Atlantic warming might be to blame for washed out festivals

When I started working at the Glastonbury Festival in 1994 it was a scorcher - hot, dry - almost too dry - and that festival followed by another sun drenched Glastonbury in 1995 - but by 1997 it was mud, and in 1998 even more mud! Now, and after the UK's wettest summer since 1912 with severe weather related problems at The Isle of Wight Festival and Creamfields amongst many others, scientists have offered some explanations for  the UK's recent spell of wet summers, blaming the spate of rain drenched festivals in the UK on  substantial warming of the North Atlantic Ocean, meaning that hot dry summers in Northern Europe shifted to mild, wet summers, linked to the warm phase in a pattern of rising and falling sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean.The new research, by Rowan Sutton and Buwen Dong, of the UK National Centre for Atmospheric Science, at the University of Reading, and published online in Nature Geoscience, compared three periods in this cycle - a warm period between 1931 and 1960, a cool period from 1961 to 1990 and the most recent warm state starting in the 1990s and  the patterns of European climate change in the 1990s were similar to earlier changes attributed to the influence of the North Atlantic Ocean, the study found. The authors also suggested that a switch back to hot dry summers  could happen as rapidly as in two to three years time. Fingers crossed!The Guardian  Wet Summers May Not Be Here to Stay  8th October 2012 and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/wet-summers-could-be-caused-by-warming-of-north-atlantic-says-new-scientific-study-8201654.html