May 2008

[damianslaw]

Three years ago we enjoyed one of the warmest and sunniest first halves to May since records began. I can't confirm how warm and sunny conditions were in statistics but I do remember it being a wonderful spell of weather with wall to wall sunshine. I was living in newcastle at the time and despite the easterly airstream it was a clean one - very similiar to the recent spell of weather and thus we were spared much low cloud, although I think the extreme coast did see some haar.

Anyone else remember back to early-mid may 2008. Things did change mid month and we saw some very wet weather indeed though it stayed warm.

[AderynCoch]

Wonderful spell of weather, topped off with a big thunderstorm on my birthday (the 11th). There was flash flooding afterwards.

I remember the warm summery weather contrasting with the late snowy weather experienced just a month earlier.

[feb1991blizzard]

I remember it well as i was out in the sun for 7 hours on a saturday and got severe sunburn on the head which swelled up near my eye and i looked a proper state for a few days but i also remember there was a couple of very chilly days either towards the end of may or early june because the french open tennnis was on at the time.

[Summer of 95]

May 2008 was here a month that started very promisingly but was ultimately rather disappointing. It started to warm up as soon as the month began, until by the 6th-8th it was reaching the low 20sC, with plenty of sunshine; and looked set to be a fine month. However it was totally spoilt by a poor second half; very cloudy, often wet, and lacking in warm days although mild nights kept the temperature above average. The western Midlands was the dullest area in the country (Fair Isle got over 300 hours sun while we didn't even make 150) and the second half was something of a precursor to that abysmal August. It might have had a similar CET to May 1992 but certainly didn't have the same weather.

[Thundery wintry showers]

The first half of May 2008 was exceptionally sunny in Norwich. The 1st was a day of sun and showers with a weak thunderstorm, then after a couple of cloudy days high pressure brought days on end of almost unbroken sunshine, and a few of the days saw Norwich Airport ranked as the sunniest place in the country. One of the days (I think it was the 11th) reached 27C. However the second half of the month was notably dull, and the Met Office's sunshine maps give Norwich as having had just 10% above average sunshine for May 2008 as a result. The only things I really remember about the second half was a brief colder, bright interlude shortly after midmonth, a lot of cloudy uninteresting days, and a significant "continental import" thunderstorm overnight 27th/28th which got as far north as Norfolk and produced some overhead lightning.

At Cleadon in Tyne and Wear the month was unexceptional, partly as a result of frequent onshore winds during the warm spell in the first half which restricted Cleadon to a monthly maximum of just 19.8C on the 11th, in spite of unbroken sunshine. The mean max (15.3C) was actually 0.1C short of the mean max that I recorded there in April 2011, and has been exceeded in several other Mays (May 2001 had the highest mean max at 16.2C). The mean min, 8.6C, was unusually high but was beaten in 1998 which had a mean min of 8.8C. It was a fairly sunny month in the North East but nowhere near as sunny as May 2001, or even 2004, 2005, 2009 or 2010.

All in all, a memorable spell in the first half but I can think of other Mays in the period 1993-2010 that I've found more enjoyable, and May 1992 (the year before I started strongly observing the weather) sounds like it was a lot more impressive overall.