England and Wales Rainfall

In 2016 I posted about UK rainfall and found that by the measure used the probability of a very wet year had increased in recent decades to 3/6 from a prior frequency of 1/6. In this post I revisit that work using an improved demarcation for wet and very wet.

What I have now found is a change of precipitation around 1998, before which the joint probability of a wet or extreme wet year has now risen from 18% prior to 1998 to 58%, a three-fold risk increase, in line with my 2016 work. 

This is a substantial change with serious implications for human impacts such as flooding.

UK Rainfall: Loading the Dice

Using UK annual precipitation, the probability of a very wet year has increased, from 1/6 before 1990 to 3/6 after 1990.

In simple terms:

Before 1990 a very wet year had the same probability as that for rolling one dice for the number you picked, after 1990 three sides have the number you pick.

Anthropogenic Climate Change and the flooding in the North of England

I cannot really add much more than my recent comments on the Cumbria floods of early December, denying a role for AGW really isn't sound as I explain in that post. However it is an issue worthy of some comment.

Anthropogenic Climate Change and the flooding in Cumbria

Cumbria in North West England has been hit by severe floods as a month's worth of rain falls in one week, the floods are as severe as the floods in 2009, which at the time were claimed to be a 1 in 1000 year event.

Has Anthropogenic (human driven) Climate Change got anything to do with this?

UK H2O

Tamino has recently posted a summary of the drought situation in California. Frankly if I lived there and read that post (or read the news!) I would be selling up and moving out before it gets worse. Anyway, now that I have finally got round to doing it, this seemed like a good excuse to finally get round to updating the UK rainfall plot.

UK Rainfall 2014, a sneak peek.

I just, rather optimistically, checked UK rainfall data to see if it had been updated. It hasn't, but I was reminded that while the annual data is for January to December, the seasons run from December to November (using meteorological seasons). The main index I will continue to use will be the calendar year, January to December, but while I wait for PIOMAS data, here's a quick early look at UK rainfall for 2014.