Well, it may surprise you to learn that although it felt like an often cool month, the temperature was indeed above average. The overall monthly mean was 16.0°C, which although the coolest of the last five years is still above the long term average mean of 15.2°C. Our warmest day was 26th, with 30.0°C, the average daily maximum was 21.7°C, and the lowest day maximum on 10th was just 14.0°C – all three of these figures were above the long term averages. The coolest temperature recorded this month was in the early hours of the 11th, at 6.1°C, which is spot on the long term average. The last month now that had a mean temperature below the long term average was August 2023 – and that only by 0.1°C.

However, for the first month of the past ten, June was actually drier than average. In fact, it was the third driest in our 40 years of records, with 12.6 mm compared with the average of 56.5 mm. There were just nine days on which it rained, the wettest being the 10th with 5.8 mm; there have been only two Junes in our records with a wettest day that delivered less rain.

Perhaps surprisingly given the dry and not particularly cool month, the barometer in June wasn’t that high. The average pressure for the month as a whole was 1013.5 hPa, lower than the long term average of 1016.1 hPa (we have just 16 years of records for this). The highest pressure recorded during the month was 1015.5 hPa, which means this June had the lowest maximum pressure in our records. The lowest pressure of the month at 996.6 hPa was also well below the long term average of 1001.4 hPa; this came with the depression that gave us a wet spell and our strongest winds.

The winds for the month were a little on the breezy side but not exceptional; the maximum gust was of 26 mph (Force 6) from the SW on 16th. The commonest (‘mode’) wind direction for the month was northerly, but the main sector from which the wind blew was north-west to south-west.

This month we’ve updated our Sunshine analysis. The weather station includes a pyrometer which measures the power of the light radiation falling on its sensor, giving us a value in watts per square metre. We had been reporting how this translates into sunshine according to the Met Office view that a value of greater than 120 watts per square metre represents sunshine , hence a lower figure means cloud. This has clearly been misrepresenting the actuality, and in fact the Met Office figure is only valid for a sensor pointing directly at the sun, rather than a fixed horizontal sensor such as the one we use.

We have now found a very complex calculation developed by the University of California which enables us to translate our reading into sunshine based on many factors, including the date and the latitude and altitude of the sensor, and thanks to the power of Excel we now have a more realistic measure of hours of sunshine per day to present. It’s too complex to put online, but we can include it in the monthly summaries. If you are interested, the details and the calculation spreadsheet are on their website here.

So for June, we can report that there were a total of 202.3 hours of sunshine, an average of 6.7 hours a day. We don’t have any history to compare with, but the Met Office mean for East Anglia covering 1991-2020 is 195.8 hours, so this suggests that our June was just slightly above average. There was some sunshine recorded on every day in June. The sunniest day was the 2nd, with 13.1 hours. The 21st was of course our longest day, when there was 16 hours 40 minutes between sunrise and sunset, but on that day we recorded 9.7 hours.

Measure	Unit	Minimum	Average	Maximum	Average min	Average max	Total
Relative humidity	%	37	70	92
Temperature	°C	6.1	16.0	30	10.5	21.7
Wind source (most common/highest gust)	Sector		N	SW
Wind speed	mph		2.3	26		15.1
Rain daily accumulation	mm		0.4	5.8			12.6
Barometric pressure	hPa	996.6	1013.5	1027.4
Solar irradiance during daylight	W/m² kWh/m2		311	1297		1005	157.6
Sunshine (according to University of California formula)	Hours		6.7	13.1			202.3