Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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UK Weather Tracker #37 – February 2020

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February 2020 broke a string of boring months weather-wise in the UK with the wettest February on record.

The meteorological year starts in December which is why December appears as the 1st data point in the charts below.  More information on the layout of the charts can be found in this post.  Points lying between the upper and lower deciles are shown as open black circles, points lying between the deciles and minimum/maximum are shown as solid black circles and any month with a new record is shown as solid black squares.

As I explained in October 2018, the addition of a Temperature Range chart (B) means I update 7 charts every month so I rotate which 6 appear in the deck above and plot the 7th as a separate chart here.  Since it is Winter, Sunshine (chart G) is shown here since that is of least interest in these months.

 

How abnormal was February 2020?

Chart H displays my UK Weather Abnormality Index (Scroll down my May 2019 post for details).  The closer to zero this index is, the less abnormal and thus more “average” a month is.  The higher it is, the more abnormal the month is.  When the index is over 100%, we can describe the month as unusual in some way.

The abnormality index was 151% in February 2020 which is the 3rd highest on record.  The month saw a new record for total rainfall (chart D), the highest ever number of rainy days (chart E) and the 2nd highest rain intensity (chart F) so it definitely counts as an abnormal month!

 

Regional Variations

February marks the end of the meteorological winter.  I do not track regional statistics every month but I do track temperature by season for each region so I can update the regional temperature chart here.  This shows the Z-Score for each region for the 2019 autumn.  A Z-Score is simply the regional temperature minus the long term average for that region divided by the long term standard deviation for that region.  Doing this, gets around the issue that each region is different on average whereas z-scores all have the same scale, namely number of standard deviations from the mean.

For the UK as a whole, the 2020 winter was well above average in temperature in all regions with the East and South East the warmest regions.  At the other end, Northern Ireland was also above average but less remarkably so.

PS: If you bookmark this link, it will be refreshed with the latest month’s data.  I usually post the update in the first week of each month.

Click the relevant month to see my other weather trackers.  Alternatively click the Weather Tracker hash tag below this post to see a list of all such posts.

For analysis of trends by seasons, please click on the relevant season from this list or the Weather Trends hashtag below this post.