It’s not often a weather record is broken by weather that didn’t happen!

April was frost free – that’s not exceptional, just under half our Aprils are frost free – but following a March with no frosts, and with frosts only having been recorded in May twice in 42 years, it is probable that the last frost of the 2025-56 winter was on 14th February, the earliest last frost date in our records by nine days. That’s another worrying further indicator of climate change affecting us.

But what of weather which did happen in April? Well, another record broken here. The maximum temperature of 26.6°C on Wednesday 8th beat the previous warmest April day of 26.2°C recorded in 2011. The average day maximum of 17.2°C was the fourth warmest in our records, and the overall monthly mean of 11.1°C was well above the long term average of our 42 years of records of 9.2°C, and only three other Aprils in our records were warmer.

One of the reasons for the warmth was that we had very little rain, just 4.8mm, which is about a tenth of the long term average for April. That meant April 2026 was the fourth driest April in our records, and with March also being very dry, the two month period was the second driest two consecutive months, the driest coming in 2011. It rained on just four days, with the wettest day mustering just 3.4mm on Monday 13th.

Interestingly, the pressure and wind recorded through the month were pretty much on the long term average. The pressure graph shows that high pressure built and stayed with us in the second half of the month, when the predominant wind direction swung to the east, usually a dry direction.

Finally to our sunshine: we’ve only three years of records of this, but this April was the second sunniest after last year, also an unusually dry month. The settled weather of the second half of the month is clearly evident.

Measure	Unit	Minimum	Average	Maximum	Average min	Average max	Total
Relative humidity	%	22	71	95
Temperature	°C	1.1	11.1	26.6	5.9	17.2
Wind source (most common/highest gust)	Sector		E	N
Wind speed	mph		3.9	35		19.2
Rain daily accumulation	mm		0.2	3.4			4.8
Barometric pressure	hPa	1001.9	1019.6	1030.3
Solar irradiance during daylight	W/m² kWh/m²		292	1011		770	124.6
Sunshine (according to University of California formula)	Hours		6.4	11.3			191.8