Summer 2016 in Central England

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xmetman

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Sep 22, 2016, 5:57:56 AM9/22/16
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Alastair B. McDonald

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Sep 22, 2016, 8:18:36 AM9/22/16
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Interesting again! The anomaly is almost the same for Max, Mean, and Min though it only needs Max and Min to be similar for that to happen.

John Hall

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Sep 22, 2016, 1:56:02 PM9/22/16
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Very interesting. I see you've taken the "astronomical" summer, but if you had taken the period from 1st June to 31st August I don't suppose the results would have been radically different. The pronounced warming in our summers over the last 30 years or so shows up really well.

Len Wood

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Sep 23, 2016, 5:12:46 AM9/23/16
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The graph below shows the long term 1874-2016 variation of Summer (JJA) temperature in the maritime locale of Plymouth.
There is a small warming trend as shown by the black dotted line through the smoothed record of 10 yr running means.

It is interesting to see there have been other warm periods in the last 140 years that compare with the recent one.
Pre 1890s and in the 1930s and 1940s before the cold plunge of the 60s.
There has been a recovery since then although in the last few years there has been a small downturn.


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xmetman

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Sep 23, 2016, 6:13:03 AM9/23/16
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John

I should have probably copied in what I wrote in the blog:

Now that summer has finally drawn to a close I thought I would look at how the astronomical summer finished in the Central England Temperature [CET] series. The mean CET of the astronomical summer was slightly higher than that of the meteorological one (1st June – 31 August) at 16.70°C, or +1.36°C above the 1961-1990 long-term average, which made it the warmest since 2006, and the 19th warmest in the daily series that started in 1772. A couple of caveats to all this are (1) the values are based on September provisional values (2) I use fixed dates in my climate statistics for the seasons, so summer starts on the 21st of  June and ends on the 20th of September, and yes I do know that the date and time of the equinoxes varies.

But If you look 1976 isn't the warmest astronomical summer as it is in meteorological summers [JJA] coming in at only 5th, behind 1995, 2006, 1947 and 2003 - but not a lot of people know that, maybe not even John Hammond.

Here's the table of meteorological ranked summers from that blog:

Bruce.


John Hall

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Sep 23, 2016, 2:24:05 PM9/23/16
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Thanks, Bruce. Yes, I'd noticed the difference in where 1976 ranks depending on which definition of summer one uses. I'm not surprised, bearing in mind that September that year wasn't particularly warm (as well as being wet). And you'd lose a week or so of very warm weather between about mid-June and the solstice.
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