Mild in Hull

At Latitude 53.7 Degrees North the City of Hull, or to give it’s formal name Kingston Upon Hull, is on the same Parallel as territories in British Columbia in Canada , Kamchatka in Russia, and parts of Lituania, Poland and Kazakhstan. 

Just the mention of these iconic far off names sends a shiver down your spine as they are just synonymous with freezing cold and inclement, if not harsh climatic conditions, notwithstanding for the latter places, political conditions. 

Mention Hull to anyone living in the Southern part of the UK and you get a stock and rather stereotypical response about the bleak North in terms of weather and social outlook. 

I first moved to this part of East Yorkshire when I was a teenager in the late 1970’s. 

It was just a geographical house move for the family of about 25 miles up the country but it was, to my immature mind at the time, to the other side of the world. 

I had expectations, for some illogical reasoning, of snow, ice, blisteringly cold arctic winds (there being nothing but the North Sea between Hull and Russia) and in between a lot of horizontal rain and scant sunshine hours. 

I could have not been more wrong or misinformed and indeed under the influences of global warming and climate change I now find that Hull is, in the speak of the Meteorological Office, mild and warm even to the extent of being temperate. 

This certainly seems to have been borne out by the weather conditions over the last few years and in the last 12 months I cannot recall there having been any ground frost at otherwise expected times nor any significant snow. 

There was a brief early morning flurry of snow, on one day in March this year and although contributing to the usual panic and chaos amongst the transport system in Hull it was but a mere memory by lunchtime. 

I was taught in secondary school that the eastern side of the UK was in what was called a “rain shadow area”, to mean that any Atlantic originating westerly wind heavily laden with precipitation moisture was encouraged to drop it on making landfall on the western regions of the nation leaving very little in cloud content by the time they reached the far side of the Pennines. 

This may have been the case in the climate archives but Hull now has significant annual rainfall, this being no more evident than in the disastrous city-wide flooding in 2007 and a few localised cases of downpour and flash flooding more recently. 

As for other climate statistics for Hull, well, we should expect warm summers, mild winters and within these no actual dry season. 

Rainfall days according to Met Office records covering the period 1981 to 2010 were on average every third day giving an annual 680 mm. This is about mid table in the UK League of Wettest Cities.

It is now late October and the daily temperatures are still in double figures which is unprecedented. I drove out into open countryside earlier this week into more seasonal temperatures of only 4 degrees Celsius which would be about normal for the season but still a surprise to me after recent trends. 

Current records for maximum and minimum temperatures are, for Hull, plus 34.4 degrees C from 1990 and minus 11 C in 1982. I am not sure if we will see such extremes again which I find depressing. 

The seasons are tending to blur into one another with climatic changes and it is now not unusual to experience a full four seasons weather in just one day.