Is the UK hot right now?

Thanks to Ed Hawkins for the link to this website via LinkedIn.

He explains all about the website here in this blog post. 

Every hour a global set of automatic weather stations openly report temperature and other weather measurements - these are called ‘synops’. For the UK, you can now see the latest temperature observations in the context of the past few decades.

What is 'normal’? For this website we use the temperature observed at the same time of day and time of year, averaged over the 1991-2020 period, as ‘normal’. We would love to use a time period that was longer ago, but the hourly observations required were not taken in enough places. Nevertheless, this tool allows anyone to see how hot (or cold) it currently is near where they live, relative to recent experience.

Is the UK hotter than normal at the moment?

Site built by Dan Harris, supported by Co-Centre for Climate + Biodiversity + Water.

Temperature Anomalies

Been exploring these with my Year 9 group this week as part of our work unpicking difference between weather and climate. We explored how climate can be represented and showed them some excellent graphs which had been produced and shared by Weatherquest and other organisations.

Today there is a further reminder of just how anomalous that temperature anomaly is, with Siberia experiencing a veritable heatwave.

https://t.co/jH1kYY0rGy

— IpswichGeog (@IpswichGeog) May 23, 2020