Record Rainfall? Met Office Accused Of Hiding The Inconvenient Truth
By Paul Homewood
Cherry picking from the Met Office!
England saw a record amount of rainfall in the year and a half leading up to last month, new figures show.
According to provisional figures from the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024.
This is the highest amount of rain for any 18-month period in England since the organisation began collecting comparable data back in 1836.
It beat the previous record of 1,680.2mm – which had only been set the month before, covering September 2022 to February 2024.
Now I wonder why they would pick an 18-month period? Particularly one that includes two winters and one summer. Hardly very scientific is it, Met Office? Are you claiming there is any significance of this compared with other periods which might include two summers and one winter, given that winter rainfall is generally much higher.
As for the claim it broke the previous record set last month is simply absurd – they are both part and parcel of the same run of weather.
So let’s do a proper analysis instead – indeed the one the Met Office should have done. We’ll start with a 12-month period, ending March:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Rainfall/date/England.txt
It was actually a much wetter 12 months in 2000/01 and 2013/14. And the last 12 months has only been marginally wetter than 1872/73 and 1882/83.
What about the last 24-months then?
The results are even less exceptional, with the last 24 months being only the 7th wettest. Again 2000/02 and 2012/14 feature at the top, and we also find that 1871/73 was wetter.
The 1870s and 80s were clearly as wet as anything seen in the last decade; for instance the 24 months to March 1877 had only 10mm less rain than the current period, whilst 1881 to 1884 saw almost as wet weather.
The Met Office are only concerned propaganda, that our weather is becoming more extreme because of climate change. And they will use whatever statistical trickery they need to do it.
I challenge them to publish the full data and let the public see the whole story.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Hunga Tonga? What goes up (water vapour) must come down.
Unlikely as a direct effect, according to my sums. The volume of water erupted is very small when spread over the world’s surface.
10% increase in stratospheric water vapour.
I would be astonished if that had no effect.
The direct cause (of the not unprecedented wet spring/late winter) is the position of the jet stream further south that normal at this time of year, and persistently so. Regardless of whether the Atlantic Ocean is a bit warmer than usual, what we are seeing is huge amounts of moist air being pushed our way by a series of low pressure systems. Is this because of Hunga Tonga? Debatable, but there is published scientific literature which suggests that Hunga Tonga stratospheric water vapour may have had a significant effect upon upper atmospheric jet streams.
Chaswarnertoo: you write
‘10% increase in stratospheric water vapour.
I would be astonished if that had no effect.’
If the increase were in the troposphere yes, but in the stratosphere an increase of 10% means very little. With a water vapour content very low at around 2ppm, we are considering an increase of 0.2ppm. Add to that the low density of the air at this altitude and the added amount becomes insignificant.
As Jaime Jessop pointed out, the jetstream was further south than usual, i.e. more over England than Scotland. Result: ‘England and Wales both recorded more than 150% of their long term average monthly rainfall, while Scotland recorded just 90% of the average March rainfall.’ – Met Office summary for March.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/summaries/index
Hunga Tonga was estimated to release 150millin tons (0.15 cubic kilometres) of water into the stratosphere. The troposphere contains circa 60,000 cubic kilometres of water. So as Doug says, it is very small, I would suggest minute.
But surely, the added heating effect of that extra water vapour (GHG!) increased evaporation resulting in higher rainfall. Not a direct result of the water itself but a feedback factor.
Yes, that’s the number I found, and when it all comes down, most of it will fall in the oceans. So, no direct Hunga Tonga effect, but perhaps it was indirectly responsible by a “multiplier” effect, using the standard argument of the alarmists, as follows:
Hunga Tonga ejected massive quantities of water vapour, the most powerful greenhouse gas, high into the stratosphere. This was almost certainly the main cause of the subsequent unprecedented spike in global temperatures. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, hence the increased precipitation.
Are there any meteorologists out there who support this thesis? No, because they would then have to admit that vater vapour is a much more potent global warming agent than their precious CO2. So they all keep schtum about Hunga Tonga and continue with their puerile pretence that every rise in global temperatures is due to CO2, no matter the true cause.
I spelled it all out in more detail in this posted-online email to various policians. No replies, natch:
https://metatron.substack.com/p/net-zero-climate-change-broadside
Doug, you seem to be arguing both sides: you appear to accept my take on the effect that there will be little if any influence but on the other hand in your referenced e-mail you maintain that it was responsible for the surface temperature rise.
I would totally agree that the effect of water vapour is often neglected and very under-rated, but then most of those who promote the CO2 effect are ignorant of the actual physics/chemistry involved.
One of the glaring issues that is totally overlooked is that the burning of fossil fuels also releases water vapour. For something that must be so obvious, it never ever gets a mention.
Yes and so will the burning of hydrogen!
Hi Norman, I think I summed up my take on Hunga Tonga in the comment above starting “Yes, that’s the number …”.
We are faced with a bunch of liars who will clearly stoop to any depths to try to maintain their fake man-made CO2 global warming narrative. For thar reason I tend to avoid getting bogged down in details. Go to “Jaime Jessop substack” for expert analysis.
The leading edge of the post-Hunga Tonga global warming spike was very similar to a normal El Nino spike, but much bigger than any we have ever seen. It now seems to be persisting much longer than a normal El Nino spike. The liars are going to have difficulty explaining this away, so they will probably continue to keep schtum about the whole thing.
Hunga Tonga exposes the fact that H2O is much more potent than CO2. It exposes the fact that the warming of the 80-90s, the only global warming we have seen since the 1930s, was caused by a succession of strong El Ninos which looked like mini-Hunga Tongas. See how well the ENSO Multivariate Index maps onto the UAH tropospheric temperature series over that period. This completely destroys their fake narrative. As my mother used to say: “Be sure your lies will find you out”, in this case including their lies of omission.
I’m currently enjoying the global warming on a sunbed in Lanzarote, armed with just my smartphone. Hence the intermittency of my comments, with more typos than usual.
Doug.
I would enjoy debating the issue with you further but here is not the place, if you would wish I am sure Paul H. would give you my e-mail address.
I believe that both you and Jaime have the situation all wrong, but cannot explain in just a few words.
I will just leave you with the fact that water vapour in the stratosphere has a concentration of just 4ppm. A 10% increase takes it to 4.4ppm, then allow for the fact that the density of the mid-stratosphere is more than 50 times less than at the surface, with the effect that there is therefore fewer molecular collisions to release heat. Jaime also wrote that the increase in water vapour made the stratosphere more opaque, but did not take the effect further, that the subsequent cooling effect would also carry to the global surface.
Now enjoy the rest of your holiday.
Its just weather, the UK got more rain than average, Spain got a lot less than average:
https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/27/tenerife-to-declare-drought-emergency-as-spain-battles-with-water-shortages
The “Scandinavian Index” quantifies the pressure dipole between Northern and Southern Europe, this year we got a wet and mild winter, Spain got a drought, which is a big problem for them as it barely rains in summer.
And France got lots. Its been so wet here that the ground and aquifers cannot absorb any more. But of course people complain about that, whereas when the aquifers were drying up, that was a disaster we would never recover from…
My onions are swimming! And I haven’t had the courage to even think about planting the potatoes yet. There have been red warnings for flooding somewhere on Meteo France for the last fortnight and orange and yellow alerts for ‘crues‘, ie flooding, over most of the country.
This is exceptional according to local people though not unprecedented. Whether Hunga-Tonga is responsible I wouldn’t know but certainly what went up has got to come down again somewhere and it seems quite reasonable that there are various climatic factors which might combine to make parts of the northern hemisphere the likely victims.
Nothing wrong with a drop of rain. They’re usually moaning about drought
They’ll moan about droughts and floods. To them, it’s all ‘evidence’ of climate change, aka: man’s evil ways. As if it’s never rained or been hot before!!
btw to add a little more misery it has been freezing in the borders today , so cold.
“publish the full data and let the public see the whole story….”
You would be more likely (and with the current Pope Francis – WAY more likely) to get the Pope to concede that, actually the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes was a complete hoax.
The charlatans at the MET office will defend even the last decimal point of a millimeter of rainfall against all evidence. And Sky / BBC / ITV etc etc will defend them.
Could try a prayer to St Jude (shrine in Tanners Street) patron saint of lost causes.
‘Saint Jude is the patron saint of various groups and places, and is best known as the patron of “desperate” or “difficult” cases (a term used in preference to the older title of “hopeless” cases, since with God no situation is hopeless). ‘Saint Jude is therefore the patron saint and Apostle of HOPE.
https://www.stjudeshrine.org.uk/
It may only be anecdotal evidence but there is a spring line near my house that comes out onto a road going up the hill. The higher the water table, the further along the road the water will seep out. On occasion it has dried up but never before in the 48 years I’ve lived here has it sprung forth so high up the road.
Are you anywhere near Assendon/Stonor? This from 1951 sounds similar.
‘The Assendon Spring, which rises in a pit on the left hand side of the road a short distance from the Henley side of Stonor, started to run last week. It is steadily making progress and has reached as far as Crabtree Farm’.
https://cbhe.hydrology.org.uk/
I’m further west in the Cotswolds but probably similar geography. Some interesting stories about Assendon but this may be less welcome.
‘In his book Gone Rustic, Cecil Roberts refers to an omen associated with The Assendon
Spring. Local people believed that the flowing of the spring was an omen of an ensuing war’
Around here in south Hampshire, groundwater levels are high at the moment, but they are nowhere near as high as they were at the same time in 2014. There was serious groundwater flooding around here that year, which is basically impossible to stop and can wreck houses from below, as happened to some friends of ours.
It’s only a few months since the hosepipe ban ended here in the SW. The Met Office were seemingly forever going on about low reservoir levels.
It would be interesting to see the levels of all our reservoirs and aquifers. Where I live, Wessex Water takes a lot of it’s supply from aquifers; it costs less to treat water from the chalk aquifer. I ought to check borehole levels. At the same time, some villages hereabouts have springs appearing at odd levels, while others are ok. Water does odd things!
Severn Trent total for reservoirs 96.8%
The most obvious p hack in history! The Met Office just try every possible time period for every possible geography to come up with records. I mean what’s an 18 month period? They really are quite, quite pathetic.
Tony over at Realclimatescience wrote a “Cherrypicker” program useful for spotting weather intervals exploitable for hysteria-fanning. Maybe they got that.
Just a local observation. I live on The Wirral (NW England) and play golf here. Have been a member of my club for 30+ years. Since the beginning of November 2023 the course has frequently been closed and has been very muddy. Until recently the fairways could not be cut. I don’t remember anything like this.
I looked at the the rainfall records for England over the past decades and couldn’t see anything unusual.
Many golf courses around here have a similar experience apart from links courses.
Whats going on?
What state are the watercourses that drain the water away from the golf course in? If the water can’t flow away then the water table will remain high and keep the course wet. And we all know of the Environment Agency’s desire not to do its job properly when it comes to drainage and river management.
Meanwhile the Met Office is grifting away in cahoots with Network Rail.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68721690
More and more of these inconvenient mismatches must be taxing the ability of the Church of Sharknado Warmunism’s ability to look the other way.
Asking as a distant foreigner, has the MET office ever even acknowledged water vapor as a “greenhouse” gas?
Oh yes they do acknowledge water vapour as a greenhouse gas – however, they do the usual bluff of claiming that it cannot “control” climate change on the basis that it condenses. Here is their BS
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/climate-change/greenhouse-gases#:~:text=Greenhouse%20gas%20emissions,fuels%20for%20energy%20and%20transport.
I think they are right in a sense since the tropics are relatively stable with less climate change due to condensing water vapour!
So reading from the MetOff “A warming atmosphere can hold more water vapour and water vapour is capable of adding to warming that has been induced by some other process. However, if temperatures then fell, the amount of atmospheric water vapour would fall too.” So that must mean all this rain means the world (or part of it) is cooling. Not sure they would accept the own words.
The thing is Graeme that condensing releases latent heat at a rate of 2260kJ/kg. Put another way, for every litre of water condensed from its vapour another 628kWh of thermal energy is released back into the atmosphere locally. Of course that heat came from where it originally evaporated and the process is thus continuous. All this makes a nonsense of the Met Office’s (and others) claims that water vapour doesn’t really count in the same way as other greenhouse gases.
Surely the point is that the effect of water vapour is limited by the fact that it condenses so the GH effect will tail off as the level rises. CO2 can rise without limit (well it will start being soaked up by plants etc) and if the CO2 GH effect was linear (which it clearly isn’t) then we would all be boiling already. All the articles I have read suggest that the effect is logarithmic and is nearly saturated. Meaning that if CO2 continued to rise to say 1200ppm the likely extra heating effect would be about 1C. Clarifying this point seems to be the crucial area that needs research because if it is true then we are worrying about nothing and we could go back to worrying about the usual things: asteroid strike, pandemics, nuclear destruction, alien invasion etc.
It is a bit early to be forecasting but I come from a long line of meterologists. I can say with confidence that I’ll have the answer in a few weeks. I have two weather stations in my back garden that have been remarkably accurate.
“Ash before oak, you’re in for a soak.
Oak before Ash you’re in for a splash”.
Amateurs, pah!
With all of this Met Office data mining for record “bad” things I am always surprised one unquestionable factor is (deliberately?) “unnoticed”
The one measured metric that has unquestionably increased over the recorded period since the 1920’s is sunshine hours. From the mid 70’s all UK countries have seen a significant and steady upward trend in sunshine hours.
For example England has steadily increased by almost 200 sunshine hours from around 1,400 to 1,600 hours over the last 50 years.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series
The modest average temperature increases over the last 50 years are much more readily explained by clearer skies and increased solar insolation.
Yes and the rise in ocean surface temperature would have to be caused by an increase in insolation. It could hardly be a result of a warming atmosphere. I read an interesting article about the CERES satellite and how its albedo data is a pretty good fit for temp variation over the last 25 years.
It could hardly be a result of a warming atmosphere
This is something that has always puzzled me, why people believe a warming atmosphere can cause appreciable warming of the oceans. Even O-level physics taught me about specific heat and the massive differences in heat capacity between gases and liquids!! Why does something so obvious escape the notice of our ‘Experts’?
The clean air acts of the 1950s and 1960s are at least partially responsible for the higher sunshine totals, but don’t forget that clearer nights allow for quicker cooling especially at grass level.
Very true regarding clear sky temperature drop off but likely more than compensated for by UHI, which is likely why rural weather stations are not showing the same average temperature increases that urban ones are.
I can actually see a rural station (private agricultural one not a Met Office one) from my bedroom window. Its long term recordings are totally different to urban ones mostly by recording cooler night times.
https://www.weatherlink.com/map/de5ffecc-aba6-4bde-bdf4-d6ac972b6c71
I have seen a 5C difference between urban temperature and rural temperature.
I see Network Rail is blaming a recent series of infrastructure failings on our “extreme weather”. It’s a very convenient excuse for their failure to carry out timely maintenance.
In their defence, most Victorian embankments were excavated from nearby cuttings and tipped by hand at more or less the angle of repose (geotechnics has advanced greatly since) so, short of rebuilding them all, fixings failures as they occur is the most effective strategy.
Is there a role for the use of automated rain gauges in remote wetter locations causing increased rainfall readings?
Some of it at least is just the luck of the jet stream draw. Anyone can interpret it to suit their own viewpoint.
I see the Worcester cricket ground is in the news for being flooded as the new season is about to start. There are the usual claims of increased rainfall but is that really the cause? Or has something changed in the watercourses around Worcester that might be causing the flooding?
This might amuse you gezza. I live in a valley that has an intermittent chalk stream.
The Nailbourne has been merrily flowing for longer and stronger than usual over the last three years for the simple reason the local water company (Veolia) have deliberately reduced water extraction from the underground aquifer to secure supplies further downstream. This reduction, however, was not common knowledge.
So I attended a local council meeting as I noticed there was an agenda item discussing the stream flow and what to do about the “future effects of climate change”. A local water company representative was invited to attend but when the meeting started had not yet arrived.
After listening to various supposedly “informed” locals giving doom and gloom projections about climate armageddon, I was allowed to speak and pointed out that climate change had zero to do with this. The real cause was the reduction in aquifer extraction of literally millions of litres.
I was confronted with sarcastic rolling eyes and hostile responses – clearly I was some kind of nutter “denier”. Just then the water company rep finally arrived. The meeting’s chair started by openly stating “we have just heard from Mr Sanders that this has nothing to do with climate change and he alleges it is entirely due to the somewhat unlikely cause of reduced water extraction from the underground aquifer.”…….and the Veolia spokesmen said “Yes that’s perfectly correct”!!!
The look on people’s faces in that room was an absolute gem. Some of them were even more furious than before – how dare I have been right – it MUST be climate change. Amazingly even at the end of the water company’s expert statement most of the original protagonists did not accept his “version of events” and felt he had been “got at”! YCMIU
The Worcester cricket ground is always getting flooded – happens nearly every year.
Oh wow! it’s a tiny bit wetter than during the last centennial solar minimum in the late 1800’s.
Network Rail to Invest £2.8bn in Climate Resilience –
3 Apr 2024
Network Rail will ‘recruit almost 400 extra drainage engineers who will increase the care and maintenance of drainage to better handle increased and intense rainfall’ – it says here…
https://railway-news.com/network-rail-to-invest-2-8bn-in-climate-resilience/