• Question: will the weather change for the better in years to come

    Asked by rosskemp to Simon, Angus, Christian, Hannah, Laura on 21 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by no1prosecutorye.
    • Photo: Angus Ferraro

      Angus Ferraro answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      It’s difficult to predict the weather more than a few days into the future because every weather event is very complicated. We can get some ideas by predicting what the average weather (the climate) will be. For example, I have no idea whether it will rain on this day next year. But I can say something about the climate: more often than not, it doesn’t rain as much in summer as it does in the winter.

      As the Earth warms up because of our greenhouse gas emissions, we might expect things to change in the atmosphere. There is a lot of research being done on exactly how this might change. We might expect summers to be warmer and drier, but winters might get wetter (it depends exactly where in the UK you live though). It’s difficult to get more detail on what might happen, but people are working on it. It is difficult because here in the UK the weather is so variable! Sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s not at all, and this changes from day to day. This makes the UK one of the hardest places in the world to predic the weather.

    • Photo: Simon Holyoake

      Simon Holyoake answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Angus is far better qualified to answer this, I am hopeful that it will!

    • Photo: Laura Roberts Artal

      Laura Roberts Artal answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Simon, I thought you said you liked the rain ;)!
      I really don’t know much about weather prediction, so Angus’ answer is much more detailed than I could dream to give.

    • Photo: Christian Maerz

      Christian Maerz answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      That’s hard to say. Current evidence from the last couple of decades or so suggests that the weather might actually become more extreme and more irregular, with more and heavier storms, less well-expressed seasonality, harder winters… But it really depends on the regions you are looking at. In Europe, I am afraid, there will be no general improvement…

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