2001–2008 of 16.30 °C (61.34 °F).[15] There have in other years been hotter specific summer months, though. The ‘Central England Temperature’ (CET) in June 2018 was 16.1 °C (61.0 °F) and in July 2018 it was 19.1 °C (66.4 °F).[16]
The summer was so hot that it is embedded in the national psyche, with subsequent heatwaves in 1995,[17] 1997[18], 2003, 2006[19] and 2018 all using 1976 as a benchmark.”
Spot on. It was often referred to as “the long hot summer of 1976”, and Denis Howell being mocked for being “Minister for Drought” (or “Minister for Rain”), and then “Minister for Floods”, and then later, “Minister for Snow”. As they say, you couldn’t make it up…
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Am seeing this kind of post a lot. True? Exaggerated? Best balancing perspective?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-europe-to-the-arctic-temperature-records-tumble-in-2019/
I wouldn’t call this Israel times article balanced because it quotes NOAA. NOAA have been falsely adjusting temperatures upwards since 1998. If you check out Tony Heller’s videos on YouTube you’ll see how their graphs up to 1998 show the 1930’s and 1950’s -slightly less so – as incredibly hot, much hotter than 1998 temperatures. During the past decade they have made the warming shown in the 1930’s and 50’s disappear! No hiding their eco socialist political leanings and ideology.
As for record temperature claims this year; it won’t just be the UK temperature record claims in the spotlight, it will be Europe too. Until eco socialist weather companies sort themselves out and stop putting thermometers in City Centre’s, airports, next to giant greenhouses, or in Cambridge a huge banknof solar panels. we’ll never see the truth. Oh, and of course, the press love fake news, sensationalism and hysteria.