A big part of the residency has been diving into local weather data and finding ways to visualise it, mainly out of my own curiosity – to see if the changes we are hearing about, or perhaps feel from our own observations are tangible in the data.
Fundamentally, I am a visual or sensory learner, so it has been useful to give some shape to the raw data. I have built some prototypes to process and compare different years and reference points.
I have been working with datasets from Paisley Airport, which go back to 1979, and the local Met Office weather station, with publicly available records extending back to 1959.
PAISLEY RAIN
The rainfall totals for Paisley are surprising. After relatively low levels in the 1960s and 1970s, rainfall levels began climbing in the late 1970s and this continued into the mid-1990s. Afterward, the average plateaued, but a new pattern of erraticness emerged. The weather starts to dramatically swing between years of drought and rainfall extremes, with annual totals ranging from lows of 850 mm to highs of 1,600 mm in recent years.
This aligns with the “global weirding” phenomenon, a trend observed worldwide.
https://legacy.geog.ucsb.edu/global-weirding/
The graph below tells the story of very wet months or terrible downpours, along with unusually dry springs and summers. It cannot capture these subtleties alone but it does give a big picture of changes in recent decades.
Source: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/stationdata/paisleydata.txt
Overall, the trend of increasing extremes is clear: “The Met Office predicts that by 2070, winters in the UK will be up to 30% wetter than they were in 1990 and that rainfall will be up to 25% more intense.” *2024 https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/c3gqxrnd5keo
“For every degree Celsius that Earth’s atmospheric temperature rises, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can increase by about 7%, according to the laws of thermodynamics.” https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-amplifies-earths-greenhouse-effect/
RAIN SHADOW
It is startling to observe how much of an effect the surrounding hills have on Renfrewshire’s rainfall. The Gleniffer Braes, Eaglesham Moors, and the hills of Muirshiel Country Park shield the lowland areas from much of the rain that blows in from off the Atlantic. This is both a blessing and a curse for those living in the rain shadow below in the valley floor of Strathclyde.
During atmospheric rivers, storms or heavy downpours, these hills gather runoff, inundating local rivers that eventually flow into the White and Black Cart waters. I’ve been working on an interactive digital live rain and river map for these catchments, where this effect becomes very clear.
In this snapshot from 18th December 2024, you can see how much rain Muirshiel and Lochwinnoch received in a 24-hour period compared to Dalmarnock in Glasgow’s east end, which sits sheltered at the bottom of the Clyde Valley.
Leaving the hills bare of trees or failing to provide adequate drainage in urban areas is likely to leave homes and infrastructure at risk. This was starkly evident in December 1994 when 80 mm of rain fell within 24 hours, causing severe flooding.
2023/2024
This past year has seen particularly elevated and strange patterns of rain. I wanted to get away from the usual linear form and consider the passage of time more as a wheel or circle. I analysed the period from September 2023 to August 2024. A process I will repeat again when the figures come in at the end of this year.
Total average rain per month really stands out in December 2023 (in pink) as being well above the 1991-2020 average (in orange). This trend continued through the spring, calming down only in June, before spiking massively in August. Wet, wet, wet!
The blue line on the graph represents daily rainfall, highlighting several days of severe downpours.
The impact of this year’s rain has been tangible. It has been impossible to grow food in the allotment and farmers across the UK have faced failing harvests due to waterlogged ground. The climate crisis will likely exacerbate these chaotic swings, deviating further from the predictable seasonal rainfall patterns we expect.
PAISLEY TEMPERATURE
I followed a similar process for temperatures, which have also been notably strange this year. The graph for October 2023 to September 2024 compares temperature variability to the 1991-2020 average.
Last winter (2023/2024) featured significantly above-average minimum temperatures (in green), meaning there were many warmer nights than usual. May was much warmer than average, but the summer was remarkably cold, with very few days exceeding 20°C.
This pattern was seen across Scotland this summer and points to an unexpected consequence of global warming. The disruption of the polar vortex and jet stream (caused by rapidly warming polar regions ) has thrown our weather patterns into disarray. As the temperature differential between the cold north and the warm equator decreases, the jet stream slows, meanders, or gets stuck in a blocking pattern.
This disrupted jet stream behaviour has also caused unprecedented heatwaves and “heat domes” in Europe and North America in recent years. https://theconversation.com/what-the-jet-stream-and-climate-change-had-to-do-with-the-hottest-summer-on-record-remember-all-those-heat-domes-238493
WHERE DO WE STAND?
It is clear that the increased CO₂ we are releasing into the atmosphere is pushing us away from stability and into times of wild extremes and variability. Governments are in the grip of big oil companies and their plan of selling as much fossil fuels as possible despite their window dressing or pretending otherwise.
Government has looked at these local and global figures and caught fright building some huge drainage tunnels under Paisley and Glasgow’s south side. Projects like The Clyde Climate Forest – https://www.clydeclimateforest.co.uk/ aim to use urban tree planting to slow rains progress running off tarmaced streets and hillsides.
On a practical level, it is really useful to get our heads around how the particularities are affecting our backyard. It will help us to know, intimately and understand the fingerprint of climate change as it presses upon us. A level of catastrophic disruption is built in, but that doesn’t mean we just give up or live in denial — better the devil we know. The devil here being the feedback of the planet of our own behaviours.
Of course, there is a lot we don’t know about how it will play out. One climate theory suggests that we could end up in a situation where no discernible pattern emerges at all, and for a period, the climate flips into a sort of unknowable chaos — years of storms followed by years of calm and then snapping into something else. I really pray it doesn’t come to this.
There has been a lot of disquiet in Scotland and the Arctic nations this year about signs of the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—the system of deep ocean currents that keeps our northern climate significantly warmer than it should be for our latitude. This would completely reconfigure everything we know and take for granted about the life we have in Scotland. Is a new ice age coming for us? So we must be on guard constantly, and we are always learning about what we are doing to our climate.
I, for one, will keep diving and swimming in the numbers as well as getting away from my desk to look for changes in the way the sky, plants, and animals behave and tell us how they are doing, through our senses. Finding the peculiarities and traits of our locale feels like the raw material that is going to help us adapt and keep a roof over our heads in challenging times.
I am working towards sharing my Rainfall installation with you early next year. Making the numbers digestible and accessible also feels like an important task and very much a work in progress, so if you have questions or feedback, please, …how do you see it in your own mind?
