It may have felt cold and wet at times, but actually April was an almost exactly average month. There were no extremes of temperature, rain or wind, and the mean values were – well, average.

The maximum temperature for the month was recorded on the last day of the month at18.6 °C, a little below the long term average (of our 39 years of records) of 20.3 °C. In fact only 8 of those 39 years failed to see a maximum above 20 °C. But at the other end of the scale, this was one of only ten of our 39 Aprils not to have an air frost: our lowest temperature of the month was 0.3 °C on 25th, compared with the long term average of -0.5 °C. The overall result was a monthly mean temperature of 8.9 °C, just slightly below the long term average of 9.1 °C, which places April as the first month this year to be (slightly) cooler than the long term average.

Looking at the rainfall, our average April rain is 50.6mm, so this year’s total of 57.2 mm is slightly higher than average but not markedly so. The wettest day was the 14th with 11.8mm, which is almost exactly the long term average of 11.9 mm. There were 17 days on which it rained, compared with the average for April of 14.6 days.

As for barometric pressure, that was also pretty average – the mean for the month was 1015.4 mb, marginally above the long term average of 1014.9 mb.

The wind was a bit lighter than average, with a maximum gust on 12th of 31mph (westerly Force 6) as against the average for April of 33.6 mph. The average daily maximum was 17.4 mph, a bit below the long term average of 20.1 mph. The main direction for the month was the south-east quadrant, followed by a northerly, which perhaps explains why the month felt cooler than it was.

Finally, as a footnote, we hope our problems with the weather station losing connectivity to the internet are now resolved. It was eventually traced to a fault in the data logger’s firmware (the computer code that manages its operation) and a new version has been installed which seems to have done the trick. Fingers crossed!