News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:San Francisco just had its second-rainiest day since 1849 by amelius on Sunday January 01, 2023 @03:17PM (#34210396)
Yes, global warming makes winters wetter.

> A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, and globally water vapour increases by 7% for every degree centigrade of warming.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/15/climate-...

Re:San Francisco just had its second-rainiest day since 1849 by mike_hearn on Sunday January 01, 2023 @04:31PM (#34211173)
I got curious about this and loaded the Met Office data your link cites into a spreadsheet. This particular dataset goes back to 1836, although the UK has data for rainfall from before that going back into the 1700s.

Plotting winter rainfall does indeed show a small trend towards wetter winters (r² = ~0.1). But the plot looks odd. Virtually all the trend comes from a step change starting around 1980. Since then the trend has been tiny (r² = 0.02). The trend from 1860 to 1980 is flat (r² = 0.0018). This doesn't look much like what you'd expect from a continuous process, which CO2 emission has been:

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

This sort of sudden discontinuity raises the question of whether there was a methodology change at some point. A quick check shows that there was:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/guides/observations/how...

"As automated instruments were introduced across the synoptic network in the 1980s and 1990s the 5 inch gauge was still deployed alongside the tipping bucket gauge to continue a long consistent record of measurements for climate purposes. In recent years this practice has proved impractical and many automatic sites now only report rainfall amount from a tipping bucket gauge."

So around the time they start introducing automation to the network and switch to tipping bucket gauges, winter rainfall measurements go up a bit and then re-stabilize. Hypothesis: the old network that relied on manual measurements by volunteers was prone to under-measure in winter when people don't want to go outside.

What about summer rainfall? The cited atmospheric effect would presumably hold regardless of season as it's just about warmer air = more moisture in it. But here we see there's actually a slight downward trend, although yet again it's so trivial as to be irrelevant (r² = 0.0036). There is no change starting in the 1980s either, which would weakly support the idea of a problem with prior winter under-collection.

So it looks like not much is happening in this data. To sanity check that I grabbed a Met Office report on rainfall trends. It says:

"An analysis of annual, summer and winter rainfall observations by Jenkins et al. (2008) shows that annual mean precipitation over England and Wales has not changed significantly since 1766 when the records began"

https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/rpt_com_...

If global warming is changing rainfall patterns it isn't having much effect, and to the extent small trends in the winter data do exist it's possible that the data set has been affected by methodology changes. Note that if such a problem does exist the common practice of only analyzing data since 1960 would yield a maximally biased trend, as the long period of absolute stability up until 1980 would largely be erased.

Re:San Francisco just had its second-rainiest day since 1849 by CameronNemo on Sunday January 01, 2023 @04:50PM (#34211364)
What about summer rainfall? The cited atmospheric effect would presumably hold regardless of season as it's just about warmer air = more moisture in it.

Is there any evidence that it holds in Summer or are you just assuming?

Re:San Francisco just had its second-rainiest day since 1849 by mike_hearn on Sunday January 01, 2023 @05:31PM (#34211756)
I was going off the quote in the OP which comes from the Guardian article which is credited to the Met Office. It dates from 2011 and says:

> A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture

Nothing in that specific causal claim is dependent on season. If anything the obvious inference is that rains should be harder in summer and less so in winter. If there's a seasonal dependency there'd need to be further elaboration as to why. There might be one but the article doesn't supply it, actually it goes on to say that:

> So far, any impact that climate change may have had generally on regional rainfall cannot be distinguished from natural variations

So they seem to be agreeing with what I wrote above.

Re:San Francisco just had its second-rainiest day since 1849 by amelius on Sunday January 01, 2023 @05:25PM (#34211692)
> What about summer rainfall? The cited atmospheric effect would presumably hold regardless of season as it's just about warmer air = more moisture in it. But here we see there's actually a slight downward trend

Yes, this is what scientists predict: wetter winters and drier summers.