VIRTUAL MEETING | How much rain?
LOCATION
UPDATE: Registration has now closed.
SPEAKER: Mark McCarthy, National Climate Information Centre, Met Office
ABSTRACT: On 3rd October 2020 widespread persistent rainfall across most of the country resulted in a provisional estimated UK average of 31.7 mm. This statistic captured news reports at the time as being the wettest day for the UK on record and enough rain by volume to fill Loch Ness (7.6 km3). Comparably extreme wet days for the UK also occurred during storms Ciara and Dennis in February 2020. In a dataset of UK daily rainfall since 1891 there are only 40 days (less than 0.1%) where the UK average rainfall has exceeded 20 mm, and remarkably three of those have occurred in 2020, with storm Bella in December also getting very close.
But what does a UK average rainfall value mean, and how is it calculated? In this talk I will discuss how these statistics are generated, how robust they are, their limitations, and how they fit into the family of UK climate monitoring datasets we produce at the Met Office. I will also discuss how the rainfall events of 2020 can be viewed in the context of past, present and future climate variability and change.
This talk started promptly at 19:00. There was a talk delivered by Mark with a subsequent Q&A session, finishing at 20:00.
UPDATE: Registration has now closed.
SPEAKER: Mark McCarthy, National Climate Information Centre, Met Office
ABSTRACT: On 3rd October 2020 widespread persistent rainfall across most of the country resulted in a provisional estimated UK average of 31.7 mm. This statistic captured news reports at the time as being the wettest day for the UK on record and enough rain by volume to fill Loch Ness (7.6 km3). Comparably extreme wet days for the UK also occurred during storms Ciara and Dennis in February 2020. In a dataset of UK daily rainfall since 1891 there are only 40 days (less than 0.1%) where the UK average rainfall has exceeded 20 mm, and remarkably three of those have occurred in 2020, with storm Bella in December also getting very close.
But what does a UK average rainfall value mean, and how is it calculated? In this talk I will discuss how these statistics are generated, how robust they are, their limitations, and how they fit into the family of UK climate monitoring datasets we produce at the Met Office. I will also discuss how the rainfall events of 2020 can be viewed in the context of past, present and future climate variability and change.
This talk started promptly at 19:00. There was a talk delivered by Mark with a subsequent Q&A session, finishing at 20:00.
