August began with Storm Floris, which was barely noticeable in Epping despite bringing havoc to Scotland, and ended with the remnants of Hurricane Erin, which had much more impact on our weather. In between though we endured our fourth heatwave of the summer (that’s at least three consecutive days with a temperature of at least 27°C, according to the Met Office definition), which actually lasted six days from the 8th to the 15th of August.

The Met Office has also announced a record hot summer for the UK overall (in meteorological terms, summer covers the months of June, July and August), and in Epping, based on our 41 years of records, we can confirm that 2025 has equalled the summer of 2022 as our hottest: the mean temperature across the three months was 19.1°C, more than two degrees above the long term average.

As for August, the mean temperature for the month of 18.7°C (the long term average is 17.6°C) made this August our 7th warmest on record. The top temperature for the month was 31.4°C on the Glorious Twelfth (not that any grouse were inconvenienced in Epping), the 5th highest August maximum.

August was also another dry month. Another period of drought lasting 14 days from 13th to 26th was broken by the arrival of a lively depression that was ex-hurricane Erin, and this delivered 60% of the month’s rain on the 29th. It still left us with just 20.0mm for the month as a whole, making this our 6th driest August. That day of rain was still only 12.0mm, well below the average for the wettest August day of 18.2mm. Overall we had just 7 days on which rain fell: only six of our 41 Augusts have seen fewer rainy days.

The barometric record shows clearly how little Storm Floris affected us, and how much more significant ex-hurricane Erin was, as this tracked much further south than Floris. Indeed, it gave us the second lowest August pressure in our records, although comparable records only cover 17 years.

August was not a windy month; the graph shows that the windiest days were associated with Storm Floris at the beginning of the month and ex-hurricane Erin at the end. The strongest gust of 23mph (force 5) from the SSE came on the 28th, but this was some way short of the average maximum gust for August in our records of 31.9mph.

This is only our second year of detailed sunshine records, but it is interesting that this August was less sunny than last year, despite being only slightly less warm and almost identical rainfall: we had 786.9 hours of sun, compared with 984.0 hours last year. There was one less sunny day, with 28 days on which the sun shone at some point.