al78

Anyone who goes on a seaside holiday in the UK knows they are taking a gamble with the weather, this has always been the case, and anyone who wants warmth and sun on holiday will go somewhere which reliably delivers that e.g. the Med. At least with places like Blackpool there are indoor entertainment facilities if the weather is too bad to walk along the promenade, and would you really want to go on the beach in Blackpool given its reputation for being polluted? I holiday in the Scottish highlands every year because I enjoy hillwalking and the spectacular scenery, and it is equally frustrating when I book a week off work and get one sunny day with the rest of the time being showers and clag. I noticed in Jotunheimen (Norway) last month when the weather is cloudy and damp the cloud base was up near 2000m so I could still appreciate the landscape. In the UK when it is cloudy and damp and you are in a mountainous region the cloud base comes crashing down to 300m and you can hardly see anything. Norway, cloudy with intermittent rain. Lake District, cloudy with intermittent rain.

My allotment is a write-off. The persistent dull damp weather has resulted in rapid weed growth and a slug explosion so all the leafy crops planted out in the preceeding bone dry period which failed to establish properly have now been destroyed. Time to throw in the towel, I don't know how to get anything decent out of an allotment with these randomised wet and dry seasons.

The good weather was split between the second half of May and the first half of June. I agree May started off very mediocre in the SE but it felt better than it was after the dreadful March-April (which in the SE England region was the second wettest on record according to HadUKP and only missing out on first place by about 1mm).

I'm now curious as to what is the worst weather you can get at this time of year without it being destructive and how the current situation compares. There was one August in the mid 1980's where ex-hurricane Charley crossed the UK and brought some awful weather.

I think this is a good summary of the situation and I remember winter 2010/11 as being a winter of two halves, an exceptional December and a mild February, the latter failing to compensate for the former so the winter overall was colder than average. IMO (and many will not agree), June was too warm in the sense of high overnight temperatures which made it difficult for me to sleep. I'm not a fan of temperatures over 25C but I can tolerate heat if I have a chance to cool down at night and sleep properly. Unless you have gone through it yourself you have no idea what it feels like to go through days or even weeks of poor sleep. The warm and dry June may prevent this summer becoming a record breaker for lousy weather but the really poor weather has coincided almost exactly with the summer school holidays, so holidays in the UK being marred by cloud, rain and wind will fuel the perception of summer 2023 being one of the worst. With all the doom and gloom across the country we really could have done without a summer like this. Unfortunately indications are that at best, August may see a regression to the mean but no prolonged warm sunny weather on the horizon.

The claim was about the absence of summer weather this year which is untrue, regardless of how long ago it happened. No-one is denying the summer since then has been very poor or claiming that one good month can compensate for two dreadful ones.

It has been a summer of extreme contrasts. June was the warmest on record, July is about 0.7C below the 1991-2020 climatology. Obviously if you take the average of June and July combined it will smooth out the monthly variation and possibly turn out close to average, but doing that destroys temnporal variation and is very misleading. If a month has 29 days of no rain then a severe thunderstorm on day 30 drops six inches of rain, is that a wet month?

They are going to be by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be "typical". Summers like 2018 and last year are the exception. Anyone who get frustrated about lack of extreme heat in summer or severe cold/snow in winter in the UK is going to spend much of their life in a state of misery.

Apart from mid May - mid June where virtually no rain fell and June being the warmest on record.

1996 was a good summer from memory (I lived in Salford at the time).

Not just for tourism, farmers are going to see falling crop production from this persistent cool wet weather. Locked in weather patterns are never good, regardless of whether they bring drought or deluge.

There has been some spatial variation in weather this month. Looking at the HadUKP charts, NW England is very close to a record wet July whereas SE England is above average but not notably so. I can believe why someone living in the south and east of the country would say July has not been a write-off. In my location in Sussex it has been unsettled but nowhere near as bad as it could be. The infamous wet summers of 2007 and 2012 had widespread destructive flooding which has been absent this year.

Anyone who makes a prediction weeks ahead is at best making an educated guess and if they turn out right are almost entirely lucky. The weather just isn't that predictable in the UK.

Whilst this month has been poor, I will refrain from comparing it with 2012 (or 2007) until we see widespread destructive flooding like we did in those two summers. We might have dodged a bullet with the very dry spell from mid May to mid June which helped the river and soil moisture levels recover from the wet spring.

They are the issue. If favourable conditions for wildfires are increasing, that will make wildfires more likely, regardless of the trigger. An indirect attempt to deny any possible link to climate change and heat related extremes.

Yes. 2007 and 2012 had a full summer month of wet weather with (unlike this year so far) severe flooding. June 1997 and 1998 in Reading were wet. August 2014 which was very wet which may have been caused by hurricane Bertha recurving and perturbing the jet stream to the UK's disadvantage. August 2008 was dreadful, one of the dullest on record and very wet. August 2020, very wet. Going back to 2004 there have been 15 summer months with rainfall of at least 100mm for England and Wales according to the HadUKP data.

Despite the fact it was wet, a sunshine anomaly equivalent to August 2014 would be preferable to this month's sunshine anomaly which is likely below average in most places.

The UK has its highest population in the part of the country with the lowest natural water supplies and that population keeps growing as people still want the high salary London jobs. The UK population is also pretty wasteful when it comes to consuming resources, natural or otherwise, hence why our roads are some of the most congested in Europe. I've not been able to get to the allotment for the best part of three weeks so heaven knows how bad the weeds will be when I get there tomorrow.

Spatial variation matters. SE England has been less wet than other parts of the country relative to climatology. NW England has had its July average rainfall up to the 19th whereas SE England isn't much above average. What has made this month poor is the frequent cloudiness, there has been some rain nearly every day with no settled spells of weather, and the forecast models are going for more of the same for the next 2-3 weeks at least which takes us to near the end of summer with very limited time for any more hot spells.

A warm winter usually means cloudy and wet. If you are vulnerable to SAD you want a cold winter with plenty of crisp Arctic air masses.

Possibly if there is a connection between blocked weather patterns and climate change through Arctic amplification. The UK's weather seems to get stuck in a rut frequently now, it is almost like living in a temperate wet and dry climate with the wet and dry seasons appearing randomly. Take this year: soaking wet March-April, bone dry for five weeks then dull and wet in July until who knows when. There is a weakish link between moderate to strong El Nino's and wetter UK summers if you looks at the JJA Oceanic Nino Index alongside the HadUKP data.

Wasn't the cold April claim more to do with the daily maximum temperatures than the overall mean? Spring in general was characterised by cloudy damp conditions (up to mid May) which suppressed daytime temperatures but also kept overnight minimums well above freezing. It is the former that people notice, although as a gardener the lack of overnight frosts was notable for me. April wasn't a terrible month even here in Sussex but it was a long way from decent, and for a month to be decent it is not sufficient for it to be better than the worst. The complaints about July so far may not be entirely due to the weather to date, although it has been wetter than average virtually everywhere, but also due to the mid-range forecast which is looking poor for the rest of the month and into the first week of August if you enjoy warm sunny weather. At the moment July here in SE England is reminding me of former July holidays in the Scottish highlands where I would have at most two days out of a week where I could do a hill walk and get good views (my holiday last June in Braemar was like this). Wasn't that payback for the hot sunny summer?

If that is the best attempt at trying to look positively at the weather this month and play down the poorness, it just goes to show how poor the month has been so far. I don't object to putting things in perspective in general but there is a point where it becomes a logical fallacy:

I don't think it is gaslighting as such, it is more like some with a strong opinion/agenda trying to make the observational data fit that opinion, analogous to people who deny anthropgenic climate change just because there were a couple of cold days in their location. One of the worst examples were posts trying to downplay the poorness of this Spring by using the monthly Central England Temperature to claim temperatures were around normal therefore it isn't that bad, which is an absurd thing to do in the face of spatial and temporal variability. I have known summer months like this before where the monthly rainfall and mean temperature might not rank significantly high or low, but if there is some rain nearly every day and low sunshine hours, the month is much worse weatherwise than monthly mean stats can get across.

Your cause and effect is likely not as strong as you think. Depression is caused/stimulated by many other things than the amount of sunshine, and spending a brief time in another country tells you little about the quality of life there unless you live there for months or years at a time. I have just come back from a week in Norway, a country not known for its abundant sunshine and warmth, and my impression is the quality of life there is very high (note I say "impression" which I am not claiming is the same as fact). The UK has the potential to be the same but seems to suffer from a lot of crapness now, at least partly as a result of much of the population trying to live like Americans. At least some countries where the citizens are poor but happy could be like that due to the lack of the worst of neo-liberal capitalism and individualism that impacts most Western countries, and they have a greater sense of community and connection with each other. We demonise socialism here but there are aspects of it that are excellent for enhancing quality of life (projecting the worst extremes onto the average is a stupid illogical fallacy that needs to die), and I think the Scandinavians have a healthy mix of socialism and capitalism which contributes to their high living standards. Speaking for myself, and I doubt I am alone, I find some of the biggest boosts to my mental well-being are 1) doing voluntary work in a team environment where we are all driving towards a common goal, and 2) forming deep connections with people (especially women).