They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb – well, this March came in like a lamb, and went out like – er – a lamb!

It was the 5th driest March in our 42 years of records, raining on just 8 days for a total of 12.8mm. The wettest was Friday 6th with 7.2mm of rain.

March was another mild month: the maximum, minimum and mean temperatures were all well above the long term average. The overall mean temperature of 8.3°C was well above the average for March of 6.9°C, and made this March the 6th warmest in our records. The top temperature for the month was 17.4°C recorded on Thursday 5th, and the lowest was 0.0°C recorded at dawn on Thursday 26th. As the Met Office definition of a frost is an air temperature below zero, that makes this the eighth March in our 42-year records not to have any air frosts (although there will have been plenty on the grass and on car windows!).

The barometric record shows how generally settled March was. The mean pressure for the month was 1017.3mb, a couple of millibars above the average for March, and the lowest pressure of 996.5mb on Friday 13th, as you might expect for such a date, brought us the strongest gust of wind for the month, a relatively modest 34mph or Force 7.

Our winds too for March were less stormy than March might bring – relatively few of John Masefield’s “mad March days”. The highest wind gust occurred on Friday 13th at 34mph (Force 7).

Finally to the sunshine: with a fair amount of settled weather, there were some good sunny days but the few passing depressions gave us some sunless days as well. The overall sunshine figure for the month was 114.9 hours on 23 days, a middling figure for the three years of records which is all we have for sun.

Measure	Unit	Minimum	Average	Maximum	Average min	Average max	Total
Relative humidity	%	43	80	97
Temperature	°C	0	8.3	17.4	4.6	12.8
Wind source (most common/highest gust)	Sector		N	N
Wind speed	mph		3.7	34		18.6
Rain daily accumulation	mm		0.4	7.2			12.8
Barometric pressure	hPa	996.5	1017.3	1030.2
Solar irradiance during daylight	W/m² kWh/m²		194	907		546	73.5
Sunshine (according to University of California formula)	Hours		3.7	8.8			114.9