{"id":1178,"date":"2018-06-04T11:06:02","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T10:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/?p=1178"},"modified":"2019-06-08T22:53:46","modified_gmt":"2019-06-08T21:53:46","slug":"uk-weather-tracker-may-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marriott-stats.com\/nigels-blog\/uk-weather-tracker-may-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"UK Weather Tracker #16 – May 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hope you enjoyed the sunniest May on record!\u00a0 It was also the second warmest May on record though the Met Office chose to sow confusion by claiming it was the warmest on record.
\nThe meteorological year starts in December which is why December appears as the 1st data point in the charts below.\u00a0 More information on the layout of the charts can be found in this pos<\/a>t.\u00a0 Points lying between the upper and lower deciles are shown as open black circles, points lying between the decile and minimum\/maximum are shown as solid black circles and any month with a new record is shown as solid black squares.<\/p>\n

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Normally, May sees one hour more sunshine per day than April but we had 4 hours more this time to end up just beating the previous sunniest May of 1989.\u00a0 At the same time, we had the second warmest May on record just behind the warmest May of 2008.\u00a0 Note that I use the 24 hour average temperature (12.1 degrees celsius in May) but the Met Office does publish two other statistics.\u00a0 These are the average daily maximum and the average daily minimum which I do track but I don’t normally report on them.<\/p>\n

The Met Office chose to highlight that the average daily maximum temperature across the UK in May was 17.2 degrees celsius<\/a> which beat the previous highest May figure of 1992.\u00a0 The average daily minimum temperature was 6.9 degrees celsius which was the 10th warmest on record.\u00a0 So let’s put the 3 figures together and paint a picture.\u00a0 The hottest part of the day was the warmest on record, the coldest part of the day was top decile so on average we had the second warmest May on record.\u00a0 In fact the difference between the maximum and minimum was quite large (1oth largest) but this can be shown to be entirely due to the amount of sunshine which makes sense.\u00a0 Given that we had the sunniest May on record, it is not surprising that maximum temperatures should have been so high.\u00a0 In general, during Spring and Summer, sunshine is closely correlated with maximum temperatures but in the winter, there is much less correlation.<\/p>\n

Now that Spring is over, it is time to update my regional chart of temperatures.\u00a0 At the moment, I do not track regional statistics every month but I do track temperature by season.\u00a0 \"\"The chart shown here, is the Z-Score for each region for the 2018 winter.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Overall, Spring 2018 was the 28th warmest on record.\u00a0 This is consistent with the step change in our climate since the 1990s but otherwise unremarkable.\u00a0 The regional chart shows that for most of England, it was warmer than this but Scotland, Northern Ireland and parts of Wales, it cooler than this.\u00a0 Unlike the winter this year<\/a>, I was living in a region (S.West & Wales) entirely representative of the UK.<\/p>\n

PS: If you bookmark this link<\/a>, it will be refreshed with the latest month’s data.\u00a0 I usually post the update in the first week of each month.<\/em><\/p>\n

Click the relevant month to see my other weather trackers.\u00a0 Alternatively click the Weather Tracker hash tag below this post to see a list of all such posts.<\/p>\n