By Paul Homewood
Another Met Office scam!
1 in 3 chance of a new monthly rainfall record in at least one region each winter.
In the last few years several rainfall events have caused widespread flooding in the UK. In winter 2013/14 a succession of storms hit the UK leading to record rainfall and flooding in many regions including the south east. December 2015 was similar, and Storm Desmond hit the north-west causing widespread flooding and storm damage.
By their very nature extreme events are rare and a novel research method was needed to quantify the risk of extreme rainfall within the current climate.
Professor Adam Scaife, who leads this area of research at the Met Office said “The new Met Office supercomputer was used to simulate thousands of possible winters, some of them much more extreme than we’ve yet witnessed. This gave many more extreme events than have happened in the real world, helping us work out how severe things could get.”
Analysing these simulated events showed there is a 7% risk of record monthly rainfall in south east England in any given winter. When other regions of England and Wales are also considered this increases to a 34% chance.
Dr Vikki Thompson, lead author of the report, said “Our computer simulations provided one hundred times more data than is available from observed records. Our analysis showed that these events could happen at any time and it’s likely we will see record monthly rainfall in one of our UK regions in the next few years.”
I probably covered this at the time, but it includes this graphic, which Ben Pile’s video highlighted today:
Note this bit, which effectively means past data is irrelevant, and is replaced with made up “virtual observations”:
There is in fact ample data, with for instance the England & Wales series going back to 1766. If these trends were so obvious the Met Office would not have to concoct their own “data” to find them.
So why do they do it? Because the actual data does not support their claims of increasingly extreme weather.
Take the South East, which they use in their example. The actual data clearly shows that winter monthly rainfall is not becoming more extreme, making a nonsense of their claim that there is a 7% risk of record monthly rainfall in south east England in any given winter.
The wet winter of 2013/14 was the trigger for this pathetic exercise, but as we can seethe winter of 1913/14 was even wetter. But it is evident that all of the really wet months, other than 2013/14, occurred decades ago – the last with over 180mm being as long ago being December 1934.