Thursday 19 December 2013

December Record Breaker?

On Tuesday we swapped a little mildness for some sunshine and had what turned out to be a very nice day. Wednesday was back to normal for this December with much milder windier conditions making it not such a nice day at all.

As forecast the rain and worst of the wind arrived mid evening but didn't hang around for long. Although it was windy it wasn't anything like the ferocity of a couple of weeks ago and the rain amounted to 6.4mm which is nothing out of the ordinary.
So far just past the middle of the month it’s been a mild month - but just how mild has it been? I normally use the Central England Temperature data set which goes back to 1772 and is maintained by the Met Office. If you fancy doing a quick check on my graphs all the figures can be found here.

Now I'm not guaranteeing that I've done all the figures correctly but I would hazard a guess that these are the mildest 10 Decembers based on daily average temperatures based on this data set. 
After 18 days the average temperature based on my weather station is 7.23°C so it’s just creeping into the top ten mildest Decembers since 1772. Isn't it odd that we discuss mild winters as though they were a new phenomenon but 6 years in the current top ten occurred in the 1800’s. 
If the trend continues to the end of the year we could well see this December taking over one of the slots in the bottom half of the top ten. It’s going to be a real blow when some cold wintry weather eventually sets in.

4 comments:

  1. I knew it was feeling mild, but didn't realise it was that good! Thanks for doing the stats for me :)

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    Replies
    1. I suppose there's plenty of time for it to change by the end of the month

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  2. The rain was huge here (near Bristol) last night. Other half got soaked through about four layers, including a thick showerproof coat. It was like buckets of water being thrown at us! Beautiful sunshine and clear skies now though. Hope it's lovely where you are too.

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    Replies
    1. Lovely sunny morning here as well. We certainly avoided the worst of the weather yesterday.

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