Monday, August 30, 2021
If you're thinking it's been a lousy summer, this may be because a) you live in southeast England b) you're over-remembering the last few weeks. Overall it's been 1°C warmer than average across the country, and drier and sunnier than usual up north.
In London, however, it's been a bit meh. We had two good spells, namely the first half of June and the third week of July, but the rest has been rather poor. A couple of July days were exceptionally wet.
| 1st half of June | warm | dry | sunny |
| mid-June - mid-July | average | wet | dull |
| 3rd week of July | hot | dry | sunny |
| mid-July - mid-Aug | average | wet | dull |
| 2nd half of Aug | cool | dry | dull |
If I define a 'proper' summer's day as
i) reaching 25°C
ii) no rain
iii) at least 7 hours of sunshine
then we only had 12 of those this summer, the last on 22nd July.
If I set the bar lower and define a 'reasonable' summer's day as
i) reaching 20°C
ii) less than 1mm of rain
iii) at least 4 hours of sunshine
then we only had 35 of those, and that's not even 40% of the summer. Three-quarters of summer days met condition 1 and three-quarters met condition 2, so condition 3 has proved the problematic one. Only eight days in August passed the 'reasonable' threshold, mainly due to lack of sun, so maybe that's why it feels like the summer has been so poor.
Maybe September'll be better. Or there's always 2022.
<< click for Newer posts
click for Older Posts >>
click to return to the main page
