Monthly Archives: May 2021

Storm Ulysses

extremes, history, observations, weather

On 27th February 1903 a major windstorm hit the UK and Ireland, known as Storm Ulysses.

The 20th Century Reanalysis (20CRv3) includes a modern reconstruction of the storm, created by assimilating available observations of surface pressure into a state-of-the-art weather forecast model.

There is a problem however. The number of available observations over north-west Europe is limited as most have never been digitised from the original hand-written paper sources. Recently, the WeatherRescue.org project rescued millions of observations, allowing us to examine the value of this new data by rerunning 20CRv3 with the new data added.
Continue reading Storm Ulysses →

Warming patterns

Global warming does not mean the same amount of warming over the whole globe. There is a distinct spatial pattern to the long-term changes.

The first map below shows the total change in temperature since the early-industrial era, and the second map removes the global average warming to highlight regions of above and below average warming.

The largest warming is seen in the Arctic, and the land regions are clearly warming faster than the ocean. The striking blue area in the North Atlantic is a region of very little warming, and this is due to a decline in the strength of the Atlantic overturning circulation which brings warm water from the tropics to the northern latitudes.

All these features of the warming have been long predicted in climate model simulations, for example in IPCC AR4 and IPCC AR5.


Technical details: spatial pattern of warming uses approach described in Hawkins et al. (2020) using Berkeley Earth dataset, and the changes are relative to 1850-1900.

Arctic surprise

In 2007, IPCC AR4 produced this figure showing projections of changes in Arctic sea ice extent in the summer (July-September). The different colours represent a wide range of different scenarios for future emissions. Observations (1979-2020, added purple line) have decreased far more rapidly than projected in the CMIP3 models used at the time, when plotted on the same scale with the same reference period.

This demonstrates the concept of a climate-related ‘surprise’, or what might have been considered a low-likelihood event at the time.

The original figure is here. Also see Stroeve et al. (2012) for a CMIP5 comparison (Fig. 2a), and Notz et al. (2020) for a CMIP6 comparison (Fig. 2f).