In its March 26, 2025 article titled “Heavier Rainfall Rates in U.S. Cities,” Climate Central (CC) claims that “Climate change is supercharging the water cycle, bringing heavier rainfall extremes and related flood risks across the U.S.” This conclusion is misleading at best, and scientifically irresponsible at worst. The evidence, when properly examined, points to alternative, well-known meteorological causes of localized rainfall increase.

CC claims that, “as the atmosphere warms with climate change, it can hold more water vapor, leading to heavier downpours—especially in urban areas.” This is easily explained by local urban meteorological factors unrelated to climate change.

To start, the CC article commits a common logical fallacy in climate reporting: correlation mistaken for causation. Yes, some cities have recorded increases in intense rainfall over recent decades, but that’s not the smoking gun for anthropogenic-driven climate change as CC would have you believe. Rather, Climate at a Glance provides a far more comprehensive and nuanced assessment of precipitation trends, showing that nationwide rainfall in the U.S. has not increased in an alarming or unprecedented manner. In fact, the entry on U.S. Precipitation shows that while total precipitation has slightly increased over the last century, there’s no consistent trend of intensifying rainfall that matches the hysteria being promoted.

Worse, CC completely ignores the well-documented Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in their article. Cities are warmer than surrounding rural areas due to the heat-retaining properties of asphalt, concrete, and reduced vegetation—this is a basic principle of meteorology that’s been acknowledged for decades.

One of the leading higher rainfall cities CC mentions is Reno, NV., citing a 37% increase in rainfall since 1970 for the city. A simple experiment, done by Anthony Watts in 2008, conclusively demonstrated the strong UHI signature of the city, as seen below:

Warmer city surfaces create more localized convection, which can in turn drive more thunderstorm and precipitation activity over urban cores. Ironically, CC has an entire section of their website dedicated to UHI in U.S. cities, none of which appear in their article claiming climate change is “supercharging the water cycle” and rainfall for cities.

With CC ignoring the UHI factor in rainfall enhancement—in an article specifically focused on urban rainfall trends—is not just an oversight. It’s obvious journalistic and scientific malpractice.

There’s another major mechanism at play here that CC sidesteps entirely: urban air pollution. Cities are loaded with particulate matter from vehicles, industry, and heating systems. These particles serve as condensation nuclei—tiny seeds upon which water vapor condenses, forming clouds and enhancing precipitation. This isn’t new or controversial science. A 2004 study in Nature titled “Enhanced precipitation due to aerosol effects” documented how increased aerosols can enhance cloud formation and intensify rainfall, particularly in urban environments.

Moreover, the American Meteorological Society has long recognized this phenomenon. The AMS Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology published a paper in 2007 on “Urban Influences on Cloud and Precipitation”, highlighting how cities can create their own microclimates that influence local rainfall, both in amount and intensity. None of these well-established mechanisms rely on global climate change to explain city-specific rainfall trends.

Let’s also not forget the role of cloud seeding in weather modification—a practice that intentionally introduces particulates into the atmosphere to enhance rainfall. The fact that urban areas do this unintentionally through pollution suggests that rainfall trends in these areas are far from purely “natural” or “climate-change” induced.

CC’s flawed analysis ignores basic well-known urban meteorology. CC’s article is therefore a misguided narrative driven by model speculation. Their narrative—that climate change is making U.S. city rainstorms worse—is built on selective data, conveniently ignoring both the well-established Urban Heat Island effect and the rainfall-enhancing role of aerosols. It’s like blaming fever on the weather while ignoring the infection causing it. By omitting these critical factors, they present an oversimplified, alarmist view that serves political ends rather than scientific truth.

This kind of shoddy research for media consumption undermines public trust in climate science. CC claims to be an authority, yet their work shows a consistent pattern: cherry-pick data, ignore contradictory evidence, and blame everything on humans using fossil fuels causing climate change. Real science considers all variables, especially ones as obvious as localized urban heating and pollution. Until Climate Central acknowledges these fundamental factors, they’re not reporting science—they’re spinning a fake news narrative.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

Originally posted at ClimateREALISM

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

How we laughed when the Met Office declared a UK temperature record of 40.3°C at 3.12pm on July 19th 2022, halfway down the runway at RAF Coningsby at a time when it later transpired three typhoon jets were coming into land. Mirth was unconfined when the ‘record’ that stood for 60 seconds as the temperature briefly spiked by 0.6°C was later declared by the Met Office to be a “milestone in UK climate history”. Now it appears that another nearby and busy RAF station in Lincolnshire is getting in on the ‘joke’ record business. It appears that RAF Waddington also declared a record high on the same day of 40.3°C and this has been entered into the archive run by the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA). This is despite the Met Office itself calling the Waddington reading ‘suspect’ due to an application of weedkiller. Quite why this should disqualify a temperature recording four feet from the ground when jet exhaust does not is unclear, and the excuse has a touch of the ‘dog ate my homework’ about it.

Weedkiller or not, the 40.3°C recording at Waddington has found its way into the Met Office Midas Open dataset. This is said to be one of CEDA’s most popular datasets, containing historical meteorological observations back from the present to the 18th century. Popular with future scientists no doubt who will be able to point to two 40.3°C records, happy to disregard any airport heat corruptions and the even more severe warmth that seems to emanate from an application of paraquat.

Shout out again to citizen super-sleuth Ray Sanders who is undertaking a forensic review of the Met Office’s UK temperature stations (existent and non-existent) along with an examination of the operation’s published readings and data. He recently queried the archived Waddington recording and was told that “at the time” the data point was suspect due to the weedkiller treatment. He notes that the Met Office is clearly in a quandary since it has claimed the reading is suspect but the numbers passed into the archive can only have come from it. Any doubts about Coningsby can be hand-waved away with “‘peer-reviewed scientific’ data proving that such a high temperature was also ‘recorded’ elsewhere”, suggests Sanders.

The Met Office clearly owes the public and the scientific community a full explanation. Mistakes may be made with routine numbers, “but how likely with the alleged all-time UK high?” asks Sanders.

Regular readers will recall that Ray Sanders was behind the recent discovery that the Met Office had been inventing temperature averages at 103 non-existent sites. The Met Office even went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites. Following massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of a Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office discretely renamed its database as ‘location specific’ and removed station coordinates. A subsequent ‘fact check’ from Science Feedback that appeared to have been largely written by the Met Office claimed that average data from some stations was not “fabricated” but estimated using “well-correlated related neighbouring stations”. This is said to be a scientific method that is published in peer-reviewed literature. At the time, the Daily Sceptic highlighted the case of Cawood in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a pristine class 1 site with no unnatural heat corruptions and a record of excellent readings going back to 1959. Insert Cawood into the Met Office’s renamed ‘location specific’ database and no record of 30-year temperatures is available. Instead there is a reference to four other estimated stations that no longer exist, and a fifth that is 27 miles away and at a higher elevation.

Sanders has now come up with an even worse example of these imaginary readings. Just when you thought things could not get worse, he investigates the location of Norwich. This is an area closely associated with some of the Met Office’s work, with connections to the University of East Anglia and past TV recordings from a local weather centre. There have been numerous temperature recordings in Norwich since 1873, but none are supplied under ‘location specific’ Norwich. Instead the long-term average temperature for the cell area is provided from five closed stations inventing data, despite nearby open sites. Sanders is not inclined to be charitable, noting: “The facts are quite simple, the vast majority of all the Met Office’s supposedly Climate Average data is covertly concocted by a system only accepted by a tiny cabal of anonymous peer reviewers operating a witches brew of contrived data that is a closely guarded secret.”

Temperature measurements play a vital role in promoting the politicised Net Zero fantasy, so it is no accident that green activists in state-run weather operations such as the Met Office have weaponised the data. But the collecting systems were never designed to offer the precision claimed down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade. Almost the entire Met Office temperature network is blasted by unnatural heat, while rough estimates of data are widespread throughout the system. Under the World Meteorological Organisation classification system, almost 80% of the Met Offices sites are in junk classes 4 and 5 with ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C and 5°C respectively.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims that humans have caused most global warming over the last 100 years but the UN body cannot know this and it is actually unprovable. All of these anthropogenic scares that lead to mass science ignorance and psychosis are the product of computer models attempting to measure a chaotic and non-linear atmosphere. Many of the important influences on weather and long-term climate such as water vapour and clouds are little understood. It is impossible to measure the contribution of a greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide to any current warming (or cooling) and estimates for a doubled atmospheric amount vary widely from almost nothing in a ‘saturated’ environment to 10°C and over. An unreliable temperature record from both national and frequently upward-adjusted global datasets do little to improve what are just speculative forecasts. In the world of climate computer modelling, making small changes to data going in can lead to large changes in the forecasts going out.

But in the world of ‘settled’ climate science, possibly the most corrupted branch of science the world has ever seen – it’s Garbage in, Gospel out.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.