Sunday 10 June 2012

May 2012 - cold start hot end.

May started in the same vein as March with cold and damp conditions prevailing until the 17th when warm air flooded the UK from the south and gave us a much welcome taste of summer with a mini heatwave that lasted 10 days. This year so far is proving to be very interesting weatherwise with extremes of temperature, wind and rain in virtually every month!

stunning buttercups
a welcome view after April!
So what does this mean for summer 2012? I think given what has happened so far this year I can see this trend continuing which at some point means another heatwave, but when and for how long (and indeed how often) is anyone's guess.

Stats: high temp.    26.8C
          low temp.     1.3C
          mean temp.  13.0C
          high wind.    32 mph
          rain.              35 mm

April 2012-- wet! wet! wet!

The dry winter and exceptionally dry March has given way to one of the wettest April's since record began.
Here in Hawley I recorded 82mm of rain, to put this into context below is the rainfall amounts recorded over the previous 6 years.

a very wet month!
2006: 38.4mm
2007: 4.8mm
2008: 0.2mm
2009: 22.1mm
2010: 13.5mm
2011: 1.2mm (6 days data missing)

The combined totals of these months is still 2mm short of 2012's which just proves what an incredibly wet month it was, good news for the farmers and water companies though!

Stats: high temp.   18.2C
          low temp.    -4.4C
          mean temp.   8.1
          high wind.    38.0 mph
          rain.              82.0 mm



Friday 8 June 2012

March 2012

cloudless skies
The first month of spring started as February ended with warm sunshine and cloudless skies, a high temperature of 17.5C recorded on the 1st and this was to set the scene for the rest of the month.
With only 11.8mm of rain it was an exceptionally dry month that has forced many water companies to issue hose pipe bans following three dry winters.
water levels low











Stats: high temp: 22.8C
         low temp:  -2.5
         mean:         7.8
         rain:            11.8mm
         high wind:   38.0

Winter 2011-2012 Summary

It's been a while since my last blog and I have decided to do monthly summaries so its easier to compare month for month in future years.
To supplement this I will also issue 'season summaries' so I thought I would start with the winter just gone.
December always brings the most anticipation if you like the prospect of a picture post card Christmas, little children with rosy red faces peering into brightly lit shop windows being briskly pulled away by mothers with fur collars and long scarves laden with bags of shopping, tree lined avenues, branches heavy with snow, lead laden skies that threaten more, and the prospect of arriving home to a roaring fire and a hot mug of soup...
The reality of December 2011 was far different from the picture that I have just described and completely different to the previous year that delivered the coldest start to winter for one hundred years.
There were many weather 'agencies' and hopeful amateurs that predicted 'snow-maggeddon' and although I was broadly accurate with my December forecast, I, like many others, were caught out by just how mild December turned out to be, the mean temperature for the month was 6.6C much warmer than 2010's 0.4C and the second warmest in Hawley since I started keeping records in 2005. ( for information, Dec 2006 was the warmest @ 7.2C) and of course no white Christmas!

So did things improve in January? with a mean of 6.0C it was colder than 2007 & 2008 (7.8C and 7.5C respectively) but again was a mild month overall, five nights mid-month recorded temparatures of -3.4 - 5.9 and that was really the highlights of January.
I predicted February would be the coldest month and indeed it delivered a reasonable snowfall, but it really was a month of two halves. For the first two weeks it looked like that the mean for the month would be below zero, but from mid-month onwards there was a dramatic change with un-seaonally warm temperatures that persisted until month end. Interesting stats: Lowest Temp, -10.3 Highest Temp: 19.8 and the mean ended up 4.3 ( second coldest since 2005)

So there it is, a rather boring winter and actually fairly typical of our winters of the last twenty years, the really cold weather never reached us and stayed in eastern Europe that in some places had the harshest winter for many, many years.