Wettest 12 Months on record?

[Stratos Ferric]

I wouldn't disagree with that, S.F. My picking up of nkaol2001's point about 'warmer drier and sunnier each year' seems to indicate that (s)he falls into the camp, inhabited by a large section of the 'general public', that GW will result in each successive summer being at least as warm, dry and sunny as the one preceeding it and any deviation from that process is to be regarded as an indication that, either the experts are wrong or that there is no G.W.

The reality is much as you have outlined above where a gradually warming climate will also be an increasingly wet climate with a bias towards warm, dry and sunny summers but not precluding a summer such as the one we're having this year.

The cry of 'Britain will have summers like the south of France' is largely perpetuated by an uninformed media and is, unfortunately swallowed whole by a large number of people. Britain may well be heading towards a summer climate which, on average, is more akin to the south of France than what has gone before but we should also be aware that this 'new climate' is likely to involve a much greater degree of variablility on both an annual and a seasonal basis.

Despite a warming climate, endless summer heat and wall to wall sunshine should certainly not be expected every year.

T.M

Quite agree with that, and some other quality posts above. TWS is correct to introduce the importance of location as a factor in climate, and for students of climate this alone, together with altitude and latitude, account for nearly all subtle varations in climate sub-type; our own cool temperate differs in sub-type from the enjoyed by Portugal, in the definition of winter minima in particular, and I'd suspect that this would perhaps represent a more likely variant for the UK in future.

If I remember rightly, the Med variant experienced by much of the territory around the Med is drier and warmer in summer than, say, the South African coastal plain enjoys, because of the more significant continental influence.

We will never alter the fact that we are an oceanic west coast marginal climate, and even if the summer HP belt drifts slightly north it MIGHT be that what we experience, on various wavelengths, are summers of unusual dryness and warmth, or, of exceptional wetness, rather than the "traditional" summer which is more consistently dynamic with shorter wavelength variation more typical.

At present we have too short a period of data to be sure, but I'd suggest that the early indications are that the local climate is starting to behave in the general way that models of GW suggest.

It's certainly the case that the typical layman far too readily extrapolates linearly from each and every extreme weather event. There is some discussion elsewhere on the board about "tipping points" for rainfall as if, suddenly, with a certain degree of warmth we will suddenly invoke sustained rainfall of biblical proportions. Even a crude knowledge of atmospheric physics would allow for realisation that non stop rainfall, and even prolonged sustained rainfall of the type we've had recently, will continue to be towards the extreme end of occurrence. It's certianly not the case that events of yet another order of magnitude more than we have seen recently can or will occur. Even in the tropics, where ET rates and (lower) atmospheric temperatures are far higher than in our temperate latitudes, there is a limit to how much rainfall can occur before the atmosphere has to recharge. The oceans would need to be boiling before we got non stop rain, or anything remotely close to it.

Maybe so but we've had several very memorable months with exceptional amounts of sunshine since 2000 although most of these have occurred from 2003 onwards. I have to say that the first 3 summers of this decade were very mediocre with very little to write home about. We have, however, seen a number of exceptionally sunny months with the whole summer of 2003 springing to mind as well as June and July 2006, with the latter being the sunniest month on record of course.

I agree - though haven't tested the perception against data - that we seem to have rather more medium wave-length extremes recently than would be expected against the long-term mean. Warm months and dry months in particular, but also a few very wet ones.