Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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UK Weather Tracker #67 – August 2022

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August 2022 was the 4th warmest, 4th sunniest & 10th driest on record.  When looking at average daily maximum temperatures, it was the 2nd warmest (after 1995) but the average daily minimums (at night) was only the 10th warmest.  I certainly noticed myself that nightime temperatures were not as bad as I’ve experienced in recent years and the wide temperature range was certainly welcome.

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 lower/upper deciles and minimum/maximum are shown as solid black circles and any month with a new record is shown as solid black squares.  All data is supplied by the Met Office and can be found here.

Every month I update 7 charts in all.  I rotate which 6 appear in the deck above and plot the 7th as a separate chart here.  Between March & October, Frost (chart G) is shown here since that is of least interest in these months.

How abnormal was August 2022?

Chart H displays my UK Weather Abnormality Index (see my May 2019 post for details).  The closer to zero this index is, the less abnormal and thus more “average” a month is.  The higher it is, the more abnormal the month is.  When the index is over 100%, we can describe the month as unusual in some way.

The abnormality index was 101% this month which is in line with the upper decile.  This is a result of the combination of 4th warmest, 4th sunniest and 6th widest temperature range on record for August.

Regional Variations

August marks the end of the meteorological summer.  I do not track regional statistics every month but I do track temperature by season for each region so I can update the regional temperature chart here.  This shows the Z-Score for each region for the 2022 spring.  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 above or below the long term average.

It was the 4th warmest summer in the UK overall but this varied by region.  East England experienced their hottest summer on summer whilst Scotland & Northern Ireland were nearer their upper deciles.

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 what the weather was back then.  Months highlighted in bold had an abnormality index exceeding 100% indicating unusual weather.  Alternatively click the Weather Tracker hash tag below this post to see a list of all such posts.

For analysis of trends by seasons, please click on the relevant season from this list or the Weather Trends hashtag below this post.

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