Umborne Weather in July 2012
In some respects the weather in July this year mirrored the pattern that we had experienced in May. Cold and wet for the first half and then warmer and drier for the second part. The warmest day occurred on the 25th of both months. July’s figure of 29.2C exceeded that of May by 0.2C and made it the highest maximum temperature since July 27th 2006. This sudden heat was a nostalgic reminder of how we all imagined
that our summers were going to become with the effects of Global Warming. It’s now becoming increasingly clear to me that our climate is suffering due to the rapidly rising temperatures in the Arctic and the resulting melting of sea ice and indeed the surface ice on Greenland.
All in all, the warm spell was not as long or as intense as it had been in May, and July was certainly the coolest I have recorded this millennium with an average mean temperature of just over 15C. Actually the mean maximum temperature managed to exceed 20C, a figure which was not achieved in 2007 or 2009. There were one or two chilly nights when
the clouds and rain finally cleared. The lowest being 5.2C on 21stfollowed closely by 5.3 on 30th. Last year’s cool and dry month recorded 4.7C as the minimum temperature on two successive nights.
But of course, the real headline of the month was the flooding that affected us on the 7th. (Please see our photos on this web site). Totals of between 92 and 100mm of rain were
recorded locally in the forty eight hours of the 6th-8th. The flooding was all the more severe due to the fact that the first four days of the month had given us about half of the month’s average rainfall total, and this in turn was on top of the unprecedented wetness of June. I recorded rainfall on fifteen of the first sixteen days of July, leaving just 10.8mm of the total monthly figure of 164.1mm to fall thereafter. In last month’s report I took consolation from the fact that we would need another 200mm for the May-August period this year to top the figure recorded for those four months in 2007. With August’s average figure of about 70mm, we are going to need a dry month not to exceed that.However, July 2012, believe it or not, was not quite as wet as that of July 2009.
Peter at Pottlelake
