Thundery wintry showers

There are mild winter weather types that can generate a fair amount of interest - an unusual spell of mild weather accompanied by bright sunshine (e.g. mid to late February 2019), or those blustery, showery polar maritime/returning polar maritime air masses that can give hail and thunder, squall lines, unusually windy spells. I guess I'm rather more surprised at regular contributors preferring mild and benign/ordinary weather in the winter, but there are of course those who are mainly into summer and aren't too fussed on winter. I'm rather like what Philip Eden said he was sometime around 2005 in an interview with Netweather, I'm a snow aficionado like most of the other members but I also enjoy other types of winter weather as well, and note that most days feature at least something of interest. It does partly depend on where you live though - I did lose interest at times in Exeter but I think here in Lincoln there's generally rather more variability. Philip lived in Luton if I remember rightly, along with (here's a blast from the past!) mr_crazy_snowfan.

I think it happened quite widely in 1934. Also 31 October 1974 had falling sleet/snow quite widely but not lying at low levels. There had been a northerly on the 29th/30th with wintry showers, and rain that pushed eastwards against the cold air turned to sleet and wet snow in some places. An amusing coincidence: those two wintry Halloweens were followed by the two warmest Decembers of the twentieth century. Regarding Bonfire Nights, in Cleadon in Tyne and Wear a rogue shower down the east coast brought wet snow during the Oakleigh Gardens firework display on 5 November 1991. It was my second memory of snow after the far more famous and widespread event in February 1991.

I'd be surprised if August 1968 was anywhere near August 1912. It was widely the coolest (at least for maximum temperature) and wettest August on record and Durham had just 57 hours of sunshine.

In 1985, 1 October was the hottest day of the year in some parts of the country, but yes it's extremely rare.

Yes, I always remembered October 1997 as a very interesting and "episodic" month - warm anticyclonic/westerly start, then a cyclonic/westerly spell followed by northerlies in the second week, then very warm southerlies, then a brief easterly incursion, then a spell of anticyclonic/northerly weather which resulted in the sharp frosts near the end of the month. I remember that the southerly around the 18th started off warm and muggy but then produced two summer-like days of sunshine and temperatures around 20-21C. In that spell near the end, even though I was just a couple of miles inland, I recorded a minimum of -3C. In Tyneside it wasn't quite as sunny overall as in some other parts of the country - I remember that there was some cloudier weather on the eastern flank of the high during the last third of the month - but it was still a sunnier than average month. In the 1990s only October 1995 came out significantly sunnier in that area of the country, when north-east England was sheltered from the prevailing south to south-west winds. I remember that, with that October following a dry sunny September with warm days and cool nights, Autumn 1997 was shaping up to be one of my favourite autumns, but November 1997 shattered that in a big way, with just over half the normal amount of sunshine. I remember that, apart from a one-off sunny day on the 21st, there was almost no sun at all from around midmonth to the 29th inclusive.

I'm aware of some other notable weather events later in the 1920s too, e.g. the very dry June of 1925, snowy northerlies in late November 1925, a warm start to October 1926 followed by an unusually wintry second half, the easterly-dominated December of 1927 with a severe Boxing Day snowstorm, and a cold winter followed by an exceptionally sunny March in 1929. Indeed, the "raw" monthly statistics don't always give a full picture as you can have a month with several noteworthy weather events but particularly with warm and cold events they can cancel each other out and result in a fairly mild to average month overall. I can think of plenty of events in the 1910s too, e.g. the long dry sunny summer of 1911, a warm and sunny and in places thundery June in 1914, the dull wet summer of 1912, the very wet winter of 1914/15 (which in many ways was a colder version of 2013/14). 1916 had a record-breaking warm January, cold snowy March, cold June. 1917 and 1919 stick out for me as seemingly having been very eventful years. 1918 had an exceptionally wet September.

I wouldn't put 2021 up there with 2011 as far as monotonous years go, there was some interest in the winter (although I get the impression that January in particular would've been much snowier at low levels had the same synoptics happened 20 years ago), an unusual warm spell at the end of March, and April was somewhat unusual for being very cold and very dry and sunny. A bit dull and depressing from May onwards towards the SE though. 2002 still sticks out for me as probably the most boring year for weather that I've lived through, but 2011 isn't far behind. 2011 for me was partly redeemed by the record-breaking April and the heatwave at the end of September.

I had a weird predictive dream last night, I dreamt about getting wet walking along a main street surrounded by historic buildings, then leaving and watching lightning from a Cb cell to the south-east. The real life version wasn't quite as spectacular, but I went shopping in M&S in Lincoln, came out and it was chucking it down with rain, so had to wait a while before going outside, and then when I was walking home, I definitely heard one clap of thunder from a Cb cell to the south-east. It was just the one clap of thunder, and it wasn't picked up by the ATD system, and I saw no lightning, but it counts as another day of thunder heard, taking my 2021 total to 15 days.

Yes, the second half of October 1993 started off dry and sunny with an exceptional run of cold frosty nights, then anticyclonic gloom set in from around the 24th. My weather records from October/November 1993 point towards a remarkable lack of sunshine in South Tyneside between 24 October and around 9 November, before the cold and, in some eastern parts of the country, snowy weather of late November. September 1993 in South Tyneside was the standout example of a depressing September from my childhood when, after a reasonably sunny and warm end to August and first day of September, cool grey weather set in just in time for the return to school, and then persisted for a large part of the month, with some wet and windy weather at times too, particularly the 13th-15th and in the last week. The northerlies that set in on the 2nd/3rd brought extensive stratocumulus near the north-east coast, so the transition set in earlier than in Hampshire. I wouldn't call 1994 a late spring necessarily, as there was an abrupt switch from cold to warm at the end of February, and most parts of the UK were predominantly warm in March 1994, though very windy as noted in previous posts. But then the progression was rather backward, with predominantly cool weather in April and May with the exception of a very warm spell at the end of April which raised April's mean temperature close to the long-term normal.

I remember the winter of 1998/99 had quite a few northerly outbreaks, resulting in parts of northern Scotland and some eastern coastal counties of England having near-average snow despite it being a generally mild winter. Early December 1998 and the second week of February 1999 were generally the coldest spells, and a more sluggish northerly in the second week of January 1999 was followed by quite a widespread frontal snow event on the 12th. However, for many regions away from North Sea coasts there were just a few dustings that didn't last for long. One issue with a repeat of the 1998/99 winter would be that with the marked warming of the Norwegian and Russian Arctic, northerlies often aren't as potent these days as they were back then. I remember several occasions last winter when northerly and north-easterly winds brought sleety rather than snowy weather to counties bordering the North Sea, including one on Christmas Eve which, had temperatures been a degree or so colder, could have given a fair number of eastern areas a white Christmas. On the other hand, as we saw repeatedly in early April 2021, we're not yet close to the stage where it's not possible to get widespread snow off a northerly. It's worth noting though that the 1998/99 La Nina was unusually strong. 2021/22 isn't forecast to have such a strong La Nina, and generally a weaker La Nina increases the chance of cold snowy spells.

11.3C and 65.2mm. Cool spells near both ends of the month, warm in the middle.

I'll be very surprised if September doesn't come out sunnier than August at nearby Waddington. Not that difficult, mind, but it seems to have been a fairly sunny September so far here, as well as a very warm one.

The cloud vs. sunshine debate has some interesting nuances. In the UK, sunny weather is preferred by the majority of people because we have a predominantly cloudy climate, which results in a relatively high incidence of Seasonal Affective Disorder and related issues. But I've seen evidence that in many parts of the world with very sunny climates, it's the other way around. I had a taste of this in early June 2020 when, following the phenomenally sunny back end of May that gave the UK as a whole its sunniest calendar month on record, a large part of me briefly welcomed the cloudier weather because it made a change from having constant sunshine. It soon wore off though as the UK climate returned to its usual predominantly cloudy state. My impression, having lived through many months in this country and holidayed in various parts of France, is that, for me, annual sunshine totals of between 2000 and 2500 hours, or around 50% of the possible total, would be ideal. Sunshine amounts in the UK, especially eastern England, have generally been increasing in recent decades, probably due mainly to the reduced "global dimming" effect from human aerosol emissions, but of course away from southern coastal fringes we're still averaging well under 2000 hours per year.

I think it's unlikely that we'll beat 2006. In the final third of September you need a bigger temperature anomaly in order to keep the CET that high than you would early in the month - we'd probably need a positive anomaly of 3.5 to 4C in the last third of September to manage it. Also, as the latest GFS run illustrates, if we had a day or two of polar maritime north-westerlies at the end of the month, that would chop a fair amount off the CET value. I reckon we'll probably be looking at something between 16.0 and 16.5 after corrections. Still pretty exceptional though.

October 1994 started off with an unusually potent cold snap on the 3rd, with wintry showers locally as far south as the Midlands, and frequent showers of wet snow in Aberdeen, then there was a long anticyclonic spell. In Tyneside I remember the second week being consistently warm by day, cool by night with lots of hazy sunshine, though the warm sunny spell was more prolonged in the south, and in the north October 1994's sunshine totals were less remarkable. Indeed, the Octobers of 1992 and 1993, and to a lesser extent 1991, also produced early wintry spells. I recall that October 1993 was also quite a sunny month in many parts of the country, but the sunniest spell of that month was exceptionally cold with night frosts, and started with lying snow in Aberdeen. Certainly there was a run of cool cloudy wet and at times stormy Septembers in 1992-94. I don't remember much in the way of stormy weather in the Novembers of 1993 and 1994, though the two months had extremely contrasting temperatures (an exceptionally cold easterly in November 1993, and then November 1994 was the warmest on record).

I think of summer 2019 as a predominantly average summer but with short-lived exceptional events (a dull wet spell from around 10-17 June, and a few record breaking heatwaves, especially across continental Europe but also a new temperature record for the UK in July), so quite unusual in that regard. I remember a lot of "usable" weather in early to mid-July 2019. August I remember being unsettled for the most part but quite sunny. Overall, arguably the second-best summer of the period 2015-2021 inclusive, but rather overshadowed by that of 2018.

Some weak storms have been passing to the south and east of Lincoln this afternoon, but not near enough for me to hear any thunder from them.

Yeah, I think I got over-excited, it was an intense rainstorm but the roar/rumble that I heard was probably a particularly intense bout of rain on my roof.

Just heard thunder. Isn't reverse psychology good? Edit: actually, not sure if it was thunder or a particularly heavy burst of rain.

I haven't given up yet - this inoccuous-looking shower that moved up from the south has really intensified as it's come overhead, some torrential rain and half-melted hail here now! Still no thunder from it yet though.

I've often thought I'd prefer a bit less variation in the daylight hours, maybe from 9-10 hours of daylight in midwinter to 14-15 hours in the summer, which is around what they get in New Zealand at nearer 40 degrees from the equator. Sunnier winters would also be helpful. I have often quite enjoyed October and December over the years, as October sometimes has autumnal colours and can produce a wide variety of weather, and in December we have the run up to Christmas and the short daylight has some novelty value, but November and January in particular have often been testing for me. I find February less depressing as the daylight is finally beginning to increase substantially. We can't do anything about our daylight hours but then again we can't do anything about our weather either, so I don't really get the argument about not being able to have a bit of a moan about daylight hours in the moans thread.

I was in South Tyneside during the 11 August 1999 eclipse and remember that it was quite a sunny day up north, although the eclipse was only partial there, and the areas that had a full or near-full eclipse were relentlessly cloudy during the eclipse. There was a period of about 20 minutes when it went darker than usual. One thing that has always stood out for me with the August stats is the UK sunshine totals - only three Augusts (1947, 1976 and 1995) managed more than 200 hours of sunshine, but all of them had over 240 hours! There is quite a jump back to 2003, which was just short of the 200 hour mark but ranked 4th sunniest. August 2003 fell behind the other three mainly because of near-average sunshine in parts of Wales and the south-west, but it was a very sunny month in the north-east. It shows that it's difficult to get prolonged sunny weather covering the vast majority of the UK in August, but there were three standout Augusts that managed it. Being born in 1984, I only lived through one of them, but it did stand out somewhat. After the first few days, there was surprisingly little sea fret in Tyneside during August 1995 despite the frequency of easterly winds, hence 267 hours' sunshine at Tynemouth and 263 at Sunderland. It was often cooler near the coast though, with mean maxima of 19 to 21C at coastal sites, contrasting with 23C at Durham. For me, August 1996 stood out to some extent too in that it reached 30C on the 18th, very unusual for the north-east coast of England, and had quite a few thundery outbreaks. Mike Hulme's stats in the newspaper articles (thanks for uploading those) shows marked regional variations in that month, with some areas having just close to average sunshine but other areas were much warmer and/or sunnier than average (though of course not as warm or sunny as August 1995).

I was in South Tyneside during that spell and I have quite strong memories of 9 June 1993, though I was just short of 9 years old at the time. It was a very hazy day, the sea fret/haar came in for a while during the afternoon but then cleared away during the evening. The sun at around 7pm was bright red/orange, consistent with a hazy continental air mass with high pollution levels. There might have been thunderstorms the following night, but if so, I slept through them (it wasn't really until the thundery summer of 1994 that I got into watching thunderstorms).

I remember comparably gloomy anticyclonic spells in the summer half-year near the Tyne and Wear coast, notably early June 2007, but that area of the UK is prone to occasional prolonged overcast spells when easterly winds dominate. It must be somewhat rare to get it over such a large swathe of England.

Summer 1976 was warmer, but the calendar year 1976 wasn't. In particular a coolish autumn and cold December brought the annual mean temperature for 1976 down somewhat. Even 1959 was marginally cooler than 1949 in the CET zone, as 1959 started off with a cold January that had a fortnight of mainly northerly winds, though there was very little in it between 1949 and 1959.