1 Year Weather Stats In Edinburgh

[Pierre]

Dear all,

Scottish people seem to have a complex about the weather in Scotland. The common lines are:

- it's raining, oh well you know, it's scotland, we're not here for the sun

- oh we're lucky to see some sun today

I live in Edinburgh, am doing things outdoor almost every day and I always thought "hang on a minute, when is the last time I had to put my rain proof kit on? It's been so long I can't remember.

I fought a long battle to try and get people to realise that the weather here is, indeed, pretty good. I used data from some websites giving stats of rainfall, sunny days, etc but that didn't talk to people. Maybe cause it's all based on historical data which they can't relate too. So I decided I'd be taking a photo of the sky every day at lunchtime and storing it somewhere.

It's been a year now and I share my 215 photos on a blog ( http://weatherinedin...h.blogspot.com/ ).

My conclusions are:

- very sunny: 63 (29%)

- average : 75 (35%)

- very cloudy: 77 (36%)

It's obviously just a snapshot of the weather at that particular time the photo was taken, not super scientific but I guess it still shows that:

- seeing the sun here is not that rare!

- cloudy horrible days are not that prevalent!

Actually I could have gone further and looked at the number of photos where you can see the ground is wet from current or past rain. I started that but the numbers were so low that I don't think anyone would have believed me. I guess I'm better off finding some real data for that (I know the botanic garden has some sort of weather station where they record rain fall but never found that data public).

Anyway, hope you enjoy the visit

Pierre

[Ross B]

Nice one, very interesting also to see that most of the winter had snow cover.

I've got to say, being a west coaster I've always found Edinburgh weather a bit boring but the last few months has been much more interesting than the west!

[J07]

Sunshine hours in themselves don't "talk to people", but if you can give them context then they can. eg. if you can turn it into a % of possible sun received. In the UK it's always below 50% everywhere, so you could say that Edinburgh receives about 30% of its possible sunshine annual sunshine. Or, "it's not sunny more often than it is sunny"! But that's not a very positive outlook!

Average annual sunshine hours are 1379. You could put it into context by comparing with cities worldwide? That way you can make "average stats" talk to "normal" people!

[MeteoMadrid]

First, sorry for my English is poor .

I think that Edinburgh (and London of course) is the most pretty city of the world.

I have been in Edinburgh with my girlfriend (she is Scottish) in my holidays (summer 2009, October 2009, February 2010 and March 2010). In two month I going to Edinburgh, Might I will stay there for one year, because I wanna learn English and my girlfriend want to finish her university in Scotland.

Well the Edinburgh´s weather is nice, It´s many days with sun. When I was there, I saw many days with rain, but only one o two hours (In Spain is horrible..the weather may be 48 hours rainning and two month under clouds in Novembre and December).

Thanks Pierre.