We British are rightly known for our weather obsession . With these sort of stats who wouldn’t be?”
February 2012
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2011
Summer?
It certainly hasn’t been much of a summer and as the prime holiday month August has been something of what may reasonably termed a dead loss.
However when compared with the best and the worst of Augusts from the rainfall figures, it doesn’t come out too badly at 52.6mm, and fitting into a 10 year average figure of 70.33mm it doesn’t sound so bad.
But the remarkable thing is that the two Augusts that followed one another in 2004 and 2005 gave the highest and the lowest August figures for many years: 2004 rained a very wet 160mm (6.3 ins) followed by the sparse 2005 figure of a mere 14mm (0.55 ins.).
So what does a “good” summer need to make it really good!?
Chris Barry 1/9/2011
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I think evryone realises that we are in pretty serious drought conditions even though we don’t (yet) have a hosepipe ban.
This year’s figures read like this:
January 47.5 mm 10-year average: 65.8
February: 63.2 ” ” ” 58.0
March: 12.0 ” ” ” 56.7
April: 9.75 ” ” ” 23.8
May (Provisional) 62.25
(this month is only this heavy due to storms on the 6/7 and 30th with 21 entirely dry days, preceded by 23 dry days in April and 21 in March, making a total of 65 entirely dry days out out 92.. Is this a record? I’m afraid I don’t know but for gardeners and farmers it was terrible.
Would you like to take on recording rainfall for the village? Christopher Barry has done so for many years, but would love to hand this on to someone else now. Please contact anyone on the website team if you are interested.
2011
July
July promised to follow June’s miserable 32.75 mm but even before St Swithen’s Day that had changed with 22.5mm over the four days 13th to 16th. (That’s more than the whole of April, the cruellest month for gardeners with only 20mm), but it was not to last so that by the end of the month, not only was it much colder but the total came to only 33.25 mm.
June -dryer than it could have been…
June’s rainfall (32.75 mm) was slightly below average for the past ten years (38.77mm) but what has, perhaps, been remarkable this past six months is the number of long dry periods of up to ten days at a time.
Published national figures of rainfall for the first half of 2010 show 356.8 mm. whereas our total is 289.25mm so Hook Norton has been dryer than it could have been.
Wet May Day
May Daycame in withtwenty-four hours rainfallof a massive 32.5 mm., by far the heaviest so far this year! However, this was not to be repeated and the remaining 30 days produced droughtlike conditions with only 15.75mm. The monthly Total therefore came to 48.25 with a 10-year May average of 74.65mm. April and May between them with part of March as well showed us as dry a spring period as we’ve seen in a long while.
How will “flaming June” compete? Wait and see.
ChristopherBarry
April Showers?
Well, where were they? An almost dry April prodced just 2 centimetres of rain. To put this in perspective, last night’s rainfall (May 1st) saw us covered to a depth of 32.5 mm. Will that do for the whole month, I wonder? I very much doubt it.
The first quarter of 2010
January, 76.oo mm of which 29+ mm were of snow. (It is very difficult to take accurate reading of snowfalls).
February, 63.25 mm of which 15 mm was snow.
March has been the driest month this quarter with 59 mm and no snow!
We all know how awful it was during the hardest part of January. Will it mean a good summer? I wonder!
Chistopher Barry
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Rainfall in Hooky for December was a little above the 10-year average for the month: 78.25mm as opposed to 77.67mm.
What, I wonder, will a return to heavy snow in winter do for figures for the new year, 2010?
Everyone agrees that this NovemberBritain had the heaviest November rainfall for years. Certainly this is borne out in Hooky where,although mercifully spared flooding, we had 129.75 mm. This the highest figure recorded here for this month since my records begin in around 1970. The nearest November rainfall to this was in 1984 but that fell a good centimetre short. Does this tell us anything about Globing Warming? Carbon emissions? I wonder….
October’s rainfall figures were 46.25 mm for the month, the monthly average for October over the past ten years being 88.95 mm. Only a particularly heavy fall on October 21-22 being notable. Nevertheless , October was nearly twice September’s meagre fall of 25.5 mm.
Christopher Barry
