As a Chicagoan, I always chuckle when I read UK news reports about killer weather. Take this example from the UK Met office which begins
Britain is turning into a pressure cooker as hot, steamy air and intense sunshine roasts the country and kicks off the first serious heatwave of summer.
My reaction: July is two days off. We’re in the northern hemisphere. It’s getting hot here too. What do you expect?
Then, I just about bust a gut when I read the temperatures corresponding to “roasts” or “pressure cooker”:
The Met Office expects a high of 30C (86F) today, but warns that later in the week it could climb to 32C (90F) or even higher. And there could be many more uncomfortable nights ahead as thick clouds help to trap the day’s heat and humidity, with night temperatures of 18C (64F).
Believe it or not, the average June high for my zip code is 84F; the average low is 57F. Many local weather readers may well prefer 75F to 87F, but they probably wound not described 86F as a “pressure cooker” or “roasting”. More likely, they’d suggest it’s a nice day to take a swim.
According to Wikipedia, the all time high temperature for Chicago is 109F. (Yikes!) The timesonline report an all time high for Britain of 101.3F.
Admittedly, right now, we’re sitting pretty relative to the UK. Our current temperature is 74F. I walked to the grocery store and bought veggies for dinner. I do feel sorry for the Europeans sweating in 86F temperatures. If you want to avoid running the air conditioning, I’d suggest wearing a damp towel on your head and sipping a cold mojito. That’s what I plan to do in July.
The problem is most houses and cars over there don’t HAVE A/C. I was in Scotland during the last big heat wave, when it reached 96 or so. I walked around the city of Ayr in shorts and felt quite comfortable. Most of the people I passed were in long pants and appeared miserable.
Yeah. No a/c when it’s 90F and 90% humidity at bedtime is a bear. That sometimes happens in Chicago and I admit to running the AC.
But there no excuse to not adapting clothing for 90F during the summer. Depending on the circumstances, I’ll wear light cotton dresses (very cool, more dressy) or shorts (cool, more casual). I’m not going to run around in blue jeans outdoors in 90F. I assume it’s currently cool up in “the land of cheese”?
Well, we’re at 82F (avg. high 86F) right now here down by the Beautiful Ohio River, and we’re only going to get up to 74F for a high tomorrow. My Eastern Redbud babies are doing quite well, for those keeping tabs. 😉
Andrew
Well, I live in Atlanta, where we are happy it’s a lot cooler today–at 89F. Down from about 97 yesterday. Our low tonight will be 74F–which is way better than the 80 or so the last few days. More than anything, the humidity blew out, so it feels 20 degrees cooler.
Yes, cheeseland is running cool this week; I think it’s around 70F now, and it’s supposed to be cooler tomorrow. I enjoyed the heat last week, and the corn in my garden exploded upwards, which was heartening to see.
As for the UK, given the Met Office’s typical “OMG we’re all going to BURN” forecasts, I’m sure they’re a bit relieved that they’re finally getting some heat over there. Of course, it’s the UK, I doubt their “heat wave” will last.
I do remember my inlaws in Scotland complaining about the 80F weather; up there they’re just not used to it.
Lucia – your’s is the most convivial, funny and sweet-natured climate blog – and packed with good science .. all owing to you .. what a rarity ..
pet peeve: 90F and 90% R.H. are nearly unheard of conditions on the earth’s surface .. it implies dew points and atmospheric water content only seen in places such as the Persian Gulf .. 90F/90% would mean a dew point of about 87F which places you well above gawdawful and only slightly below the kill-me-now part of the heat index scale ..
melpomene–
True. I exaggerated.
Last week, Iowa clocked the highest dew point (82F). (See http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/weather/chi-wx-weathersummary0623jun23,0,7082789.story ) with temperatures in the 90s. So, they didn’t make it to 87F.
Yesterday in Phoenix it was 111F. That’s not pleasant, either. The good news is we’re not near the record of 122F for June, and that humidity is something around 20% I think. Walking the dogs is not real comfortable, we took them out last night at 10:30 and it was still 100F.
Ok lets cherry pick ie Moscow This saturday predicted MAXIMUM 14C! LOL
Apart from the AC issue, which is huge in the UK, there’s the issue of acclimatization. When I came to the USA from Northern England I found it be very hot but after a few years I didn’t really notice it. This was brought home to me when a former colleague visited me in NJ late in May on a fairly pleasant day, on the walk over to my office he was sweating buckets even though he was in shirt sleeves! At lunch time we walked over to lunch with the same result for him but I barely got warm. I’m fairly sure that I would have had the same reaction when I first came here.
In reference to the 90º/90% conditions you can add DC and Shanghai in the summer to the list.
Phil
Acclimatization does make a huge difference. I read an article that said we had more heat related deaths in the upper midwest than many hotter parts of the country. People who got used to winter are, evidently, more vulnerable during unusual heat waves in June as opposed to August. (BTW: I could be totally wrong on this. I don’t know where I read this. It could be some unreliable source like a newspaper. It wasn’t anything like a medical journal.)
Your acclimatization theory couldn’t be right. It hasn’t been debunked at RC yet.
I’m in Vienna, Austria right nowwhere it has bee raining for 2 weeks, massive flooding at the Danube and also in areas near the Hungarian border. 100 year flood prevention measures have failed in spots.
Must be global warming.
having lived in the UK for some time aswell as several other countries I have observed the following:
The UK is not prepared for warm weather, 30 degrees is not common. Houses are well insulated and have no AC, and many cars dont either. Houses are often brick coloured rather than white.
The english are very dramatic when it comes to weather, a small flood, a few mm of snow, a cold night or a hot day and they all go into a panic and the country comes to a stand still.
The media only reports the unusual, so if they talk about warm temps its because its rare, and same applies to deaths due to warmth. People die from the cold all the time in the UK but thats not news!
Where I live now it often gets over 30 degrees in summer and can hit 40 on occasion. On these days the news reporters suggest its a good day for a swim at the beach! No panic here as everything has AC and houses are white and badly insulated!
When I have spent time in colder regions I had snow tryres, I carried snow chains and kept warm clothes, a sleeping bag, snow spade etc.. incase I got stuck. But that was norm for these areas where cold and snow are common. In the UK people drive in snow on road tyres and crash or abandon their cars! If snow is forecast they still go for a drive unprepared and then moan when the road ends up closed. Very british!
Stumpy, very funny and mainly fair. I would only point out that the UK makes an appropriate investment in weather-proofing. So while it is hilarious to (say) a Canadian that a few inches of snow stops the trains, the £bns of investment required to prevent this would not be money well spent – its cheaper just to put up with the country grinding to a halt for a few days every so often.
Mind you, we will have to adapt. I read somewhere that some folks are predicting it will be warmer in 100 years time – something which has given me many a sleepless night.
SH, quite so.
In ’96 I was in LA in January. There were three days of quite heavy rain – and there was chaos. I and my brit pals all laughed at the silly californians for not being able to cope with a spot of rain. I got home to London in time for maybe an inch of snow. Chaos…
As a UK ‘northerner’ I can say that some of us can deal with snowy conditions relatively well (hot weather is a different matter of course).
We seem to be seeing ever increasing releases by the UK Met Office of “severe weather warnings” for anything, and I do mean anything, remotely inclement. We have them for hot spells, cold spells, thunderstorms, heavy rain, ice, snow; you name it.
The cynic in me (and it’s a big hairy thing trying to get out) wonders whether, no pun intended, we will see the UK Met Office releasing a headline soon, along the lines of “number of severe weather warnings increases dramatically – climate change responsible!”.
Anyone care to place a bet ;o)
Cheers
Mark.
The quoted temperatures are probably valid for Central London, but where I live, just 3 miles away, the values are about 4 to 5 degrees C lower.
It all depends on where you stick your thermometer!
Mark Smith
My sister lived in California for a while. She was amazed at how they just couldn’t deal with the tiniest bit of rain. (On the other hand, they could have used more. Many parts of California are borderline desert and have always been borderline desert.)
Air conditioning is very rare indeed in homes in the UK. I don’t even know where you’d buy an air conditioner at retail. If you are in a small town in the country, the large supermarkets will have it, but very few if any of the smaller stores. The pubs won’t.
The problem is, summers like this happen every four or five years – it is apparently caused by whether the jet stream goes north or south. Of the remaining years, two or three will be a mixture of clouds, cool breezes, rain and some sunny days as the weather blows in from the Atlantic. We think of that as a normal summer. One year will be as cool and wet as this is turning out warm and dry.
The amusing thing is what the Met Office does when confronted with this essentially unpredictable situation. It puts out forecasts for the summer and winter in the late Spring and early Autumn. You can see that in summer it has to choose between hot, normal, or cool. Similarly for the winter, cold, normal, mild. To show skill it would have to get it right more often than a random guess, or perhaps better than predictions of the same as last year.
You guessed it. The actual results seem to the residents of these islands to show negative skill, if one can put it like that. To which we react with the usual sardonic amusement with which ongoing public service disasters are greeted here. If they forecast cold and wet, you have a better than one in three chance of either of the alternatives. It is a bit like the Monty Hall problem. You know that what they forecast has become less likely, so it must be one of the other two.
They then make it worse by trying to forecast regional weather, which merely raises their chances of getting it even further wrong.
And so it was that the benighted residents of Gloucester looked out of their windows one summer and found their streets had turned to rivers, water was gushing in their front doors, and inflatable boats were sailing down to evacuate them, when the Met Office had forecast a dry summer for them, while elsewhere where the residents had received a forecast of wet and cool, gardens withered under the sun, and lawns turned brown.
Ah well, its all part of life’s rich pattern. The Met Office is, like the weather, a national treasure. It should really merge with Private Eye which could liberate its true nature, it seems to many of us to be actually engaged in an essentially post modern enterprise of producing deadpan satire in the guise of weather forecasts and staffed by people who are only civil servants because they could not follow their real vocation, that of standup comedy.
Mad dogs and Englishmen….. no wonder they suffer in the heat. Regarding the availability of air conditioning: my family in Boston didn’t get our first AC until some time in the 1970s – our neighbors during the 1960s didn’t have ACs in their windows either. . Somehow we survived. Air conditioning in cars was also a luxury until after the 1960s.
Mark Fawcett,
You are so right! Scarcely a day goes by anymore without the Met Office issuing a “severe weather warning” for somewhere in the country. This language will soon cease to resonate with the populace and we can expect the use of prefixes like ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ or ‘exceptionally’.
But why has this Met Office trend developed? It may have some kind of real basis but the cynic in me says it is probably related to the prominent role the Met Office, via the Hadley Centre, plays in the IPCC process. And, of course, it is desirable to keep ‘climate issues’ in the public mind as we approach Copenhagen 2009.
You will all be pleased to hear that the hot weather has passed and the UK is still green. Living on a northern coast of the wet and windy atlantic we get very excited when tempertures get over 25C, or below 0C. However our non anglo saxon cousins do know about heat and cold and how to cope with it as they live in a more continental climate. I just wish we had more days like it, I’m sure we would learn to cope with the warm nights. Enjoy your holiday and keep up the interesting comments
We didn’t quite have the typical British weather pattern – 3 hot days then a thunder storm. Instead, the good weather lasted nearly 2 weeks – amazingly, coinciding with Wimbledon, although obviously that was caused by the newly-built retractable roof over centre court influencing local weather patterns – but the heat wave has now broken, moving back to cool weather (about 18 deg C) with occasional heavy and perhaps thundery showers.
Guess what? The Met Office was giving severe weather warnings last night about the risk of local flooding from these storms.