Air flow influences on local climate: Observed United Kingdom climate variations

Identifying and removing the influence of atmospheric circulation variability on central England temperature increases the statistical significance of warming trends in spring, autumn and the annual mean over the last 50 years. The trends are more detectable because the circulation changes contribute greatly to the ‘noise’ of interannual to interdecadal variability, but induce only small multi-decadal trends (the ‘signal’). Factoring out the circulation can thus enhance the signal-to-noise ratio. For precipitation, the recent enhancement in the difference between summer rainfall in south-east England and winter precipitation in northern Scotland can partly be explained by atmospheric circulation variability over the past 40 years (particularly the increase in the North Atlantic Oscillation index from the 1960s to the early 1990s).