Picture Post: A changeable day on Ilkley Moor

With temperatures having plummeted and now the first signs of snow, we’re not out of the woods yet, and this photograph shows just how changeable the weather can be.

Taken from the top of Ilkley Moor, the picturesque West Yorkshire town is all but obscured by mist hanging at the bottom of the Wharfe Valley while just a few miles away blue skies reign.

While the last few weeks have brought high levels of rainfall causing devastation from the coast to the cities of Leeds and York and further west to the towns and villages of the Calder Valley, it seems likely that it is something we are going to have to get used to.

According to the Met Office, December was the wettest month ever recorded in the UK, with almost twice as much rain as normal. It was the newly named storms Desmond, Eva and Frank which brought the wettest weather to British shores with meteorologists recording 230mm of rain – beating a previous record of 215.7mm, set in November 2009.

And according to Professor Piers Forster, Professor of Climate Change at the University of Leeds, we should probably get used to sandbags, rivers bursting their banks and flash flooding.

In the wake of the recent storms, he said: “The record- breaking wet and warm December is not just due to climate change but I am sure that man-made climate change played a significant role.

“Warmer, wetter winters with increases in extreme rainfall are entirely expected and predicted responses to climate change.

“Physics tells us that the 4.1C warmer December would bring 30 per cent heavier extremes of 24-hour rainfall rates, and this is what we saw across much of the North of the UK.”

And in a similarly bleak prediction, Professor Myles Allen, of the University of Oxford’s Environmental 
Change Institute said: “Normal weather, unchanged over generations, is now a thing of the past.”

Technical details: Fujifilm X-Pro1, 1/60th @f8 100ASA.