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Aug 20, 2022Liked by John Dee

JD, A few months back I independently discovered the historical met office mini-series. Out of interest then, I thought there may be a way of discovering the urban heat island effect from analysing stations in some windy and remote stations such as Stornaway and others where the UHI effect would be negligible or non-existent. Now, you say “in a jiffy” you have the data in analysable form. OK, kudos, you obviously have a routine that converts their pdf type data into Excel type column format. I admit my attempts were pathetic and long-winded. Let’s put it down to my old age, Microsoft Excel input limitations (not to mention my not paying enough attention in my stats courses 50 years ago!). Thing is, I would love access to your converted data. I’m just going to potter here. A few graphs, searching for changes in recordings thermometers/sensors and location, i.e. has there been urbanisation around some sites? You know what I mean, all the stuff which pragmatic types like us just don’t gloss over. If you have a link to your tabulated data I would really love to download your stuff and have a play.

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You must have ESP because I was trying out some analyses along these very lines last night! To save my fingers I've established an automated import routine that crunches through the files in next to no time. Herewith a link to the master Excel spreadsheet that should be self-explanatory save for Tmean, which is simply (Tmax + Tmin)/2 - being the way the Met Office do it. Have fun!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MT6uCQoCtm54lh89kx1ZiPUw3OnuoUJoey78F85mtXA/edit?usp=sharing

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Wow! Thanks JD. Now, that's going to keep me busy for a while!

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My treat!

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Peter Norman

2 min ago

It rains more in the west and in the north of the UK is a fact and if your statistical analysis confirm it. Enjoy a nights sleep without worry: There's no "gato encerrado" here. My worry is UK rainfall is so variable in any location you will have trouble finding any trend which might really and truly indicate a "climate change". We had the 1975-1976 drought issues and politicians did sweet fanny all to build more reservoirs. Planning for the increased population and the probable recurrence of future drought periods was just ignored/shelved. Hose pipe bans and water panic are therefore built into our future. Given that we use less than 2% of our rainfall, the fishes and sea creatures must be really happy with our 98% run-off with added nitrogen and minerals.

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Yes, it was rather nice to see the numbers confirm what I see out of the window. And yes, it is so variable across locations that's its hard to detect anything (more on this in forthcoming newsletters). I remember the '70s bans and bath sharing only too well, but yes, our water management record is lamentable given we're a wet island; it's almost as if they want to torture the public to make a point about fossil fuels.

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