How sunshine, rain and temperature are linked in the UK

This work is intended to give insight into the climate of the UK.

Figure 1, Sunshine and temperature relationship

At first sight the above might seem strange but is logical. Regional effect can be seen, particularly the Atlantic maritime, eg. East vs. West Scotland, a contrast with the dryer East Anglia and NE England.

The underlying data is a heavily processed version of Met Office areal series by the author, all results 1929 through June 2015. Final data section is linked to various plots and data.

Figure 2, for completeness the anti-correlation of sun and rain

Next is the stranger rainfall vs. temperature

Figure 3

The connection between rain and temperature is altogether more interesting and here a strong regional pattern appears between the Atlantic West and the East.

For Scotland a surprise is how the rain vs. maximum temperature correlation is reversed.

Background

A year or so ago the moaning and poor practices of the UK Met Office tripped me into taking their own data, doing a careful analysis, which showed weather is weather, and pushing that back out. No-one has objected technically.

This week
A whim led me to refine the automatic plots slightly in preparation of updated data, I’ve added a last few years plot, a great improvement, at a glance see now.

In addition
With recent events in mind Paul Homewood’s interest in sunshine being linked to temperature came to me. As is my way the above work has fat, I write out some result files which have no actual use for the plots being done.

Those will do, dropped them into a spreadsheet, compute correlations, figure out a sensible plot and the article images here were born.

Data

1. Input CSV used for this article here (zip 750kB)
2. Spreadsheet containing (1) and computation here (.ods in .zip 1MB)
3. Revised plots of areal data as PDF here (zip, 9MB, 85 pages of plots)

Post by Tim