A look at back at Lamb's The English Climate (mine's a 1963 edition)
demonstrates clearly how much our climate has warmed in the last 100 years.

The statistics in Lamb's book are mainly from 1900-1960, and include:-

1913-1940 the average number of days per year when the temperature exceeded
25 degrees was
5 in Bristol and the Southampton area.
1 in west Cornwall

The average SST off the south Devon Cornwall coast during August during
1930s/1940s was around 15.5 It was a good 2 degrees higher in the 1990s

When you start to look at snow cover, it was a different world

Lamb ends by predicting cooling. He says 'We have been spoilt by the good
summers of the 30s & 40s'
I think if I only recorded 1 day a year 25 degrees now, I'd be pretty
disappointed!


Graham

Penzance Weather www.easterling.freeserve.co.uk/weather.html
Holiday Cottage www.easterling.freeserve.co.uk

"Dave.C" wrote in message
. uk...
Don't the "hot spell" statistics imply that they are rare events in any
decade and that if we don't get any more in the next four years (which is
statistically quite likely) , the 2000's will be fairly typical of most
recent decades bar the sixties?

Dave

"Paul Fishwick" wrote in message
. ..
Discussions about the 60's tempertures have been posted recently and after
the 'hot' spell in mid July I compared my 35 years of July records (1971 -
2005) and also looked at the Bracknell Met Office records (1962 to 1970) 1
KM distant to make 44 years of continuos records for Bracknell.

I have used the term 'hot' which applies when the air temperature reaches
or
exceeds 25c. The criterion set is that there is a 'week' of 7 consecutive
days, where the maximum must have reached or exceed 25c within July
allowing
for only one of those days in either June or August. This has only
occurred
7 times in the 44 July's as indicated in table 1 below. There were no
occurrences in the 1960's 2 in the 1970's, 2 in the 1980's 1 in the 1990's
and already in the first 6 years 2 in the 2000's.

Table 1
Day 1975 1976 1983 1989 1994 2001 2005
1 25.0 31.0 30.6 28.8 25.5 25.7 29.4
2 26.4 33.5 31.3 31.8 26.2 27.6 28.3
3 28.4 34.0 31.6 33.6 28.5 29.8 28.3
4 29.0 32.5 30.0 32.0 25.8 31.0 31.8
5 30.0 31.7 31.5 30.4 27.0 32.2 30.2
6 26.9 34.0 32.5 29.7 31.0 29.7 27.9
7 25.5 31.6 28.1 26.9 29.2 26.8 25.4

Ave 27.3 32.6 30.8 30.5 27.6 29.0 28.7
Rank 7th 1st 2nd 3rd 6th 4th 5th

Dates
26-1 1-7 11-17 20-26 19-25 25-31 10-17

There are many single days or a run of several days where the maximum
reached or exceeded 25c. However, between 1962 and 1970, 1962 had no days
reaching 25c, 1963 had 4, 1964 had 4, 1965 had none, 1966 had 1, 1967 had
6,
1968 had 2, 1969 had 9 ( 6 consecutive)and 1970 had 3.

Regards
Paul Fishwick