I have just studied the provisional figures for up to the 29th of July which were released by the Met Office, and was extremely surprised to notice that the rainfall totals for here just like July of last year, actually came out at around average in this part of the world. That goes completely against what Hadley's running totals for the month has been showing, which show the south of Scotland to be much wetter than average with the anomalies not all that far short of what was recorded in England and Wales during that same timescale. The Met Office maps however, have those wetter than average anomalies mostly confined to the extreme SW of Scotland and while there are a number of tiny wetter than average splodges dotted around the south of Scotland, this part of Edinburgh doesn't lie within one such splodge.
However, I am struggling to see how the Met Office has come up with this conclusion that this part of the world was not wetter than average during July. Last year, it was obvious that the month of July wasn't any wetter than average because whilst most of Scotland was wetter than average then, those Atlantic weather systems were usual always much weaker with very little in the way of that rain reaching us here on the eastern side of Scotland, apart from maybe, in the north-east. On its own terms, that would probably have resulted in a drier than average month, except that this was probably balanced out by some thunderstorms which we had during the second half of that month, which followed on from our only really hot day of that month where the temperature reached 28C.
This year, is a completely different story though because there has been some really miserable weather during this month, most notably, that washout weekend which we had a couple of weeks ago. However, there weren't been any hot spells during July of this year (which is shown to be a colder than average month here according to those stats), and that means that there weren't been any resulting thunderstorms. We have had a number of showers over recent days and during each of those days, we have always had at least one such shower of rain. However, apart from Saturday when we had that really torrential rain for over an hour or so at night whilst the rest of the country was enjoying much better weather, those 'showery' days have generally been dry apart from that.
Since it is only that one low pressure system which brought that washout weekend which hung around for any length of time, and since there hasn't actually been many frontal bands of rain crossing the country recently in spite of the current unsettled pattern of weather, that in addition to that lack of convective rainfall which I have just mentioned, may well be be why July came out a bit drier than how it would appear. Of course, I won't ever argue with actual statistics and if they say that the rainfall for July was about average, that is how it was. However, last month feels much more like a wetter than average month to me compared to the same month during last year, not that it matters anyway because this is still even with that, going to go down as a wet summer overall mainly as a result of what happened during June and in this part of the world, that will make this summer, our first wetter than average season since that washout winter of 2015/16 when there was all of that flooding, and which was the first winter for which the system of officially naming these storm systems which brought all of that heavy rain, was first introduced.
Edited by user
02 August 2017 06:28:49
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Reason: Not specified
The north of Edinburgh, usually always missing out on snow events which occur not just within the rest of Scotland or the UK, but also within the rest of Edinburgh.