The climate here is becoming much more maritime with cloudier, wetter summers and snowless winters. It is absolutely dire and has completely killed my interest in the weather - the 21st Century is the worst era for weather since modern recording began in the mid-19th Century.
It now takes exceptional synoptics to deliver better than average conditions in the summer such as in 2018. Pretty much everything else, even synoptics that would have given reasonable conditions in the past, gives poor weather due to fronts being further south so no longer just afftecting the Highlands. 2013 and 2018 have been the only drier than average summers since 2007. Only four Junes since then have managed average sunshine and the same for July. Staggeringly awful statistics. This run of summers is poor without precedent in at least the past 160 years.
Soon it will be 8 years since we had 10cm of lying snow, something that used to happen in the majority of years, even in previous relatively snowless eras like the 90s. There hasn't been any lying snow at all since February 2019 yet both Mays since then have recorded falling snow so it's nothing to do with the arctic not being cold enough and everything to do with relentless westerlies and an almost dearth of northerlies. On the rare occasion we get them there they are inexplicably 'bone dry' when they would have generated lots of showers in the past.
Autumn is a disgusting mild claggy mess year in year out with horrid double digit mins persisting well into October killing off any leaf colour. The majority of Octobers used to see frost but now this is seldom seen until November. Convection has almost died off completely in spring and as a result there hasn't been a wetter than average spring since 2006.
It's beyond tedious as there is no variety and unpredictability any more. Other than 2018, it's just like living the same year over and over again on a loop. I can barely think of anything to distinguish 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020 from one another. Dire snowless winters and horrid wet summers. Sunshine markedly higher during the cold months due to relentless westerlies but at record low levels during the summer. Mean temperatures practically the same and unsettled but never particularly wet. I call it the 'blandification' of the climate.
Speaking from the point of view of my area, it is hard to disagree there Richard.
As I mentioned recently in the thread we had on the great summer of 1995, for me summers in the past 22 years at least in my part of the world have become worse, not better. Of the entire period going back to 2000, the only years which have produced good or even decent summers here have been 2003, 2006, 2013, 2014 and of course 2018. The period from 1989 to and including 1997 saw generally much better summers in those 9 years than we have seen in the vast majority of years going all the way back to 1998.
Perhaps when the AMO returns to a negative phase (it has been in a mostly positive phase since the mid-late 1990s I believe), it will perhaps help to even things out. However, the predictions that some made back in 1995 about summers like we saw that year becoming the norm have been well wide of the mark thus far, for most areas.
Edited by user
04 August 2020 13:24:41
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Reason: Not specified
Lenzie, Glasgow
"Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom, and we must always be ready to listen and respect other points of view."- Queen Elizabeth II 1926-2022