Central England Temperature in 2014
2014 was a warm year for much of Europe and the globe, and may end up being the warmest year on record globally. But, no-one experiences a global mean temperature directly, so how about more locally?...
View ArticleOzone birthday
Almost exactly 30 years ago a paper by Farman, Gardiner & Shanklin appeared in Nature describing the loss of ozone in the Antarctic and suggesting that the presence of chlorine compounds high in...
View ArticleObserving long-term climatic changes with unusual sources
We are all familiar with the usual metrics used to highlight that the climate is changing: surface air temperatures, sea level, sea surface temperatures and ocean heat content all rising, glaciers...
View ArticleDefining ‘pre-industrial’
The UN Paris Agreement on climate change aims to ensure increases in global temperature are less than 2°C above ‘pre-industrial’ levels, with an aspirational 1.5°C limit. However, the ‘starting line’...
View ArticleFrost fairs and the Little Ice Age
The term ‘Little Ice Age’ refers to a period of cooler temperatures between around 1400 and 1850, although a range of dates are used. This climate feature has been inferred from various types of direct...
View ArticleWeathermen of Ben Nevis
For twenty years between 1883 and 1904, three intrepid weathermen lived at the top of Ben Nevis – the highest mountain in the UK – experiencing some of the worst weather the country has to offer. Every...
View ArticleJohn Tyndall: founder of climate science?
John Tyndall (c.1822–1893), Irish physicist, mountaineer, and public intellectual, is best known for his work on the absorption of heat by gases such as water vapour and carbon dioxide in the...
View ArticleStorm Ulysses
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 … Continue reading...
View Article
