It's a cracking Easter weekend, weatherwise - very warm and sunny across the UK. But how unusual is that?
To help find out, here's a table summarising the weather over the last 50 Easter weekends.
The temperature shown is the highest temperature recorded anywhere in the UK across the four-day bank holiday weekend.
For example, in 1969 the highest temperature was 21°C at Gatwick Airport on Easter Monday. This temperature appears in the second column because Easter Day was Sunday 6th April.
Highest Easter weekend temperature
23-31 Mar
1-8 Apr
9-16 Apr
17-24 Apr
summary
1969
21°C
very sunny
1970
13°C
unsettled
1971
18°C
dry, fine
1972
19°C
mild, wet
1973
14°C
mixed, cool
1974
18°C
mostly fine
1975
10°C
cold, sunny
1976
21°C
mostly fine
1977
12°C
wintry, snow
1978
15°C
cold, windy
1979
23°C
warm, dry
1980
17°C
fair
1981
18°C
went downhill
1982
14°C
cold, bright
1983
11°C
wintry, snow
1984
26°C
very warm
1985
17°C
unsettled, dull
1986
13°C
showery, chilly
1987
24°C
went downhill
1988
17°C
indifferent
1989
19°C
improving
1990
13°C
unsettled
1991
18°C
went downhill
1992
20°C
warm, dry
1993
16°C
mixed
1994
13°C
wet, windy
1995
19°C
went downhill
1996
17°C
mixed
1997
18°C
improving
1998
12°C
wintry showers
1999
19°C
warm, dull
2000
18°C
wet
2001
15°C
cold wind
2002
18°C
went downhill
2003
25°C
went downhill
2004
18°C
average
2005
18°C
very dull
2006
17°C
mixed
2007
20°C
dry, sunny
2008
11°C
wintry
2009
20°C
mixed
2010
15°C
dull, cool
2011
28°C
very warm
2012
16°C
very dull
2013
9°C
very cold
2014
21°C
very sunny
2015
21°C
improving
2016
15°C
wet, windy
2017
15°C
mostly dry
2018
14°C
unsettled
2019
26°C
very warm
The data comes from a splendidly geeky webpage, now defunct, but captured forever within the Wayback Machine archive. It has full summaries of weather across the Easter weekend between 1959-1989 here, and 1990-2014 here, which you should read if you're after considerably more detail.
It's important to note that the weather often changes dramatically across the Easter weekend, so the highest temperature on one day may not reflect the temperature on the others. For example in 1970 the maximum temperature of 13°C occured on Easter Monday in Suffolk, whereas the highest temperature on the Saturday in London was only 6°C.
Also a high temperature in one part of the country doesn't necessarily mean it was similarly warm everywhere. For example in 1979 the maximum temperature of 23°C occurred on Easter Sunday in London, but Manchester only reached 13°C on the same day.
Also temperature doesn't tell the whole story, so it could have been a mild Easter but also miserably wet. For example Easter Monday in 1973 was plagued by thunderstorms and hail, and London saw over an inch of rain across the Sunday and Monday combined.
That said, the following obvious conclusions jump out...
» Easter tends to be coldest when it's in March
» Easter tends to be warmest when it's in the second half of April
» The two coldest Easters were both in March
» The five warmest Easters were all in the second half of April
But...
» An early Easter is not always cold
» A late Easter is not always warm
» An early Easter (26th March 1989) can be warmer than a late Easter (23rd April 2000)
Also, before anyone gets over-excited...
» A random snapshot of over-specific data proves nothing about global warming
» The Church isn't going to change the date of Easter just because Britons would like better weather
As an aside, I like how the table shows that Easter never appears in the same column two years running. That's because the gap between consecutive Easters can only be 50, 51, 54 or 55 weeks, never 52 or 53.
The worst Easter of the last 50 years is undoubtedly 2013, when a cold east wind pegged temperatures down to 4-6°C in many places and Braemar recorded a record-breaking low of -12½°C on Easter Sunday. Other notably poor Easters include 1994, 2008 and 2012, while more recently in 2016 Easter Monday was blighted by Storm Katie.
The best Easters were probably 1969 (dry, fine and very sunny, except on the east coast), 1984 (fine, warm and sunny), 2007 (dry, sunny and mostly warm), and especially 2011 (whose top temperature of 28°C was the warmest since 1949). We won't top that at Easter 2019, but four days of wall-to-wall sunshine and temperatures in the mid-twenties might just be as good as Easter ever gets.
