I have had a look back through the archives (as far as 1700) to try and find months with a positive CET anomaly of 5C or more. To do this I have used a rolling 30 year mean as this is the only sensible way to do it. No point comparing the CET in 1800 against the 1981-2010 mean as that is somewhat meaningless. I used rolling 30 year means finishing in a year ending with a zero and updating the rolling mean every 10 years.
The result is that while there are plenty of years with a negative CET mean anomaly of more than 5C there are no years with a positive CET anomaly that large.
The biggest positive CET anomaly was 4.9C in January 1796. The CET that January was 7.3C which was 4.9C above the 1761-1790 mean of 2.4C. The 1761-1790 CET mean was especially cold. During that period there were 4 January's with a negative CET and another 4 with a CET between 0C and 1C.
December 2015 could see a positive CET anomaly as high as 5.2C. This would be unprecedented for any month of the year.
It really is amazing. Not, though, the temperature so much but the persistence of the spell and it's location. It looks to me like France hasn't see the record highs/anomalies, nor (for much of the time) has N Scotland, but England has seen what seem like weeks of a run of 'perfect' Swlies - quite amazing. I think I remember previous spells like this sometimes saw the high move a little so that a few days saw the colder nights that the continent is seeing now spread to us - not this time. Otoh, I've seen anomaly maps and this unprecedented warmth is Europe/Russia wide.
What's also interesting is the shape of the euroblob high. In the 70's I seem to remember swlies with a high over France or Iberia, these day we seem to see high pressure with an indistinct centre over much of W Europe, and a rush of winds for the SW over us.
Is it my imagination or is the persistence of weather spells increasing? But, how would we measure such a thing?
edit: one other thing... there are, obviously, twelve 30 day month periods but are there, what, 365 minus about 30 thirty day periods in a year and has one of them had such an anomaly? There a bit of work to do!
Edited by user
19 December 2015 11:38:14
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Reason: Not specified
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