Wet Wet Wet…
But Mild Temperatures More Concerning
“Oh the weather outside is frightful”: there have been many days since last October when Sammy Cahn’s 1945 lyric will have struck a chord with residents of Britain from Land’s End to John o’ Groats this winter, not least in Hastings. But the sober statistics as compiled from the daily recordings of the Hastings Weather Volunteers based on St Leonards seafront show that there have been many wetter winters, though few warmer.
Wettest of recent months here was actually November when there were 162.7mm (6.4 inches) of rain. But there have been eight individual months over the past 40 years – seven of them in autumn or winter – with higher totals, headed by November 2009 with 221.2mm.
Total rainfall for the three months of December, January and February 2019/20 was 277mm (nearly 11 inches), a third up on the established norm of the last 40 years. That’s well within the general range of variability over a century and a half. There have actually been 25 winters since 1876 that have been cumulatively wetter. Six years ago in 2013/14 the total three-month figure was 462mm (over 18 inches).
As far as climate trends are concerned, the mild air temperatures appear more indicative of a general shift. The average 24-hour temperature (that’s the mean of maximum and minimum figures) in Hastings over the three winter months of 2019/20 was 7.6C. Since 1876 there have been only three warmer winters here, all recorded within the last 30 years (1990, 2007 and 2016); of the nine warmest, none precede 1975.
Local evidence of global warming? It’s difficult not to concur.
• There are seven Hastings Weather Volunteers at the moment, with one lead who acts as contact point and organiser. Each volunteer is on a one-week-in-seven rota, taking all weather readings at 9:00am GMT (10:00am during BST) every day over a seven-day period, then in principle off for six weeks. One or more new recruits will probably be needed in the autumn – people who can cover whole weeks at a time, at any time of the year, all year round. Candidates should be interested in the weather, happy to be out in all its various manifestations, and diligent in entering collected data into a paper register and a simple Met Office web page.
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