"Philip Eden" philipATweatherHYPHENukDOTcom wrote:

"Graham P Davis" wrote :
STUART ONYECHE wrote:

Is the latest rainfall event really unprescedented? Particularly
interested in whether there have been similar summer events in terms of
both spatial area of rainfall combined with magnitude of the rain.
Media/ politicians are too keen to add recent events to the GW
bandwagon, conveniently ignoring the point that with GW our summers are
supposed to get drier, as far as I understand it. I thought the extreme
rain events would be autumn/winter synoptic scale events such as those
in 2000, not summer synoptic scale. Attributing the latest events also
to GW makes me increasingly lose faith in the GW science.


Yes, GW is forecast to give us drier summers, but that is because there
will
be fewer rainfall events in summer. However, single rainfall events are
likely to be heavier due to the increased warmth.

Although having said that -- and I offer this as an observation only, and
not as evidence of anything else -- this summer's individual rainfall
events all have several precedents, whereas the aggregate rainfall for
May, June and July, averaged over England and Wales, has easily broken
the previous record.

It's also worth noting that the synoptic character of MJJ combined
has also been unprecedentedly cyclonic, and there is a strong
correlation between cyclonicity and aggregate rainfall. So the question
I would ask is, "where has that extreme cyclonicity come from?" Not
"where has all the rain come from?"


No idea about the cyclonicity. I usually go by SST anomalies near the Grand
Banks but they've led me right up the garden path this summer. I'd expected
more cyclonicity but to the north of Scotland and higher pressure over
southern UK. Oops!


--
Graham P Davis
Bracknell, Berks., UK
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