[Crimson Dynamo]

Summer 2011
A statistical overview
By Philip Eden

As temperatures continue to decline in spite of the sunshine, we can now look back at summer 2011 and put it into some sort of historical context.

Summer means different things to different people, and our perceptions are coloured by various factors such as the weather at weekends, during holidays, or at major sporting events. June might be the critical month for some of us with its plethora of sporting activity, while August is more important for others as it coincides with the school holidays. Everyone will have their own subjective memories of the season, so we need a simple statistical analysis to provide some common ground. We can address these varying perceptions by considering the records for high summer (July/August), the summer quarter (June-August), and the long summer (May-September).

Averaged over England and Wales, high summer was 0.8°C cooler, 14 per cent wetter, and 14 per cent less sunny compared with the standard reference period 1971-2000. The summer quarter was 0.6°C cooler, 17 per cent wetter, with 6 per cent less sunshine than normal, and the long summer was 0.2°C warmer, just 2 per cent wetter, with one per cent less sunshine.

Overall, then, it was a mediocre summer with relatively low temperatures and plentiful rain in July and August offset by warmer and drier weather in May and September. High summer was the coolest since 1993, but the long summer was no cooler than 2007, while statistics for the summer half-year (mid-April to mid-October) indicate that it was actually the warmest for five years.

We should also recognise that there were considerable geographical variations, and some parts of the UK did appreciably worse than others during summer 2011.

Looking in detail at the statistics for the long summer, we find that the best weather (using 'best' in the conventional sense of warmest, driest and sunniest) was found in the Midlands and East Anglia, while Scotland, Northern Ireland and northwest England had the worst. Cluanie Inn in Wester Ross collected 1438mm of rain during the 5-month period and Capel Curig in Snowdonia 1029mm, contrasting with just 232mm at Gringley-on-the-Hill in Nottinghamshire. The daily sunshine average ranged from 7.3 hours on Jersey in the Channel Islands to just 2.9 hours at Kinlochewe in the northwest highlands of Scotland.

By Philip Eden


http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/cgi-a...e&DAY=20111016