June Weather report 2012:

I have a tendency, don’t we all, to refer to a month as
‘good’, ‘poor’, ‘average’ etc. Perhaps we apply human attributes to
natural forces.  A good person; one who helps others etc. A good child;
one who is obedient, like a dog!

However, we come to expect a certain standard of
‘behaviour’ from the atmosphere that we live in at certain times of the
year.  So, when we have sixteen hours every day when the sun could be
shining, we expect that there will be more sunshine than in January,
when the sun can only possibly shine for eight hours a day. Couple this
with an optimism that says the weather tends to be more settled or
stable in the summer months. So that even if the sun shone continuously
in January we could get 240hours as a total, which is about the same
figure as we might expect from a typical June. These days however,
things can never be expected to follow any normal pattern. A few years
back, we had a sunnier February (28 days) than the following August with
its 31 days! Now it really looks as if January this year may well have
been sunnier than June.

I have never recorded such a wet month, or indeed a month
with over 200mm. June’s total was 213mm. There were just three days when
no rain fell at all, and several significant falls, notably the 72 hours
from 5th-8th when 96.4mm fell. This in itself was about twice the
amount that one might expect in an ‘average’ June. Another bad patch,
about a fortnight later notched up a further 67.5mm.

Temperature wise, this was the coolest June since 2002.
Not that the sunless days were anything like warm, but the continual
cloudiness helped keep the nights comparatively milder than many Junes,
a degree on average higher than last year. The overall minimum of 3.9C
on the 20th followed one of the few sunny days that occurred. The
highest temperature of 22.2C on the 28th was quite unremarkable,
although it coincided with some high humidity which made it feel warmer
than it was.

Back to the rainfall for a moment. Nationwide, people are
recording that the second quarter of 2012 was the wettest on record.
However, just to put things into another perspective, May to August 2007
gave a combined total rainfall of about 467mm. The first two months of
this sequence this year have totted up about 267mm.

Peter at Pottlelake