March 2024 has made it seven months in a row now that the average weather has been both warmer and wetter than the long term average.

The mean temperature overall for the month was 8.4°C, the fourth warmest in our records, and well above the long term average of 6.7°C. Warmest day of the month was 18.2°C on the 22nd, and the coldest was 0.9°C in the early hours of the 4th, making this March just the seventh in our forty years of weather records not to record an air frost.

Rainfall was steady rather than spectacular, but we still managed 56.0mm, some 23% above the average for March of 45.4mm. There was no single day of deluge, and the wettest day at 10.6mm was almost spot on the average wettest March day, and the 17 days on which it rained wasn’t much above the average of 15.7 days, but it added up.

There was no named storm in March, but the barometer however demonstrated that this March was a series of low pressure systems with just brief cols in between. We have only 16 years of comparable records but the average pressure for the month at 1004.3hPa was comfortably the lowest in our March records, and more than 10hPa below the average for March. The highest pressure recorded in the month was also the lowest ‘high’ in our records at 1025.5hPa, and the low for the month of 973.2hPa was the second lowest we’ve recorded in March.

It wasn’t a particularly windy March, however, with the maximum gust for the month being 36mph (Force 7) from the South on the 28th. This is some 4mph below the average for March. Similarly, the average day maximum was 19.5mph, against a long term average of 21.8mph. Unsurprisingly most of our winds in March came from a broadly southerly quarter.

Will it carry on mild and wet in April? Will we get the classic month of April showers? Keep an eye on our daily weather, and we will review how the month as a whole went here in due course!