Article: Article: UK HISTORICAL WEATHER DATA FROM DURHAM OBSERVATORY 1880-DATE

The data used for this study includes mean high and low temperatures, air frost, rainfall and sun hours, starting in 1880.

The object of this study was to :

1 Show how global warming has effected the weather in the UK,north east

2 Predicting the future weather from historical data

Points to consider:

Temperature data is quite a difficult thing to measure accurately. For example, day one has a low temperature of 10 degrees for one hour and the for the rest of the day is a steady 15 degrees. Day two is 12 degrees and all day until 6pm. When the sun comes out and the temperature shoots up to 16 degrees for one hour and then drops again. Day one is clearly the warmer of the two days but gets recorded as the colder of the two.

The met office have so much data to look at to predict tomorrows weather: satellite images, rainfall radar, weather stations recording wind speed, pressure, temperature, etc. There are also thousands of profiling floats in the sea sending back data as part of the Argo experiment. All of this data, and more, gets fed into the most sophisticated forecasting model devised and a prediction for tomorrows weather is computed. Why is it not always correct? Why is it that many times it is completely wrong? The reason is, according to the met office, the butterfly effect. For example, a small miscalculation or change in one area can have a big effect in another and consequently a wrong prediction is made. This is just looking at a 24 hour prediction, the met office understand that when we start looking at a three day forecast then things really do start looking erratic and as for a week in advance the data can look even more capricious!

Few people would expect the met office to get the weather correct 100% of the time because we all know that the weather can be unpredictable at times. But if we accept this why do many people accept the met office predictions for an apocalypse 80 years time? Bearing in mind that the amount of data that they are looking at to predict the weather in 2090 is far less than the data they use to predict tomorrows weather. In fact, these predictions for 2090 are completely based on a predicted level of co2 in the atmosphere, that prediction of co2 is basically a guess (and a bad one) based on co2 in ice core samples and a speculation on future emissions. The prediction

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