Richard2901

It was the wettest August at Dyce between 1986 and 2010, with 110mm, but I struggle to recall much about it. Probably due to the fact it recorded near average sunshine of 162 hours. It tends to be only the exceptionally dull months that stick in my mind as revolting, regardless as to rain totals, and August 1992 was sunnier than every August since 2006 and every one of the past 5 summer months. Even the summers of 1993 and 1998, by far the worst summers of the 1990s, did not produce the protracted periods of excruciatingly dull weather, with gloomy grey skies day in day out, that we have seen in every single summer since 2005 except for 2009.

Longest spells of consecutive days with snow lying at 9am here - 2012/13: 15 2011/12: 2 2010/11: 18 2009/10: 26 2008/09: 13 2007/08: 3 2006/07: 5 2005/06: 10 2004/05: 6 2003/04: 8 2002/03 had about 8 days while 2000/01 and 2001/02 both managed around 14 consecutive days. The 90s winters were much less snowy with only 90/91, 93/94, 95/96 and 98/99 managing as much as 7 consecutive days and only 1998/99 managed as much as 10. I won't bother with ice days as we hardly ever get them and this winter has been so dire that there has barely been any air frost either. Just 9 air frosts this month totaling 83 hours below freezing. Average would be 12 and over 100 hours while December 2010, a proper cold winter month, managed 19 and an incredible duration of 393.7hrs.

Abysmal here with 29.6 hours and over a third of that was recorded under south westerlies during the first 3 days of the month. Just 10.5 hours since the 10th and 0.8 hours in the past week. The dismal cloudy skies have ruined this cold spell preventing frosts occurring most nights. Hopefully February will see a northerly spell but if not then I'd rather not see any further cold. Last thing I want to see is another easterly spell on top of all the gloom there's been since April. 12-month running sun total down to 1375.2 hours and that includes last years exceptionally sunny March. A real possibility it could drop below 1300 hours by the end of March.

I enjoy snow but I'm certainly not viewing this spell as a treat. It's a diabolical, abysmal spell of tediously dull and depressing rubbish. A spectacular flop. The temperature has not gone below 0C here since the early hours of Thursday morning which is ridiculous given uppers of -10C. It's just a joke of a cold spell. I have snow lying at the moment but that is left over from last Monday/Tuesday and it looks horrible. Since then there has only been the odd flurry with thawing exceeding any further accumulation. Much of the more central parts of the city have no lying snow at all This is the second sunless slate grey weekend in succession. It's grim and the worst winter cold spell I've ever experienced. Can't wait for it to end but it looks like even worse to come before that happens. I got three frosts during the mild Christmas and New Year period, including -1C on New Year's morning following a max of 10.5C the previous day, yet the past three days have not seen one frost despite the temperature not exceeding 3C. It's pathetic and proof that easterlies are no longer capable of delivering the proper cold, snowy spells that they could bring in the past

January – Ridiculously dry and sunny zonal tripe. No snow and little frost – a pathetic winter month – but never unpleasant until an easterly set in during the final days. Rating: 3/10 February – Started with a vile easterly then became exceptionally mild. Only snowfall from a brief northerly on the 18th so another boring inadequate winter month. Rating: 2/10 March – Very sunny and the warmest since 1938 with an exceptional spell of three 20C days in the final week. Little in the way of frost or convection. Rating: 8/10 April – Diabolical, cold, dull wet horror show. Dullest since 1941 with an astounding 26 rain days. Mostly frontal rain and drizzle too with little convection. Only highlights were the 6cm snowfall on the 3rd and a sunny but cold weekend at the end of the month. Rating: 1/10 May – Pretty poor first half – cold, cloudy and showery but an excellent hot, sunny spell in the final third coincided perfectly with a holiday to Somerset. Rating: 6/10 June – Vile, execrable revolting cold, dull and wet piece of subarctic hell. One of the coldest, dullest and wettest on record. No redeeming features. Rating: 0/10 July – Unbelievably even worse than June. A sunless, depressing abomination of a summer month. The 6 weeks to 19th July were sunless without parallel managing a joke 39% of average. December was the only month of 2012 to have less sunshine than July. Rating: 0/10 August – Dire throughout the first half – thankfully I had escaped to Spain for a fortnight. Some improvement around the 18th but then more downpours brought flooding in the final week and made this the wettest summer month I have recorded in 8 years. Rating: 2/10 September – A considerable improvement on the revolting summer. A nice pleasant sunny month with the warmest temperatures of the year during the first third then much cooler with some ground frost. Sunnier than any summer month since July 2009. Rating: 8/10 October – A nice sunny pleasant start to the month but turned fairly dull and wet after the 10th. A few frosts and a notably heavy snowfall on the 26th. One of the coldest Octobers on record. Rating: 5/10 November – Boring uneventful, sunny dry month with average temperatures. No snow but the dry sunny weekends made it much better than summer for getting outdoors. Rating: 6/10 December – The 4th catastrophic horror month of the year. A couple of brief snowfalls and frosts in the first half but the 2nd half so far has been beyond disgusting. The 10 days since the 14th has been the worst pre-Christmas weather I can remember –completely devoid of festive cheer with extensive flooding in the region. Overall likely to end up the wettest December since 1929 and the 3rd wettest in 150 years. Rating: 1/10. That works out at an average 3.5/10 and the only year to have scored worse since 2000 was 2011 with an average of 2.8. Both years have been absolutely shocking and disgusting for the simultaneous lack of warmth and sunshine during summer and lack of snow during winter. Never before has there been a pair of successive summers so bad and the only consecutive years that have been as snowless were 1989 and 1990. All things considered 2011 and 2012 easily deserve to go down as the worst pair of years for weather in recorded history.

Same here - I despise easterlies. They are revolting. If I see any easterlies in the model output I hope and pray that they disappear as I loath the featureless overcast, drizzle and static temperatures they bring. Any time we get easterlies these days they often result in a daily mean above average as it barely goes any lower at night than the raw 4-6C maxes achieved during the day. The period 11th - 28th January 2010 perfectly sums up how detestable easterlies are. There were only two sunny days and one air frost during that 18 day spell of easterly dross and that only came about as the wind temporarily switched to a westerly around the 17th/18th.

I hope not as, although we had a decent snowfall from a northerly on 23rd November 2008, that was about it in terms of decent wintry weather until February. December 2008 was the worst of recent years - truly awful. There was a dusting of snow here on the 2nd then the rest of the month was shockingly bad. We suffered a very wet washout weekend over the 13th/14th and the second half was very mild, dull and boring. It reached 13C on the 21st and this was followed by endless gloom, with almost no diurnal temperature range, for the rest of the month putting a dampener on the festive period. I recorded only one air frost during the second half of December which was on the last day of the month. Had it not been for that frost then the second half of December would have been the mildest since 1988. January 2009 was a write-off as well with zero days of lying snow. Only the snowy first half of February saved that winter from being a total disaster. Certainly not a winter I want to see a repeat of

As is usually the case with westerly/south westerly dominated months the NE has been the driest part of the country. Ridiculously dry here with just 7.0mm in total so far. Aboyne has had just 5.4mm and Kinloss has been driest of all at 5.0mm. Looks like more substantial rain in the next two days but nothing to get the total anywhere near the average of 81mm. We got all the rain and gloom we should be getting this month in summer

Heating has hardly been off here this year. One of the longest spells it has been off continuously was 8 days while I was away in the Canaries. Got back last Friday night to find an indoor temperature of just 8.9C Makes you wonder how people managed in the days before central heating.

Worst type of weather for me is the garbage we had for the last 3 weeks of October. Grey skies day in day out with drizzle/light rain nearly every day and a lack of variability in temperature. Conditions as boring as they are unpleasant. Thankfully I managed to escape it for a week and got plenty warm sunshine in the Canaries last week. I'd rather have mild south westerlies than cold, grey rubbish with rain/drizzle and little or no frost and that applies in winter too. A winter similar to the last 3 weeks would be my worst nightmare and it happened in 1971/72 and also 1979/80. 1971/72 really was the bottom of the barrel - virtually snowless with a very mild anticyclonic gloom dominated December, which had no frost at all in parts of NE Scotland, followed by a cold, dull and wet January and February which saw rain and maxes of 5-6C nearly every day. These were the stats for Dyce: Dec '71 – Mean Max: 9.0C, Mean Min: 3.3C, Sunshine: 35hrs, Sunless Days: 11, Rainfall: 19mm, Rain Days: 12, Snow/sleet falling: 1, snow lying: 0 Jan '72 - Mean Max: 5.2C, Mean Min: 1.8C, Sunshine: 35hrs, Sunless Days: 18, Rainfall: 135mm, Rain Days: 26, Snow/sleet falling: 5, snow lying: 2 Feb '72 - Mean Max: 6.0C, Mean Min: 1.4C, Sunshine: 41hrs, Sunless days:17, Rainfall: 101mm, Rain Days: 17, Snow/sleet falling: 2, snow lying: 2 What a load of tripe and not surprisingly south easterlies featured more prominently than usual during that vile winter.

The 7th consecutive colder than average month and one of the coldest Octobers on record for the Aberdeen area. Only 1926, 1932, 1974, 1981 and 1992 were colder in the last 100 years. The first third of the month was very sunny and dry but the remainder was awful with only some frosts on the 16th/17th, a mild sunny day on the 21st and an unusually heavy snowfall on the 26th providing any relief from the monotony of constant grey skies, drizzle/light rain and below average temperatures. Only 4 days (1st, 7th, 20th and 21st) recorded maxima above average and since 1st April an astounding 162 out of 214 days have recorded below average maxima. This has resulted in the mean maximum for April to October 2012 being the coldest for this period during the post-war era, beating 1951 by 0.1C. Mean Max: 10.1 (-1.9) Mean Min: 4.0 (-2.0) Mean: 7.1 (-1.9) Highest Max: 14.0 (1st, 21st) Lowest Max: 4.5 (26th) Highest Min: 9.9 (12th) Lowest Min: -1.8 (17th) Air Frosts: 3 Air Frost Duration: 11.5 hrs Rainfall: 83.4mm (101%) Rain Days: 21 Wet Days: 13 Sunshine: 108.6 hrs (105%) [1st -10th: 68.2hrs, 11th-31st: 40.4hrs] Sunniest Day: 9.8hrs (7th) Sunless days: 6

Thankfully no repeat of last years diabolical frost free horror of an autumn as we have the first air frost of the season with the temp down to -0.4C already With the last frost having been on 20th May this will be the first year in over a decade with a shorter than average frost-free season here.

A disgusting, awful day. Rain on and off, cloudy and cold with a current temp of only 7.1C, just 0.3C above the overnight low. Over 40mm of rain has fallen since Thursday, there has been barely any sunshine and day temperatures have been cold with mild nights. A horrendous spell

Not had an air frost yet though but several ground frosts and Dyce recorded its first September air frost since 1991 Mean min over the past month has been just 5.7C with three nights below 2C. The same period of 2011 had a mean min of 9.6C and only two nights below 6C. It's the irritating breeze that keeps preventing an air frost being recorded. Yesterday was the first calm evening but it was cloudy until about 11pm. Got down to +0.9C but would have definitely had an air frost had the cloud cleared earlier.

With the excess of sunshine, cool nights, lack of double digit minima and good leaf colour, as well as the storm in September, this has been one of the best autumns for a long time, so far, in sharp contrast to last year's vile offering which has to go down as one of the worst. Maxima have been below average but not particularly cold and with all the sun it certainly feels much more pleasant than this time last year. There haven't been any really cold days yet with no maxima below 11C. Unusually for recent years it has been minima recording the greatest negative anomaly. I haven’t had a double figure min since 14th September with a mean min of just 5.7C for the past month. This is 2.2C below average and compares with 9.6C for the same period of 2011 and 6.7C for November 2011. The first third of October will go down as one of the sunniest ever with 68.2 hours recorded . It took until the 29th for July to rack up as much and we've had far more sunshine in the first 40 days of autumn than in the whole of June and July. Autumn total so far 233.3 hours compared to 190.0 hours for June and July. Looks like a very wet and dull spell coming up for the next few days but we only need a further 78 hours to match the summer total so, barring 6 weeks of relentless easterly dross, autumn will certainly up sunnier than summer for the first time ever. The closest this has come to happening before was in 1954 but even then autumn had 46 fewer hours of sunshine than the summer.

Mean Max: 15.9C (+0.3) Mean Min: 8.2C (-0.5) Overall Mean: 12.0C (-0.2) Highest Max: 24.5C (3rd) Lowest Max: 11.7C (25th) Highest Min: 12.5C (4th, 7th) Lowest Min: 1.6C (23rd) Rainfall: 50.0mm (85%) Rain days: 17 Wet days: 6 Wettest day: 17.2mm (25th) Sunshine: 165.1hrs (127%) Sunless days: 3 Max total: 12.1hrs (8th) The 6th consecutive below average monthly mean temp but the sunniest September since 2004 and the driest since 2008. Sunnier than any of the past 10 summer months - which have all had below average sunshine - and the 3rd sunniest month of 2012 behind May (223.7hrs) and March (189.7hrs). The Septembers of 2007 and 2008 both had a lower mean max while September 2010 had a considerably cooler mean max. The highest max and lowest min were both records for September since I started recording in 2005. The combination of above average mean max and below average mean min is so rare nowadays I can't remember the last time it happened. Possibly as long ago as Sept 2003.

September was drier than average here with exactly 50mm. 2012 rainfall to date Jan: 33.8mm (55%) Feb: 20.0mm (39%) Mar: 13.8mm (26%) Apr: 103.8mm (188%) May: 34.4mm (70%) Jun: 101.0mm (184%) July: 88.0mm (162%) Aug: 112.8mm (204%) Sep: 50.0mm (85%) Total: 557.6mm (113%)

5.2mm of rain overnight then the day started cloudy which was stubborn to clear but we ended up with a lovely warm and sunny afternoon Was able to sit out in the garden for a while, for possibly the last time this year, then went for a walk and noticed plenty of red and yellow leaves already which we never saw at all during last years awful unrelentingly mild autumn. Max was 17.5C which is the highest reached during the second half of the month. Sunshine totalled 4.58 hours.

A sunny, dry and windy day. Max 15.1C with 9.37 hours of sunshine. It feels as though September has had more sunshine than June and July combined and when you exclude wasted very early morning sun it probably has.

Couldn't believe it when I saw those pictures. Easterly gales were far more common in the past and I have seen lots of old photos of massive waves crashing over the harbour but never anything like that A pity it hadn't happened yesterday when it was a local holiday as I could have gone down to take photos myself! Aside from the foam, conditions were not all that unusual. Peak gust I recorded was 47mph which was exceeded several times last year and rain has totalled 24mm for the last 24 hours. Rate reached 103.8mm/hr in showers during the afternoon though.

Got down to 1.6C last night - the coldest September night of the past 8 years. This was followed by another fine sunny day but cool with a max of 12.8C. Sunshine totalled 9.11 hours. Currently 9.6C and partly cloudy but the wind is now in the east meaning overcast, rain and static temperatures can't be far off.

3rd consecutive sunny Saturday but while the last two have hit the 20s today was much cooler with a max of 13.7C following min of 3.1C. Sunshine total 10.23 hours and we have now passed the monthly average of 130 hours as well as the appalling totals recorded by all 3 summer months.

Haven't seen anything particularly cold so far this week due too much breeze/cloud. Lowest so far has been 4.9C compared to 4.2C last week and 4.0C on 31st August. However with very light wind and clear sky temp has already fallen to 5.4C so we should beat that tonight

The first half of September has been a welcome contrast from summer here. Warm, dry and sunny. Mean Max: 18.0 (+1.7) Mean Min: 10.0 (+0.7) Rainfall: 14.0mm (48%) Sunshine: 88.4hrs (128%) Sunshine has not only surpassed July's total already but we have had more than in the whole 6 week period 5th June to 16th July which produced a putrid 87.6 hours. Almost all the rain so far has fallen on just 2 days (10th and 13th). It was rather cool between the 10th and 14th but even then there was plenty of sun on the 11th and 12th. I just wonder why it seems impossible to get these conditions during the actual summer now. It's not as if there has been a lot of high pressure this month. In fact pressure has actually been 1mb below average so far but the SW wind, almost entirely absent in summer nowadays, has been dominant keeping us dry and sunny in the rain shadow of the Grampians.

Seems lke we are finally getting a well-deserved break here in the North East of Scotland with the best weather occurring at weekends for a change Another brilliant summerlike Saturday following a week of cool, windy conditions akin to October. Max was 20.3C with 9.82 hours of sunshine. Clear blue skies all day after clouds cleared at 10am courtesy of lovely south west winds. Haven't had anything from the east at all this month