The UK’s wet and stormy winter of 2013/2014

Abstract

Editorialshould also be acknowledged: at the start of 2015 these still comprise over one-third of the UK's official climatological station network.The UK is a small and geographically complex country, and often a high density of weather stations is needed to capture localised features of our climate. As demonstrated during winter 2013/2014, even a small range of hills such as the North York Moors -rising to a modest 454m above sea level at the highest point -can have a profound effect on the weather. It is the interaction between the highly variable climate and complex geography across the UK that makes monitoring its weather so interesting. We thank all writers for their contributions to this issue.Correspondence to: michael kendon michael. kendon@metoffice.gov.uk

Was the Extreme Storm Season in Winter 2013/14 Over the North Atlantic and the United Kingdom Triggered by Changes in the West Pacific Warm Pool?

“…Thus, we find that parts of the proposed mechanism in previous studies (Huntingford et al 2014;Slingo et al 2014;Kendon and McCarthy 2015) linking the tropical west Pacific and European storminess show significant covariability, but we cannot find evidence for a direct relation from the beginning to the end of such a mechanism. In addition, the correlation between North American temperatures and windstorm anomalies drops to insignificant values when the winter 2013/14 is excluded from the analysis.…”

Spatial and temporal analysis of extreme sea level and storm surge events around the coastline of the UK

“…In short, the UK’s wet and storm winter was linked to record low temperatures on the North American continent 48 , and the contrast between the warm tropical Atlantic and cold air advecting south across the United States are likely to have been partly responsible for the persistence and unusual strength of the North Atlantic jet stream, which created the ideal conditions for generation of storms. Huntingford et al 16 argue that this in turn could have been related to the filling of the Aleutian Low in the northeast Pacific, which itself could be linked to high sea surface temperatures and a westward displacement of precipitation in the tropical Pacific.…”

Was the Extreme Storm Season in Winter 2013/14 Over the North Atlantic and the United Kingdom Triggered by Changes in the West Pacific Warm Pool?

“…A potential driver for positive sea surface temperature anomalies in the North Pacific and cold conditions in central North America further downstream is warm surface waters in the tropical west Pacific (Palmer 2014;Hartmann 2015). It has been suggested that increasing sea surface temperatures in the tropical west Pacific could also be the cause for extreme weather over the British Isles (Huntingford et al 2014;Slingo et al 2014;Kendon and McCarthy 2015). In line with this hypothesis, we first quantify the interannual variability of winter windstorm frequency over the North Atlantic/European region, which can be related to very low temperatures over North America.…”