Rescued 66,000 actual rainfall observation sheets in the UK refute alarmist claims of more drought – Is it up because of that?
Via P Gosselin
Europe has seen a dry summer this year, and global climate warningers say droughts are becoming more frequent. This is the new normal, they love to declare.
However, a trove of hard data refute this altogether. A recent paper by Hawkins et al., published by the Royal Meteorological Society yields astonishing results tabulated from meticulously handwritten old observations over 300 years.
Hat head: Die kalte Sonne here.
The following is a summary of the article. Key statements highlighted:
Recovering additional historical weather observations from known archival sources will improve understanding of how the climate is changing and allow for a detailed examination of unusual events in the historical record.
The UK National Meteorological Archive recently scanned more 66,000 sheets of paper containing 5.28 million handwritten monthly precipitation observations made across Great Britain and Ireland between 1677 and 1960.
Only a small fraction of these observations were previously available digitally for analysis by climate scientists. More than 16,000 volunteer citizen scientists have completed transcription among these observatories in early 2020 using the website RainfallRescue.org, built using the Zooniverse platform. A total of 3.34 million observations from over 6000 locations so far have been quality controlled and made public. This increased the total number of monthly precipitation observations available for this period and area by a factor of six.. The newly rescued observations will allow for a much longer and more improved reconstruction of past variations in precipitation over the British Isles and Ireland, including periods of severe flooding and droughts. . In particular, this data will allow for an extension of the period to reproduce the monthly precipitation officially netted in the United Kingdom back to 1836, and even earlier for some areas. “
It is truly astounding that such a volume of precious data has been ignored for so long by publicly funded research institutions that spend tens of millions of dollars annually to reconstruct historic climates.
Currently, 16,000 volunteers are involved and carrying out the work, giving us a much clearer picture of the UK’s past climate. Some of the results are very interesting, if not surprising, especially given all the apocalyptic drought claims that have been made so recently.
The driest year on record was not recently, but 1855. Furthermore, as the chart above shows, the trend is wetter, not drier. Precipitation has averaged 10% more than recently in the mid-19th century.
The dry years since 1950 have turned out to be nothing out of the ordinary.
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