Unpredictable weather not unprecedented again.

 A year ago The National Trust warned of the dangers of the new norm of "tumultuous weather" - https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/services/media/weather-and-wildlife-2022 This year the National Trust is: "sounding the alarm for UK wildlife as the loss of predictable weather patterns and traditional seasonal shifts causes chaos for nature." https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/services/media/weather-and-wildlife-2023

As a worrier myself, and as this endangers ancient sites, I was intrigued enough to quickly look to at the historical records to see if the unpredictability was unprecedented. 

My approach was to graph the difference between one year's temperature, or rainfall, record and the previous year's. 

I used the UK's Met Office records. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html   and  https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/download.html 

So for instance 2022's mean temperature was 10 deg C and 2021's 10.3 so I record that as a drop of 0.3 for 2022. Obviously the larger the gains and drops the more "unpredictable" the weather is. 

Last year's post is here: https://www.sarsen.org/2022/12/is-this-years-tumultuous-weather-set-to.html and has links to data sources and results.

I have updated the data and there is no change in the pattern, the amount of unpredictability by my definition seems to be same. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the amount of unpredictability is unprecedented or unusual so far. Against a background of rising temperatures this is good news and long may it continue.

If anyone is interested in the Data or more graphs please get in touch.