Quote:
Originally Posted by New Brisavoine
Yeah, but London is 670 miles more to the north than Chicago. So picture a gray day in northern Ontario, way more north than Lake Superior. It's DARK, ugly, miserable. It's like day and night are almost the same sometimes when the clouds almost touch the soil. And temperature is more like in the 40s, not in the 50s. And windy. It's always windy in London.
And you know you have 4/5 more months of that before finally a little bit of sunshine.
In fact in England sometimes even in mid-June it can be gray and miserable. Check the parade they had with the queen on the Thames in June before the London Olympic Games. It was mid-June, and it looks like winter. Gray, dark, temperature in the 50s.
Usually Londoners reassure themselves by telling each other how much worse it is in Glasgow. I've heard it several times. What a comfort!
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LUCKILY we get the Gulf Flow transporting warm air and ocean currents from the Caribbean, which means we get mild temperatures across NW Europe, and not the tundra of northern Canada. And why palm trees are such a thing here, ever since they discovered they survived the surprisingly mild winters -even in Western Scotland:
Sadly, London has started uprooting them as we're all meant to be eco-friendly and not planting invasive species
It is however grey and overcast alot -but not that windy -first I've heard of it? And it would be a misrepresentation to report it's like
never sunny and the 'clouds touch the ground'. I mean I do joke the same, but we do actually get a summer and average about 7 hrs a day, with often less rainfall than Mexico City, Melbourne, Tel Aviv (as the driest part of the country, in a chalk valley).
I mean come on, every year we hit the 90s for at least a week or two, and why there are so many memes on how much more unbearable it is -the tube, the housing, the humidity and lack of AC, all designed to retain heat makes it feel doubly worse and literally kills hundreds of people. It costs the local economy about $270m a year.
London is one of the worst urban heat islands in the world, and why 25C genuinely feels like 40C (77F to 104F) -the effect raises the temperature about 15C (60F), and can double on the surfaces of the brick, steel and asphalt. This is why Australians and Indians complain it's hotter here -the humidity, the brick, the insulation, the lack of ventilation.
In this vid, on a normal summer's day they measure the radiation coming off a normal surfaces at 32C (90F), and 48C (118F) off a brick one. Meanwhile ventilation shafts pump out 40C (104F) air into the street:
• Video Link
^Now imagine what it's like on a genuine heatwave day, and why thousands die each time.
We do however get a little-studied phenomenon of a decade of grey (eg 1970s -80s, 2010s) followed by a decade of drought (90s, noughties), like a regional El Nino for the Gulf Flow. In the latter years we technically fall into semi-arid territory, and the Thames becomes the cleanest urban waterway in the world (as there is so little rain runoff). My teenage and young adult years were always marked by dreary winters and glorious summers, which has recently started up again.
These years the parks become dustbowls en masse, no longer the patchwork of crowds, sunbathers and picnics:
Wildfires become a hazard if it heads over 35C / 95F. One of my friends has a house facing a common (wild grassland area), and he constantly has to worry. In 2022, when it hit 40C/ 104F it started burning but luckily stopped at his road -the low winds that year avoided what the papers said might have been 'the second Great Fire of London', as over 100 fires broke out in one day and they were inundated with 1,100 incidents. Over half the city is open green area, with low rainfall.
Basically the region is just not designed for global warming.
IN short, London has a bad rep for bad or rainy weather by dint of it being the capital of the UK -the western half of the country and Ireland, is indeed very wet, facing the Atlantic. The eastern half (where London is), much less.
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Weather is going to be gorgeous for eating outside (as opposed to constant cloud and rain these past days in Paris/London).
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