The 2024 meteorological summer in the UK was unremarkable on all weather variables. In fact 2024 was so unremarkable that it is in fact the most “normal” summer of the last 114 years when I compare the data to the last 50 years which I regard as “living memory”.
Meteorologists define summer in the UK to be the period from June to August so summer is now over and we are officially in autumn.
I analyse the long term trends in the UK weather using a statistical tool known as Standardisation. This means the three key variables of Temperature, Sunshine and Rainfall are recalculated so that they all have the same units, which is number of standard deviations above or below the mean. Such variables are known as Z-Scores which by definition will have a mean value of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. For more information on how I have done this, please read my post on trends in the UK summer of 2017.
Latest Z-Scores
The Z-Scores for Temperature, Sunshine and Rainfall are shown in the three charts below. Each chart also contains an 11-year centred moving average which gives an idea of the underlying trend.
Standardised variables aid interpretation of data in many ways. If the standardised value is positive, it means that the value is above your average or expected value. If it is negative, then the value is below your expected value. If the original variable is approximately normal in its distribution then the vertical scale gives us an idea of how typical or atypical each year is. Z-Scores in the range -1 to +1 are considered typical values and completely unremarkable. Z-scores in the ranges -2 to -1 and +1 to +2 are considered to be uncommon values but still entirely plausible and such values should not cause us concern. When Z-Scores get into the ranges -3 to -2 and +2 to +3, we should start paying closer attention and asking ourselves if something has changed especially if we get a sequence of successive points in these ranges. Finally, if the Z-scores are less than -3 or greater than +3, that is normally regarded as a clear call to action. There are in fact many ways of interpreting Z-Scores and what I have said so far merely a gives an overview of the most basic interpretations. A whole field of study known as Statistical Process Control (SPC) is dedicated to building and interpreting such charts (known as Control Charts).
For the summer of 2023, the z-scores for temperature, sunshine and rainfall were respectively -0.1, -0.2 and 0.0. This tells us the summer was as normal as it could be when compared with the last 50 years.
Long Term Climate Trends
Since the 3 moving averages in the above 3 charts all use the same units, they can be plotted onto the same chart as below.
This clearly shows a shift in our summer climate over the last 100 years of roughly 1 standard deviation. Recall that the baseline for the z-score calculation is based on the idea of “living memory” which I have defined to be the last 50 years of 1970 to 2019. We can characterise our summers broadly as follows:
- 1915-1970 – we had cold and damp summers.
- 1970-1995 – we had dryer and almost normal temperature summers.
- 1995-today – a clear shift in our climate occurred to warm and wet summers.
2024 might not have been warm and wet but it doesn’t contradict the recent climate period for all three variables.
How many dimensions does summer have?
The long term trends chart above suggests that the z-scores for temperature, sunshine and rainfall all appear to be correlated. In fact this can be illusory as the above chart uses moving averages. If we look at the actual z-scores, we can see what the correlations are in the three scatter plots below.
The brown square in each chart is 2024. Scatter plots can be useful to identify unusual years that do not follow the normal relationships. Here we see that 2024 is bang in the middle of the scatter for all plots emphasising how “normal” the summer was overall.
When we examine the three scatter plots, we see all three variables are correlated with each other. A statistician would look at these charts and observe that what appears to be 3-dimensional data (temperature, sunshine and rainfall being the 3 dimensions) is in fact closer to be being 1 dimensional. By using the method of PCA (Principal Components Analysis) which takes our 3-dimensional data set and calculates 3 new components that are statistically uncorrelated with each other, we see from the scree plot that the 1st component (PC1) accounts for 2.25 dimensions whilst the 2nd component (PC2) accounts for 0.5 dimension.
** In the bi-plots below, rainfall has been replaced with dryness (= -1 x rainfall z-score) in spring, summer & autumn whilst winter retains rainfall. This is to aid visualisation of the biplots in terms of how the correlations change over the year. Had I used rainfall in all plots, then in the 3 seasons mentioned, the rainfall label would be on the opposite side of the circles shown.
For more information about Principal Components Analysis, please visit my link about training materials for multivariate analysis. and read the information in section A.
Summer is the only season where the weather is effectively one dimensional and the 1st principal component, which is basically an average of the three z-scores, can be thought of as a measure of how “nice” our summer was. It is worth plotting the 1st principal component over time as it suggests that good summers where the 1st principal component exceeds 2 may follow a pattern of some kind. In 2024, the 1st component was +0.07 which is effectively bang on average.
A point I noted in 2022 was the possibility we may be moving to a new era of dryer summers relative to the prevailing temperatures. This feature shows up in the chart of the 2nd principal component below. Bear in mind that the scree plot shows this component is much less important than the 1st component but the consistently negative values we’ve had since 1995 reflects the changing climate of our summers. The bi-plot shows that this component is effectively the difference between the dryness & temperature and when it’s strongly negative it’s because the summer has been both warmer and wetter than normal. In 2021, 2022 and 2024, this component was close to zero which leads me to speculate we are seeing a change but 2023 recorded the second largest negative score so who knows.
If you want to read my other Weather Trends posts, please click on the link or the Weather Trends hashtag below this post. Otherwise, please click the relevant season from the list below.
- 2024 – Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Annual
- 2023 – Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Annual
- 2022 – Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Annual
- 2021 – Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn
- 2020 – Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn
- 2019 – Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn
- 2018 – Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn
- 2017 – Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn
