Weather news

And another wet month!

After another month typified by frequent heavy showers, it’s no surprise that July was a wet month: in fact the third wettest July in our 37 years of records, with 89.2mm, compared with the long term average for July of 54.0mm. Amazingly that was still way short of the wettest July, that of 1987 when we had a Noah’s Flood’s worth of 144.9mm!

We had our wettest day on 25th, as a week of hot weather broke down. The 25.6mm on that day made it the seventh wettest July day in our records. Of that downpour, 14mm came in just 30 minutes mid-afternoon. All in all, it rained on 16 days, which is actually not much above the long term average of 13 days in July.

That hot week saw temperatures rise above 30°C on three consecutive days, topping out at 32.6°C on 18th, our third warmest ever July maximum. Other than this one week, it generally felt fairly cool with the unsettled weather, but surprisingly the mean temperature for the month as a whole was still above the long term average.

At the end of the month, we all braced ourselves for Storm Evert – very unusual to have a named storm in July! However, it proved not to inconvenience us too much, the highest wind gust being 24mph (Force 5) on 30th.

In fact the lowest barometric pressure of the month was associated with a depression which came through on 6th, and gave us the lowest recorded July pressure (albeit these records only cover 12 years) of 994.8mb, and a highest wind gust also of 24mph (Force 5). Overall however it was a month of gentle breezes, if a bit gusty when the showers came through.

Measure	Unit	Minimum	Average	Maximum	Average min	Average max	Total
Relative humidity	%	38	80	97
Temperature	°C	9.6	18.2	32.6	13.8	24.0
Wind source (most common/highest gust)	Sector		WSW	NE
Wind high gust	mph		2.1	24		14.1
Rain daily accumulation	mm		2.9	25.6			89.2
Barometric pressure	hPa	994.8	1015.7	1030.3
Solar irradiance during daylight	W/m²		268	1125		869
Sunshine (sunny if irradiance > 300 W/m2)	Hours		6.1	11.0			190.5