Will the warm sunshine last for Easter?

Will the Met Office use the term Barbeque Easter do you think?

"Will the Met Office use the term Barbeque Easter do you think?"



Well if they do, let me know, as I need a new umbrella.

Paul already tweeted it :D, but fingers crossed we will still make it one of the best Easters for a while. Royal Wedding so far looks dry and cool with an Easterly, so possibly cloudy for those of us east of the Pennines. Coats on for the street party then!

We could go from one of the coldest Decembers on record to one of the warmest April's on record in the space of a few months. The Central England Temperature record for April is currently under threat.



A few people suggested the cold December in their back garden was a sign of global cooling... would be wrong of me to suugest the opposite then! :-)

I'm with PingoSan on this - I'll get some more coal ordered if the met publish that forecast.



Cold winter, lots of snow followed by some decent spring weather. It's like being a kid again. Seasons living up to their reputations.

Let's not forget that this is one of the latest Easters it is possible to have.

Consequently, comparing Easter records is a bit meaningless, unless they are on exactly the same dates.

I know that being a few weeks later doesn't guarantee good weather, but the average temperatures should be a bit higher with later Easters.

@ 4



A few people suggested the cold December in their back garden was a sign of global cooling... would be wrong of me to suugest the opposite then! :-)



You could, but then of course local warming is entirely consistent with a cooling planet :O

lateintheday @5 you say:



"Cold winter, lots of snow followed by some decent spring weather. It's like being a kid again. Seasons living up to their reputations".



I'm thinking that you must have been born around mid 1900's cos I remember that's how it used to be in the UK when I was a kid. Sweet reminiscences.

Titus, Lateintheday



That would be the last time the PDO flipped cold after a warming period. Expect more repeats of "how it used to be" as the cooling continues. The good weather is being caused by the same blocking systems that gave us the cold early winter, which is why one often follows the other. Unfortunately these blocks are not indefinite and a period of mobile westerlies is bound to set in, which is where our memories of crap UK summers come from ;)

I was working for a Carbon Management company in 2006 and we had just had a bad winter, then had a brilliant spring and three months of glorius summer weather. But the back end of the summer fell away. I left the Carbon management company after I found out that Global warming was Fear, False evidence appearing real. I believed in it completely up to this point and found out a few people were making massive amounts of money out of it and the Carbon Trust were more bothered about paying their own salaries, that doing anything about it. I am even more sure that Global warming is a false and naturally occuring temperature variation, due to the temperature of the sun and our orbit around the sun.

The Easter Monday duck race in Sheffield may be more of a sprint than a swim - some rain please!

well spotted Titus . . .

I don't know how much we can trust our memories of the weather though. Back then, summer was one long holiday, stretching on seemingly forever. Any half decent weather and we'd be outside making the most of it. Nowadays, we miss most of the good stuff because of work commitments and so judge summer largely by the weekends.



Whatever happened to that prediction (Tomorrows World?) that we'd all be working part time, have pots of money and tons of Leisure time.



One banana two banana three banana four . . .

We seem to be on course for a warmer than average (whatever that is) April, but the rest of the NH seems to be colder than normal, Chicago have just had one of the latest snow storms on record, so the Met office cannot come out and claim Global Warming on the result of our April data.

Paul - can you comment on the different terms used for that fog on on the east coast - 'sea fret', 'haar' and so on? I'm interested in these as somebody from further north now living in South Yorkshire! And also, as an anthropologist with an interest in linguistics. Do you know where the 'fret' term comes from?



(I didn't know it before - and as I'm now living in Yorkshire will have to start using it!)



Jenny

"I don't know how much we can trust our memories of the weather though."



Our own memories are more reliable than the Met Office's repeatedly adjusted data, which is tortured repeatedly in order to match climate models - as clearly the original data was wrong if it didn't match them!

The Met Office data is not adjusted to match climate models, you are talking nonsense.

To seidkona #14



Your discussion of "sea fret" reminds me that the local East Yorkshire expression - at least in the days before widespread media dilution- was always "sea roke" in my childhood. Sea roke is much less often used today, it seems, because everyone knows it as sea fret or haar from television weathermen (sorry Paul H !).



As I understand it the word "roke" derives from the (Danish or Dutch) for "smoke" - which would make sense given the visual appearance of the sea mist and the strong historical links of this region with both the Danes and Dutch.



I have heard it said that in the past, East Yorkshire dialect speakers were able to make themselves reasonably well understood to stranded mariners from across the North Sea of Danish origin.



As an East Yorkshire native myself, I have always considered "sea fret" to be a Lincolnshire expression. As for "haar" this is distinctly east coast Scottish and has no rightful place in the Yorkshire vocabulary!



I hope this helps.

While we are on the subject of sea rokes, frets and haars threatening to ruin glorious Easters - this must surely be one of the most consistant and reliable features of the climate of NE England. Indeed it is so predictable that anyone can have a pretty good chance of getting it right!



If the air from the continent is reasonably warm especially if also moist, you can almost guarantee that an easterly flow will develop, which brings, at times, almost wintery conditions to the east coast whilst much of the UK basks in "scorchio" weather.



Another feature of such conditions is that they are often stable and persistant, unlike anticyclones bringing warm westerly offshore winds (which usually either buckle under weather fronts or settle themselves into easterlies).



This explains why Blackpool can sometimes be so gloriously hot, while Brid or Scarborough rarely are. I remember the dreaded April of (1974?) - the 7c/70f

contrast anomaly that occured between the North sea coast and Blackpool sands that spring. It is something of a vexation why (except in winter when they bring fog or frost) anticyclones of an easterly component are so much more stable than those of a westerly or southerly one.

As Niels Bohr said, "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future".

I'm more interested in the overall weather, climate and environments than just the possibility of barbecuing bunnies. It's the radiation from the Japanese event that has really got my attention.

So I'm interested in in a very important matter where I continue to sit on the fence - uncertain, wondering, sometimes getting very angry (if it should prove true).

I know there's not enough hard data on the Japan quake to contend conclusively that it was induced, though there are many sites stating this e.g. "HAARP Magnetometer shows Japan quake was induced."

My own approach remains: what data can I find, what evidence? The fact is, the more I read, the more I think this may well have been a HAARP-EVENT.

I need good, scientific data, on

1) the quake’s epicenter,

2) the output not only of HAARP during the time period,

3) the wider political context on why HAARP would target Japan when it did, and finally (I can handle this one.)

4) a good analysis of the initial explosion at the nuclear power plant, which, when I look at it, just does not look right, but what do I know? I'm not a scientist.

As I've noted elsewhere, the political context was for me a most decisive factor. It may have been a strike by the Anglo-American bankster-elite against a Japan that was looking increasingly like it was severing ties to the West and reorienting towards Asia, especially China.

Could Japan have been developing a WPM? Was this strike preemptive.

Does the western elite care if USA/HAARP takes out as many of us useless feeders/eaters as possible, or how it does it? Radiation seems good!

So, here I sit with my little conspiracy theories, looking for something hard and scientific.

Something about the Japan quake does not seem right - like some of the other "convenient quakes" in China and of course Haiti and Chile.

Since you divide your time between forecasting and reporting on stories about climate change and its implications for people's everyday lives, do you think you might do some digging on the Japanese event and HAARP...for the sake of us that do not know what to think?

Paul, I think you should be congratulated by this forecast. It will no doubt be forgotton by your Look North colleagues who oddly seem to prefer it when you get it wrong, but yours was the first and earliest forecast that I saw and it has turned out to be remarkably accurate. Will they be big enough to admit it? Somehow I doubt it!