Correlating Summer temperature, rainfall and sunshine in the UK

[xmetman]

A while I go I looked into a summer index for the UK, this gave me the idea of producing a couple of charts that correlated mean maximum temperature for the summer [JJA] against rainfall and temperature.  And as you can see from the two charts below it gives a very quick and easy way to spot the warm and sunny years against the cold and wet. Instead of using my old favourite of Daily Central England Temperatures [CET] and England and Wales Rainfall [EWP], I’ve used instead the historic regional data series from the Met Office that extends back to 1910 for temperature and rainfall, and from 1929 for sunshine. The regional monthly and seasonal values are of course calculated from gridded values and that’s the reason they are so short. The application can display charts for any region but for now the entire UK is what is of interest to me. It maybe that a linear trend line is not the best way of testing any correlation, and there must be a way of doing a three-way correlation, but for now this will have to do! 

[Richard Dixon]

Lovely stuff Bruce, packed with information. 1976 still a beacon for dryness and warmth !

It would be interesting to have a look at the same graph on the left but with the year labels removed and the colouring banded by decade instead just to see the impact of climate change - if any...

Richard

[John Hall]

1913 must have been an interesting summer: very dry but quite cool.

[RWood]

Interesting how tight the correlations in the warmth-sunshine chart are. I don't think it would be so marked in our country. What about the winters? Over here I think the temperature-sunshine correlation for winter would be close to zero, or even possibly somewhat negative.

[Richard Dixon]

On Wednesday, 10 August 2016 11:37:05 UTC+1, RWood wrote:

Interesting how tight the correlations in the warmth-sunshine chart are. I don't think it would be so marked in our country. What about the winters? Over here I think the temperature-sunshine correlation for winter would be close to zero, or even possibly somewhat negative.

My hand-wavy guess is that as you get closer to the winter solstice that the correlation becomes more negative as clearer days usually mean colder with less and less insolation.

Richard