After 3 months of hot, dry and sunny weather, the UK returned to normal in August with a completely unremarkable month.
The meteorological year starts in December which is why December appears as the 1st data point in the charts below. More information on the layout of the charts can be found in this post. Points lying between the upper and lower deciles are shown as open black circles, points lying between the deciles and minimum/maximum are shown as solid black circles and any month with a new record is shown as solid black squares.
There is nothing of note to say about August but it does mark the end of the meteorological summer and as I explain in my Weather Trends post about the summer, the summer of 2018 has been one of best ever. However, this was not necessarily the case everywhere in the UK as shown in my regional chart of temperatures below. At the moment, I do not track regional statistics every month but I do track temperature by season. The chart shown here, is the Z-Score for each region for the 2018 summer. A Z-Score is simply the regional temperature minus the long term average for that region divided by the long term standard deviation for that region. Doing this, gets around the issue that each region is different on average whereas z-scores all have the same scale, namely number of standard deviations from the mean.
For the UK as a whole, Summer 2018 was the joint hottest on record tying with 2006. For the South East and North East, it was the hottest summer ever. Indeed, it appears that the East coast of England was hot throughout but on the west coast, it was hot but not extraordinary. In Scotland, there may well have been hot spells but overall the summer was not one to get worked up about.
PS: If you bookmark this link, it will be refreshed with the latest month’s data. I usually post the update in the first week of each month.
Click the relevant month to see my other weather trackers. Alternatively click the Weather Tracker hash tag below this post to see a list of all such posts.
