Phil's Occasional Blog

Hot? Or Not?

Today my outdoor thermometer was reading 12ºC at 3pm, rather warm for this time of year, or so it seemed.

So I decided to investigate. The Met Office provides a dataset of Central England Daily Temperatures, dating back to 1878. After downloading the daily maximum HadCET 1878-2001 data, extracting the January 8th data, adding today's measurement, and playing with a spreadsheet, I got this graph (click on image to enlarge):

The line through the middle of the graph is a linear trend line, increasing over time.

Also interesting is the numbers of January 8ths with maximum temperatures of 10ºC or more:

1878-1944, 8 January 8s with max temp 10ºC or more.

1945-2012, 15 with max temp 10ºC or more, the last eight of which are from 1992 to 2012

So, yes, January 8th is getting warmer in these parts.