Arctic Ice Levels Showing Signs of Recovery?

A small piece of good news for anyone worried about global warming and the reduction of the ice caps with the resultant raising of sea levels. Here is the latest graph showing Arctic ice levels over the last few years compared with the average from 1970-2000. Hopefully, this is not a blip and is an indicator of some form of receovery from the lows of 2007. The good news is that current 2009 figures seem to be about 3 Standard Deviations from the average of 1970-2000. I will continue to monitor.

Irish Summer Weather Part 2

The Armagh weather data for the month of August has been posted. I could use other weather stations like the one in Ashford County Wicklow but Armagh has been gathering weather data for over 200 years. Overall, using the Armagh data this summer was well above the trend for number of Mean Sunshine Hours and for Mean Maximum Temperature. See graphs below. The overall trend for Mean Sunshine Hours has decreased by about 30 hours per summer since 1880.

The overall trend for Mean Maximum Summer Temperature has increased slightly from 18.35 to 18.75 degrees Celsius since 1844.

The overall trend therefore is for slightly wetter (see last post), warmer and cloudier summers for the future.

Irish Summer Weather

One useful comparison between countries would be to check the weather over a period of time in a particular region. The Armagh Observatory has being publishing weather data for the last 200 years. The summers (June, July & August) in Ireland have been really bad over the last 3 years. For example, here is the rainfall data since 1838 for the 3 month summer period. You can see a peak rainfall datapoint to the right of the graph that represents the amount of rainfall for Summer 2007 (377mm) which was the worst rainfall since summer of 1958 and before that we did not have as much rain in a summer since 1861.

Despite the heavier than normal rainfall over the last 3 years the trend is down slightly over the period of 170 years (slightly drier summers on average with a reduction from 235mm to just over 200mm). Hopefully we might get a decent summer again like in 1995 when we got just under 80mm of rain during the summer and a decent amount of sunshine (more later when I collate the sunshine data).