Met office red alert for extreme heat has been issued for London and for parts of the Midlands. This is the first ever met office red warning for heat.
Government red warnings for heat health alert now cover all of England. I think that this may be the first such alert, it is undoubtedly the first ever to affect all of England.
Are significant consequences expected for electricity generation and distribution ?
The iceland glaciers are melting back to where they were 3,000 years ago exposing a forest of trees. 7,000 year old tree roots in perfect frozen condition have also been found in Canada north of Vancover. Could there have been global warming then and how or who was causing it????
OK so 40km apart will give some spurious results so.e of which become headline news.
So from the little ice age we're warming nicely. And may get as warm as the medieval warm period. The trend over the past 2 decades is no warming.
I would suggest that you read the Met Office's specification for weather stations (and the reasoning for it).
But it is patently true that microclimates might result in nearby locations having different temperatures. That doesn't mean the trend over many decades isn't relevant, nor that the variations are not well-understood by the clever people at the Met Office.
These are, after all, the stations used as part of the weather model for forecasting the accuracy of which has fairly substantial economic and security implications; one would expect that by now if it really was "well known" that the sites were problematic they would have been moved!
The Urban Heat dome effect produces only best guess temperatures. Its well known that poorly located temperature gauges are used.
It depends on what you mean by "real". We have had airfields with weather stations on them since at least WWII, and some before that.
Yes its been hot.
The hottest recorded from an airfield with plenty of tarmac.
You have ask if these records are real
mapj1: "there may be an element of over reacting in the UK" . When a substantial proportion of the population does not know how to deal with this kind of heat in their place of residence, then "getting the message out" requires grandiose gestures. France didn't react strongly in advance of and during the 2003 heatwave, and as a result suffered some 14,000 deaths due to the heat (some 30,000 across Europe as a whole).
Brits are notorious (not just via Kipling and Coward) for going "out in the midday sun". Back in 1984, I hiked/ran the Grand Canyon South Rim to North Rim (round about 26 miles) in September. I encountered some young Brits on the trail with half-litre water bottles, convinced they didn't need more - after all, there was a place to refill. You actually need to ingest 1-2 litres/hour minimum in those conditions, depending on what you are doing. I had six litres of bottles with me. That is what I drunk per hour for the first two hours on the way down.
35° heat here in Bielefeld is often uncomfortable, because it often comes with 60+% humidity. These last few days, we were at about 30%. I was even out riding my bicycle. Lower humidity is more comfortable, but it is however also more dangerous, because you don't notice how much water is evaporating from you.
Most people I know don't have hygrometers in their houses, but they do know about humidity because you feel it. The good weather services show humidity along with temperature.
Slight correction. Designed to handle what used to be typical British weather.
For example, no heated points. Every time it gets really cold, people are dispatched to known "cold spots" to unfreeze the points (and they rarely manage to reach all of them). German rail has heated points, because conditions when you need it are more frequent. Britain is currently more worried about heavy rains and about heat spells than about extremal cold spells, probably because that is the way the likelihoods pan out.
Almost all prophylactic environment measures cost more (installation, maintenance, maybe running costs). So you have to figure out if/when you need them, in advance. A decade-plus ago, there was a cold-snow ("powder snow") storm in Northern France, Belgium, Germany, in January I think. The Eurostar trains (1st gen) could not run because the filters in the traction cars could not cope. We are talking some two decades after service introduction - this really was new. In contrast, in Sweden such circumstances occur regularly, so engine filters routinely cope. But they had real trouble in winter with their first tilt trains. And now with trying to run trains at higher speeds, there are issues with "snow clouds" with operations over 200kph in winter. For example http://gronataget.se/upload/TR10_2011.pdf Was it considered worth retrofitting the 1st ten Eurostar traction cars? Nope. Obviously, nope. We haven't had the chance yet to see if the 2nd gen Siemens multis behave better.
Despite some failures, it seems that electricity transmission and distribution generally held up very well.
Very hot weather increases the load as compared to mild or warm weather, but even the peak load on the hottest ever day was less than that prevailing in winter weather.
That however is the position nationally, I suspect that in London that new records may have been set for load. AFAIK nothing major blew up which is reassuring.
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