Amidst all of the talk about summer indexes on this thread, I have decided to dabble in my own one for here in Edinburgh.
To begin with, I had to learn what a summer index actually was and once I had done so, I then had to learn how to calculate that for any particular location or station (which might either by a station which someone maintains themselves, or a nearby official station which is used in the Met Office's statistics).
Since I am currently quoting all of my data for Edinburgh Gogarbank just now (which is my nearest official Met Office station), I decided to go for the same location for working out my summer indexes. In order to learn what a summer index actually is, I did a Google search for 'Manchester Summer Index' since that is the one which is most commonly used on this forum. When I did that, I found a post which KevBrads1 from this forum posted on another forum over at NetWeather on 31 May 2009 where he also very nicely, posted the formula for working that out.
From what I learned there, I discovered that in order to calculate a similar index for here in Edinburgh, I had to obtain some past data for the number of rain days, the max temps and the total sunshine hours. I then turned to WeatherOnline to try to obtain that data and from, I got enough information to be able to work out this year's Edinburgh Summer Index (as I have decided to call it) which is now shown and updated on every one of my posts on every forum on this site.
As for past years though, I have not been able to go all the way back in time as much as what Kev has been able to do, and have only been able to get enough data to be able to work out last year's index in addition to this year's one. When I did that, I discovered that last year's index was a bit higher at 152, although this year's figure will probably increase a little bit further as we progress further through this month, since the rest of this month's sunshine totals will still need to be taken into consideration for that.
What is interesting though is the fact that actual rainfall amounts have no affect at all on these indexes. We had the wettest June on record here in Edinburgh with July having just above average rainfall and yet, June only had 14 rain days (which means that even in the wettest June on record, it is still possible for more than half of the number of days in June to still be completely dry which is exactly what happened here) whereas July had 18 rain days.
That means that June actually had fewer rain days than July even though June was by far, the wettest month in terms of the actual rainfall amounts and that means that July had a much more detrimental effect on our summer index than what June had. Nevertheless, the fact that my own figure for this year's Edinburgh summer index is lower than that which has been recorded by others, just confirms how poor a summer this has been overall.
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.