Summer8906

Doesn't sound terrible, except for the June. April, October, November and December are of course unstated.

A number of so-so months there though: June 2020 and July-Aug 2019. Would probably go with, following similar rules, two of yours but would make different choices for the mid-year period: Jan-Mar 2012 (If historic years are allowed, then 1929, without a doubt). April-June 1995 July-Sep 1989 October-December 2010

I realise this is many months old but just going back over this thread, and is of course on-topic for the title. This graph confirms my suspicion that 200 hours is the threshold for "acceptable" sunshine in a summer month. Every month with 200hrs+ since 1980 is a month that I would rate a fairly "good" July. Almost every month with below 200 I would rate as disappointingly cloudy. There is one exception, July 1982 which I'm sure was better than that where I was (NW Sussex). I seem to remember that month as being persistently sunny but not especially warm, but could be wrong. It could have been the school holidays were sunny and the end of term less so, meaning I perceived the month as sunnier than it was. "Good" Julys by this measurement include 1959, 1964, 1967, 1969, 1971, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2003, 2006... and then only 2013, 2014, 2018 and 2022. Thus the frequency has really declined recently compared to the 1983-2006 period. Indeed the 15-year periods 2007-21, 2008-22 or 2009-23 perform worse than most comparable 15-year periods. The only other 15-year period to do as badly for "200 hours of sunshine" Julys is 1960-74.

Interesting that Bembridge seems to have something of an anomaly for this region, having around double most other central southern counties. Particularly as Surrey of all places is bottom. The southeast really ought to be the sunniest region this time of year, being amongst the furthest south and closest to drier continental influence.

And given there's been almost none since, and likely to be little more for the rest of the year, could Charlwood end up with less than 20 overall? That sounds shockingly bad even for December, and must surely be a chance of an all-time low record.

Good question - depends how much sun we had on the partly sunny days. In spring I guess the question is theoretical, as it would be very rare to have a long spell with only small amounts of sun - but I would probably prefer 8 days of 6 hour sun than 4 days of 12 hour sun and 4 days of no sun.

This time of year: probably the 4 cloudy, 1 sunny. As long as 3 of the 4 cloudy days were dry. Trouble is, it isn't even that good! There were about three days with decent sunshine around the 7th-12th or so, if I remember right, and that's been more or less it for December! Last really sunny day, though, was the final Saturday in November.

I see what you're saying, but the 9.20pm sunsets we get here in mid-summer will do me, I don't really need it lighter later than that. Sunset on the continent is (IMX - I have visited France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Austria and Switzerland in July) typically not as early as 8pm; remember that they are on a more "forward" timezone anyway, so the southerliness (=earlier summer sunsets) is counteracted by a timezone favouring later sunsets. In northern Greece sunset in midsummer is around 9pm. In Munich it's comparable to here and in southwestern France it's considerably later (9.52pm in Bordeaux). More noticeable in many continental locations are the relatively dark summer mornings - many locations lack the really early sunrises we get here. In other warm, sunny locations though, California is prone to very early sunsets due to being on the same kind of timezone (favouring light mornings, disfavouring light evenings) to the UK. LA does indeed have a (close to) 8pm sunset and San Francisco is only a little better at 8.35pm. Southern Spain in winter is an interesting one. Somewhere like Malaga is west of here yet is on a more easterly timezone, result being sunrise later than here but 6pm sunsets, something we won't get here until early March.

Another zero-sunshine day today, it seems. Already the next load of Atlantic clag is piling in, cutting off the sun before it even rose. Blue skies were visible to the north for a time. Wonder if we'll even get a further hour of sun before the year is out? And I suspect the last two weeks of Dec 2023 will be even duller than the last two of Dec 22, which featured bright days on Dec 26th and 29th. As I said yesterday, I do wonder whether any stations, particularly in the southwest which seems to have bore the brunt of the gloom of the latter half of the year, could be on course for their dullest month of any name on record? We do have the also exceedingly dull Dec 2021 to beat, of course.

If mid-Oct to mid-Nov counts, we'd have to add that, certainly in this part of the country. Second half of Oct and first of Nov were very wet, though to be fair both months had short drier spells which meant they weren't quite as bad as March and July. As for December, dull is the word. A dry-ish spell ended yesterday but sunshine has been very much at a premium.

Sorry, a non-meteorological moan: Is it though? It was always January 6th in the "old days", Twelfth Night/Epiphany, the Twelve Days of Christmas and all that. These days they seem to want to start Christmas the day after Remembrance Sunday when it's still autumn, and finish it at 23:59 on the 25th. Christmas songs, having been over-played in November, are now seemingly banned in the modern UK after the 25th has passed. I don't see the point of this. End of Dec, start of Jan is a dark and (most years) a wet, dull and Atlantic-driven time of year. It has nothing else whatsoever going for it. So why this contemporary obsession with killing off Christmas at midnight on the 25th? It's not as if there's anything else to enjoy, and spring is still too remote to properly look forward to. The time for Christmas is December and the start of January, not November. Yet the contemporary UK wants to throw all the celebratory eggs in the basket between Halloween and Dec 25th - and then, dark, dull, lifeless nothingness for about four weeks until the nights have drawn out enough to start noticing it, which is around Jan 21st. Thankfully other countries, such as Greece and Spain, don't seem to share this bizarre practice of killing off Christmas prematurely. I think countries that have a proper Jan 6th festival are more prone to celebrating Christmas at the proper time, and not in mid-November.

The problem with early morning daylight at the expense of early evening daylight IMO is that it's pre-work, so you can't enjoy it. If it's light between 6-7pm, chances are you've finished work and can enjoy it better. Hence, moving the clocks forward one month early would arguably give people more daylight at times of day when they can appreciate it. I can see the need for GMT at this time of year, but really it could be restricted to mid-Nov to mid-Feb. There seems no need for it before or after that period. Wouldn't like to scrap BST, we'd end up with it being dark at 8pm throughout April, dark at 9pm all year, and getting dark at 6pm from mid-September. The "feel" of much of the spring and autumn would be impacted negatively and the "summer months" by daylight, the period of the year when sunset is post-7pm, would be cut drastically.

Interesting to see you're forecast a short cold spell on the 30th and 31st, not sure we'll get that here (but I'll be out of the country anyway). The BBC doesn't seem to be suggesting any extreme mild early in the new year, though a lot of dull and damp... I also see you've still got a pre-4pm sunset - the price of living further north I guess. Here we've dropped out of the pre-4pm club now, not that we've had sunshine at any time of day for what seems like a couple of weeks though. In 2016 the early spring was cold but not severely so, it didn't kill anything off, but the good aspect was it slowed down the spring flowering (which had been silly early by mid-Feb) so we thankfully didn't get a premature end to spring.

Don't remember this spell at all, though I do remember a cold, dry and sometimes foggy period at the start of Dec. IIRC it was then near-constantly mild until the end of Jan before the cold, and snowy, spell set in once we got to Feb. I think Jan was mostly dry down here too - perhaps a cross between Jan 1989 and Jan 1990. This event reminds me of your typical 21st century cold spell, two days and then it's gone. People must have been writing off 1982/83 by the time we got to mid Jan, not knowing how the winter would end... 1993/94 is the only other winter I remember with a similar reversal in Feb, though on that occasion the low track was further north so the cold spell was shorter and more transient.

5.2 and 110mm. Based on a combination of the Met Office forecast and what the models were showing, some hint of cold, taking this with scepticism but perhaps enough to prevent it being silly mild for too long. Going for the first half being mild and wet, but less mild and less wet than last year, and the second half being dry but less dry than last year, with temps around average. So a month of two halves again, but the halves less contrasting than this year.

Extended hot summers aren't really the norm though. Other than 2018 and 2022, recent summers have been pretty cloudy and cool-to-average by day, but with short heat spikes and warm nights lifting the CET above average. The stereotypical modern climate is: Winter (=dull, mild, wet and windy) late Nov-mid Feb Spring and early summer (=one or more prolonged warm, dry, sunny spells at some point mixed with more changeable periods) mid-Feb to late June Mid/late summer (=cool by day, cloudy, occasional short extreme heat spikes otherwise very Atlantic-driven) July and August Early autumn (=fine and dry, though still sometimes cloudy) most of Sep Autumn (=generally mild, Atlantic-driven and rather wet though with settled interludes) Oct and Nov

Dry, but some cold in the first 6 weeks would be nice. Spring warm but not too warm (to prevent the flowers ending early) with one short spell of late April snow. warm thundery summer, warm dry autumn until early Nov then cold and frosty would be ideal.

And doubtless very dull and drizzly with it, with constant stratus masking the 10-15 minutes gain in afternoon daylight relative to the earliest sunset by then. The third dire start to the new year in a row, and the fourth dire start to the year of the last five. January is almost invariably the most disappointing month of the year, relative to how it could be. August too is a serial disappointment but even a poor August can normally manage a few summer-like days.

Met Office seems to be currently suggesting an almost carbon-copy repeat of this year, more or less, mild, wet and windy first half, and "probably" drier and more settled second half. Doesn't seem to suggest a cold Jan overall, I'd be willing to place bets that the first half is milder than the second half is cold, and we'll end up with a slightly milder-than-normal Jan if that forecast comes to pass. (The Met Office forecast for first half of Jan suggests "close to average", but IMX when you get a forecast suggesting wet, windy Atlantic-driven weather and "close to average" in winter, what actually transpires, almost invariably, is temps around 2-3C above). Nonetheless it appears that yet again we'll get a dull, wet New Years' Eve and New Year's Day to add to the dull and damp/wet Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Christmas to mid-Jan seems to be very poor at least as often as not, and the chances of New Years Eve/Day both being dull and wet seems, as a ballpark figure, to be as high as around 75% (though need to analyse this properly) thankfully I am leaving the UK for drier climes for the next three weeks. Hopefully I will come back into this "probable" drier and more settled weather... Nonetheless it must be a good bet that January will be the 7th consecutive wetter than average month, it normally only takes a couple of weeks of the Atlantic in overdrive to make a month wet this time of year. Hoping February will break the cycle and we get a better end to winter than the poor (most of) summer, autumn and early winter.

Silly question: what site to people generally use as their source for links to model info? I have been using wetterzentrale, is this the best site or are others recommended? Thanks.

I did see snowdrops in one garden today; snowdrops on Christmas Day is just plain bizarre. Don't normally see them until late Jan. Reminds me of when daffodils came into flower at the end of Jan in both 2016 and 2020, under dull wet conditions, which I thought was a shame as if they come out too early under dark. dull, wet weather before spring-like weather arrives, you can't enjoy them. Particularly as, generally, it hasn't been really silly mild until now; autumn was actually less mild than 2021 and 2022 according to the Met Office. I don't remember seeing the same in 2015. Perhaps the sequence of events which confuses nature the most is cold followed by really mild. We did of course have something of a cold spell in late Nov, while in 2015 it was just constantly mild except for one cold weekend.

The first week of June? I'm surprised: here it was constant warm sunshine with max temps around 20C or a little higher. Arguably the most settled and finest spell of the entire year, as it became a little less settled once the hot weather came in. I guess the nights were cool, 20C max 8C min has the same mean temp as 15C max, 13C min. Perhaps the nights were lower than 8 which would indeed bring the mean down to below now. If so it's a perfect illustration of why mean temp isn't necessarily a good indication of weather.

True. I wonder if we are in with the chance of the dullest month of any name on record this month in some locations? Dec 2023 seems to have been very dull indeed here, we had about 3 days with some sunshine around the end of the first week and start of the second, but almost nothing since. That said, Dec 2021 also barely saw the sun so there's stiff competition. More generally, obviously December is going to be the dullest month of the year but it does seem to have been particularly dull from 2011 onwards compared to the period before. In recent years, only Dec 2014 seemed to have relatively good sunshine levels, while many in the 90s and 00s seemed to be relatively sunny for the time of year.

I'd tend to agree there, the British countryside is very nice in places but can be spoilt by dull, Atlantic-dominated weather. To be fair dull and damp weather can add atmosphere to mountainous areas but doesn't really go well with the lowlands. With our extreme lack of frosts never mind snow, winter these days is by far the blandest season, I'd tend to agree the UK countryside can look a bit washed-out from late Nov to Feb. Spring, summer and autumn can all have appeal if the weather plays ball (more common in spring and early summer than late summer/autumn). The coming of the spring flowers and then the appearance of green makes a big difference. I tend also not to get the phrase "green Christmas" because at this time of year, browns and greys are the dominant colours.

I guess at least 8.8 is vaguely seasonal, being only a little (1C or so?) above average.