Ed Hawkins
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Ed Hawkins
@edhawkins.org
29K followers 620 following 740 posts

Climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading | IPCC AR6 Lead Author | MBE | Views own | https://edhawkins.org

Warming Stripes: http://www.ShowYourStripes.info

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Edward Hawkins is a British climate scientist who is Professor of climate science at the University of Reading, principal research scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), editor of Climate Lab Book blog and lead scientist for the Weather Rescue citizen science project. He is known for his data visualizations of climate change for the general public such as warming stripes and climate spirals. .. more

Environmental science 47%
Geology 18%
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edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · Oct 8
Monitoring changes in UK temperature

To (almost) no-one’s surprise, multiple sources of data agree on the long-term trends in UK temperatures.

climatelabbook.substack.com/p/monitoring...
Monitoring changes in UK temperature
Multiple sources of data agree on long-term observed trends
climatelabbook.substack.com

Reposted by Peter Thorne

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 14h
As we move into the final days of the year, 2025 has just overtaken 2022 as warmest year-to-date for Central England.

Given the forecast, it looks likely that 2025 will end up being the warmest calendar year for this region since records began in 1659.

The top 3 warmest will be 2022, 2023 & 2025.

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 1d
I loved being a guest on The Infinite Monkey Cage. Sad to hear that Robin has had to resign as presenter because of opinions expressed outside of the show. His energy, passion and humour are key reasons why the show is so popular.
robinince.bsky.social Robin Ince @robinince.bsky.social · 2d
Heartbreaking night where I told the final audience for Monkey Cage that I will ever play to that I had no choice but to resign
joannafairtrade.bsky.social Joanna Abena Fianu @joannafairtrade.bsky.social · 2d
In the audience today at the amazing Niamos theatre in Manchester for the Christmas recording of Infinite Monkey Cage. Devastating news from @robinince.bsky.social - what must have been an incredibly difficult decision but absolutely the correct and humane one. Robin remains the best of us.

Reposted by Ed Hawkins

robinince.bsky.social
Robin Ince @robinince.bsky.social · 2d
Heartbreaking night where I told the final audience for Monkey Cage that I will ever play to that I had no choice but to resign
joannafairtrade.bsky.social Joanna Abena Fianu @joannafairtrade.bsky.social · 2d
In the audience today at the amazing Niamos theatre in Manchester for the Christmas recording of Infinite Monkey Cage. Devastating news from @robinince.bsky.social - what must have been an incredibly difficult decision but absolutely the correct and humane one. Robin remains the best of us.

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 3d
Very warm for the time of year, obviously, not very warm in absolute terms. It is the UK, in December, after all.

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 3d
Is it warm in the UK right now?

Yes, it is very warm!

Track temperatures every hour: istheukhotrightnow.com

Reposted by Ed Hawkins

hannahritchie.bsky.social
Hannah Ritchie @hannahritchie.bsky.social · 6d
The Warming Stripes have been an iconic way to communicate temperature data. On the latest episode of the podcast, we got to speak to their creator, @edhawkins.org.

As a fellow data viz nerd, this was a fun one.

The latest episode of our podcast:
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...

Reposted by Valerie M. Delmotte, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Du Toit , and 2 more

oceanterra.org
Sam Burgess @oceanterra.org · 6d
The latest #climate update from Copernicus shows that 2025 is on course to be:

- joint 2nd warmest year, tied with 2023 and behind 2024 (warmest year)

- November 2025 was the 3rd warmest November globally

For more: climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2...

🌏🌡️⚒️🧪🌊
Annual global surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to the 1850–1900 pre-industrial reference from 1967 to 2025. The value for 2025 is based on data for January to November. Data source: ERA5. Credit: C3S/ECMWF. Monthly global surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to the 1850–1900 pre-industrial reference period from January 1940 to November 2025, plotted as time series for each year. The year 2025 as well as the two warmest calendar years are shown in colour: 2025 in dark red, 2024 in orange, and 2023 in yellow. All other years are shown with thin grey lines. Data source: ERA5. Credit: C3S /ECMWF.

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
Our experience is very different. In multiple trials by different people with a range of weather logbook types, Gemini3 is consistently >99% accurate. And the evidence in the graphic is clear: high agreement with independent human-keyed data.
Have you tried the latest gemini3-pro?

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
Another commenter suggested Qwen3-VL as a different (open) model to try, and it is on huggingface.

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
Why do we want such pressure observations?

On 26th Jan 1884, the UK experienced its lowest ever observed sea level pressure with a windstorm at <930mb over Scotland. We will add these newly rescued observations into a reanalysis system to build a full dynamical reconstruction of this extreme event.

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
I can dig out the exact words, but “please extract the hourly barometer values from this weather logbook page” will basically do the job. I did add some text about there being missing digits when the integer part is the same as the row above, asking Gemini to output the full value.

Reposted by Wim Thiery, Kevin J. Anchukaitis

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
Exciting jobs & PhD studentship!

1) postdoc in historical windstorms: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

2) postdoc in extreme event storylines: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

3) PhD in redeveloping the Central England Temperature series (led by Tim Osborn): www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Reposted by Peter Thorne, Ed Hawkins

healionk.bsky.social
Kevin Healion @healionk.bsky.social · 6d
www.zooniverse.org/projects/hea...

1/ The Weather Archive Africa @zooniverse.bsky.social project is continuing to return important data that helps us to learn more about the climate of Africa. If you havn't contributed yet, please click the above link. A few minutes will rescue invaluable data

Reposted by Fabrice Ardhuin

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
Also - a new discussion paper by Malte Rehbein about using AI tools to read pen charts of historical river levels: essd.copernicus.org/preprints/es...
Reconstructing Nineteenth-Century River Water Levels with Transformer-Based Computer Vision
Abstract. We convert nineteenth-century Bavarian Danube gauge charts (1826–1894) into daily water-level series referenced to gauge zero through a novel semi-automated workflow combining light document...
essd.copernicus.org

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
Philip Brohan (@brohan.org) has been leading these efforts to test various AI tools, e.g. brohan.org/Robot_Rainfa...
Robot Rainfall Rescue — Robot Rainfall Rescue
brohan.org

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
We have the daily averages at the bottom of the page which are also returned to allow flags for disagreements. There are 2 days out of 62 where sums don't match which need checking. It does not return a confidence flag for each value, but you could use an ensemble of similar tools to generate that.

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
For this relatively niche activity, Gemini3 is a gamechanger for accuracy, cost and speed compared to any other tool we have tried before. OCR is embedded within this, but importantly it is general (i.e. not specific to certain page layouts) and can interpret what is on the page.

Reposted by Peter Thorne, Ben Bond‐Lamberty, Dominik Wiedenhofer

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 6d
The Google Gemini3 LLM is remarkably excellent at reading weather observations from handwritten logbooks.

Example of recovering hourly pressure observations taken in Oxford in December 1883 and January 1884, compared to human-keyed data from relatively nearby sites.

Climate data rescue solved?
Example daily page from Oxford weather logbooks Hourly pressure data from 3 sites - Oxford, Falmouth and Kew. Oxford transcribed with Gemini3, the others done by humans.

Reposted by Peter Thorne, Ed Hawkins

ncas-uk.bsky.social
National Centre for Atmospheric Science @ncas-uk.bsky.social · 16d
Fascinated by windstorms and their hidden history? Be part of the NCAS team at Reading, and get a chance to dig into the archives and shape the future of storm-risk science.

@uor-research.bsky.social

Apply by 4 January 2026:

ncas.ac.uk/job-opportun...
Job Opportunity: Research Scientist (Historical Windstorms) - NCAS
We are seeking to appoint a Research Scientist in Historical Windstorms to join our team at the University of Reading.
ncas.ac.uk

edhawkins.org
Ed Hawkins @edhawkins.org · 19d
There are several extreme historical UK & Ireland windstorms which are of interest to insurance companies to understand wind risks, e.g. January 1884 dropped to <930mb over Scotland.

Postdoc position in Reading (working with Aon & QBE) to explore these risks: jobs.reading.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...