The Temperature Of The UK Over The Last 100 Years (part 9)
A butcher's at daily maxima and minima over the last 100 years. Are things getting worse, and what does ‘worse’ mean?
In this series so far I have focused on UK daily mean maximum and minimum temperatures as recorded at 34 weather stations since 1853, details of which may be found here. My experience is such that alarmists will respond with phrases like, “big deal, so what?”, or perhaps, “only 34, that’s nothing: they’re not likely to be representative of the global picture”. Hence today I’m going to determine if 34 UK weather stations is a big deal or not, and whether a small island sitting between a cold northerly sea and warmer ocean at latitude is capable of yielding anything worth spending cogitation time on.
What we need, then, is to get our hands on a highly reputable temperature dataset derived from land-based stations by a leading institution, and ideally one that feeds measurements into IPCC’s CMIP sausage machine. Whilst I could go to NASA, NOAA or Berkeley I decided to keep it Brit-flavoured and opted for the mighty CRUTEM5 anomaly series as concocted by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Yes indeedy, that CRU/UEA that took a starring role in the climategate affair (p.s. don’t expect much truth on the matter to be told on Wiki).
Crusty CRUTEM
Now CRUTEM5 data are lovely stuff, being 1961-1990 normalised anomalies for the mean surface temperature as derived from a rather a large number of stations worldwide, and baked with a golden crust. You can pull down monthly or annual estimates going all the way back to 1850 and you can pull down estimates by hemisphere. For today’s recipe I am going to pull down the latest annual estimates for the northern hemisphere (CRUTEM.5.0.1.0).
For the time being we are going to have to set aside the many controversial issues surrounding data capture, preparation and… ahem… ‘adjustment’ and take the series at face value. We are going to bung CRUTEM5 estimates in a time series plot along with the time series I have derived for tmax and tmin from my sample of 34 UK stations. There’s a little bit of jiggery-pokery involved in this in that I have to re-normalise my data series to correspond to the 1961-1990 climatological normal period instead of the 1991-2020 normal period, but that is a trivial matter. Get something to munch and have a look at this:
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