With heatwave weather forecast for 2050 it could come true in the UK next week, 28 years ago | environment
2 min readIn 2020, two UK meteorologists made a forecast to estimate the weather thirty years from now, in 2050. For this purpose, specialists from the official weather forecasting agency Met Office have dedicated themselves to analyzing very long climate models.
At the time, the charts indicated that this wasn’t a true prediction. The phrase “Examples of reasonable weather based on weather forecasts” written in the upper right corner of the imaginary forecast appears. However, next Monday (18), the estimate can be confirmed with 28 years in advance.
The person who noticed the similarity was Simon Lee, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University in New York. “In 2020, the Met Office has released a hypothetical weather forecast for July 23, 2050 based on the UK climate forecast. Today, Tuesday’s forecast is surprisingly nearly identical across most of the country,” he wrote on Twitter.
The estimate for next week is unprecedented, with temperatures rising 10 to 15 degrees above normal. Until then, the highest temperature ever recorded in the country was 38.7°C, at Cambridge Botanic Garden, in 2019.
This possibility led to a red alert due to a heat wave, which is unprecedented so far. In an official statement on the Weather Service website, Bureau of Meteorology climate scientist Dr. Nikos Christidis says:
We were hoping we wouldn’t get to this situation. […] In a recent study, we found that the likelihood of extremely hot days in the UK has increased and will continue to increase over the course of the century, with extremes expected to be observed in southeast England.”
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