How Many Extreme Heat Alert Days Until Christmas?

We had two climate changed extreme heat days in July and we’ve had an extended period of very warm, sunny, settled days (formerly known as a nice summer) in August. But it’s all gone pear-shaped now. This is tomorrow’s chart.

After a sweltering week of blue skies and light winds, it was blowing a gale on the beach today, with driving rain. I came back soaked with numb hands. The rest of August doesn’t look particularly auspicious for the Extreme Weather Moonies hoping to attribute another few hot days to some nasty Thermageddon Molecule consisting of two atoms of oxygen and one of carbon, released in huge quantities by the Satanic ritualised burning of fossil fuels. But what of September. Will we get an Indian Summer? September last year was very warm. The long range jet stream forecast for early September hints at some more settled weather after a generally unsettled end to August. So who knows.

It would be nice to have an extended warm settled summer before we are faced with a nightmare scenario of blackouts and extreme energy price hikes beginning in October, I must admit.

**Which reminds me; a director of Ofgem quit today claiming that the regulator was not doing enough to protect customers from massive price hikes and was working more in the interests of the energy companies. Martin Lewis probably thought similar when he called them a “fucking disgrace” a couple of months ago, but then he apologised and went rather quiet. Why was that?**

Anyway, back to Indian Summers. The most notable warm Septembers in England, ranked warmest, are as follows:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Tmax/ranked/England.txt

2021 comes in at 7th and you can see there are a fair few other warm Septembers in the 21st century, but the warmest by quite a margin was way back in 1895, and in fact the 1890s decade saw three very warm September months. The 21st century so far has been outstanding - seven Indian summers in the space of 21 years. Will we see an eighth? Will September 2022 surpass 1895 even? Probably not, which is perhaps just as well because we would never hear the last of it. But just supposing it did, a word of caution. 1895, the year of the warmest September recorded (in terms of maximum daytime temperature), curiously experienced the coldest October ever recorded. In fact, the 1890s stands out as a decade where the top three coldest Octobers were recorded in the UK, 1895 ranking first.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Tmin/ranked/UK.txt

How odd is that? Seems almost like if you get a record-breaking warm September, you pay for it in October. However, there’s not much evidence of that happening so far in the 21st century, so I’m sure we’ll be fine.