May 2010: What a month of extremes!
Sunday across much of the UK was one of the hottest on record. At Leeming in North Yorkshire, the maximum temperature of 27.2C (81F) was second only to the record which was set in May 1947, when the mercury soared to 28.9C (84F).
These high temperatures were all the more interesting when you consider it was only just under two weeks ago when I wrote that Leeming had recorded its coldest May night since 1967, and the second coldest on record, on the morning of Wed 13th May.
Other stations across Yorkshire have had similar extremes. At Pateley Bridge, which is not an official Met Office site but nevertheless an accurate station run by a local expert in the area, Sunday was the hottest since records began in that part of Nidderdale 27 years ago. Moreover, the contrast between the cold reported in Mid May, to this record heat, is a record in itself. The absolute temp range for this May at Pateley Bridge is 29.3C (-2.8C to 26.5C).
Hull in East Yorkshire also set a new record. Again, it's not an official station, but 29.4C (85F) was recorded on Sunday at a very reliable site run by a local expert. At the old Hull Met Office site, records which run from 1901 to 1971, the previous record was 27.8C. It's a remarkable temperature for a city on the Humber Estuary and so close to the influence of cold sea breezes at this time of the year.
But it's proved to be a very short lived hot spell. Indeed as I write, it's currently only 10C in the Vale of York as cool air from the Northeast makes a return.
For those still keen to know what the summer will be like, an interesting fact. As I wrote in my one of my previous blogs, there's been 23 cold winters since 1940; and only 2 have been followed by warm summers. That would suggest that although a hot summer is not impossible, it is certainly statistically very unlikely.
But one of the 2 years in which a cold winter was followed by a hot summer was in 1947. It's probably just a coincidence, but I found it interesting that Sunday was the hottest May day at Leeming since May 1947. Could history repeat itself, with 2010 following the same pattern as in 1947, with a warm summer to follow? Only time will tell.
Briefly onto global temperatures. I wrote in my last blog that global temperatures were high on all measures, close to the record values set in 1998.
The big question is how long will this heat last, and will it mean 2010 is the hottest on record, as predicted by the UK Met Office?
The graph below offers a few clues. It shows in blue the global ocean temperature anomaly, with the red line indicating the ocean temperature anomaly where the current El Nino has been occurring (an upwelling of warm water which adds to global temperatures). It shows a sharp drop off in the El Nino heat; with global temperatures starting to follow.
Several models are forecasting a La Nina developing later this year which would cause cooling. It's going to be a very interesting few months.
Hello, I’m Paul Hudson, weather presenter and climate correspondent for Ö÷²¥´óÐã Look North in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. I've been interested in the weather and climate for as long as I can remember, and worked as a forecaster with the Met Office for more than ten years locally and at the international unit before joining the Ö÷²¥´óÐã in October 2007. Here I divide my time between forecasting and reporting on stories about climate change and its implications for people's everyday lives.
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