Worst summers for Manchester

Manchester Summer Indices 

1954 143
1907 147
1956 155
1912 156
1924 158
2012 164
2008 168
1987 169
1946 170
1909 171
1931 173
1978 173
1980 173
1920 174
1923 174
2007 174
1927 175
1948 176
1938 177
1922 178
2011 179
1985 180
1958 184
1972 185
2020 185 (up to 27th August)
1916 188
1986 189
1965 189
2016 189
1910 190

Raining, gloomy and dark, 14c absolute filth

Those scarce warm days this summer gave false hope of something better and settled, never materialised.

Aberdeen Football Club is playing a team from the Faeroes at Pittodrie tonight and the visitors should more than feel at home in the ludicrous conditions we are having to endure. Day after day of depressing featureless gloom accompanied by horror 13C highs just like typical summer weather in those bleak, isolated and remote islands 

Another staggeringly bad 3-day spell since Tuesday with essentially no sunshine at all. The last 15 days have been diabolical in a way that only post-2006 summers can be. 30.9 hours of sun since the 13th which compares with 32.2 hours during the same period of last November. That was an extremely wet and dull November as well so it's beyond comprehension that we can now expect summer weather to be even worse than a bad November. Taking into account the differing daylight hours would make the comparison even more preposterous 

No summer in my life until 2007 produced anything this dire. It's just unreal. 10 out of the last 15 days have produced no more than half-an-hours sun. Only one August in my records had that many in its entirety and that was 2011 which I would rate as the worst August of my lifetime but this revolting month is causing me to reassess that. It's also the most that any month this year has recorded so far 

Could be that the final week fails to even reach 15C which has only happened once before in August in the past 60 years and that was in the ridiculously cold 1986. Even that month, despite the cold​, was nowhere near as dull as this grim, gruesome catastrophe. August 2008 didn't have this much soul destroying featureless cloud either despite having less sunshine.

The frequency with which we are seeing spells of weather so bad, that they should only belong in sub-polar regions, is alarming and concerning. There simply aren't any antidepressants strong enough to make this seem remotely tolerable

Will they be treated to a meal of whale blubber after the match?

Amen to that. As late as 11am today was down to be a bit drizzly this afternoon for an hour or so but no significant rain until early tomorrow.

It has lashed down for five hours straight, and it's added to the minor flooding which has developed bit by bit over the past few weeks.

We've planned a day in York tomorrow and the forecast up to yesterday, when we decided to book a boat trip, was raining to around 11 then scattered showers. And now? Rain from 8am to 5pm. EDIT: Oh no, it's changed again in the last two hours. Rain 8 until 2. Yippeee!

I know I shouldn't be surprised and I am well aware of the limits of forecasting, but this is a real shocker, here at least.

Yes, I fully agree with that.

Today's weather system had been forecast to dive away towards the SE, which meant that today's latest event was originally supposed to be more or less, an England and Wales only event.

However, that clearly hasn't happened and as a result, today has ended up being yet another wet and miserable day here in Edinburgh.

Isn't it funny that whenever we need to be getting some rain, these weather systems will then tend to miss us to our south whereas these times such as now where we have had far more enough rain for now, is when these systems then end up coming further north than expected (as has been the case today) and thus, providing us with a direct hit in this part of the world?

Hi, Simon. Sorry for hijacking the thread but welcome back to the Premier League. 

Cheers! It's been a long time.

Hopefully we'll do better than the forecasters

As Noodle has quoted a song in a post above, I have been reminded of Vera Lynn - Whale meat again, don't know where, don't know when...

Sneaked up quietly, but I did mention back at the end of May that the summer was shaping up to be a wet one. Its been an horrific second half to August and this follows a cool and unsettled July.

All in all, this summer has been largely forgettable with the exception if one brief burst of heat.

I'm not going to remember this summer for that heat, it is going to be for the thunderstorms. Best summer for storms for some years.

Yet another ridiculously awful Saturday with no redeeming features whatsoever. Grey, windy and stupidly cold at only 11C. Absolutely and utterly REVOLTING. Shouldn't be seeing anything this bad until late September at the earliest but it's just the same horrific filth day in day out.

Four out of five write-off Saturdays in August is incredulously bad and makes this the most miserable and depressing August I've experienced. Not only that but I would place it in my top 5 list of most detested months ever along side March 1996, December 2002, June 2007 and July 2012 

There are no words to do justice as to how awful this extraordinarily bleak and depressing second half of August has been. Only two or three days where it has been acceptable to sit out in the garden for even the briefest of periods. Barely any sun, highest temperature since the 13th a woeful 18.9C and most days in the past week feeling cold not just cool which is ludicrous for August.

Looks like it will just pip 2014 as the coldest second half of August since 1986 but with far less sun. Touch and go whether we will complete only the second sub-15C August week in the last 60 years.  The highest it has reached since last Monday has been just 14.4C but a max of 15C is forecast for the coming Monday.

There have only been two better than average weeks the entire season: 20th -26th June and 6th-12th August. Neither brought anything memorable. Once again it is a summer memorable for all the wrong reasons. The stupidly cold, dull and windy second half of August and the equally poor sub-polar first half of June which brought day after day of single figure temperatures like nothing I had ever experienced before. Felt like living in Svalbard.

Talking of Svalbard, only six days in this dismal summer here managed to reach the 21.7C that was recorded in Longyearbyen on 25th July. They had four consecutive days reaching 20C in July which we failed to achieve in either July or August and only once in June (23rd-26th). Desperate beyond comprehension when you can't do any better than a bleak, polar wilderness unfit for human habitation

Just what the hell is happening to our summers? 

Remarkable the similarities between this summer and the summer of 2004.

Both Augusts are going to go down as warm wet months, they even share the drop in the running August CET value at the back end of the month.

Manchester Summer Indices, temperatures have kept it from being even lower

1954 143
1907 147
1956 155
1912 156
1924 158
2012 164
2008 168
1987 169
1946 170
1909 171
1931 173
1978 173
1980 173
1920 174
1923 174
2007 174
1927 175
1948 176
1938 177
1922 178
2011 179
1985 180
2020 182

Thank you Kevin. I always look forward to your Manchester Summer Index.

I lived the first half of my life in the Manchester area, before moving in the mid Eighties to Worcestershire. I found the Index very close to my memories of Manchester summers (although I had 1969 down as much better than the index, but this is just memories). Since moving, in most years the index bears out what I have experienced, some years not so much, the difference between Manchester and Worcestershire is more marked in some summers than others.  I still have many friends and family in Manchester and see them often, so I do get a feel of what weather they have been having. 

I have actually thought this summer was OK. Plenty of high temperatures and thunderstorms (my 2 favourite types of summer weather). I only keep temperature records and the mean maximum averages have been reasonable, especially August which would have been a great month if the temperatures hadn't fallen away in the final 10 days.

Sounds like opposite of here where it wasn’t warm but was definitely wet. A mediocre summer would be a very flattering description for the season just passed for this location compared with LTA or what would count as a decent summer up here. Disappointing and underwhelming throughout. 

Must be pretty localised because the South East England regional total has it the wettest August since 2015 and about 148% of the August average.

What precise area does the South East England regional total cover? It does look as though there have been some considerable variations in rainfall across it, as we only had 59% of the local LTA in August, and I think that 'fairweather' posting from Essex has also seen a dry month.  I think it comes down to the rain having come in storms of torrential rainfall which dumped large amounts in some places and nothing at all in others.  If the official recording stations have been in places that got hit by the heavy rainfall, this would give an imprecise view of the overall picture.

It is also worth noting that here the year total to end August is exactly 100% of the LTA total for that period, which would give the impression that rainfall had been normal in this part of the country.  But that would be entirely misleading because the figure was substantially affected by the very wet February (275% of monthly LTA) which was followed by weeks of desiccating NE winds which turned the ground from a quagmire to bone dry, combined with 5 months of below average rainfall (Apr-Aug here has given 59% of LTA for those months), resulting in an agricultural drought.

This all just goes to show that averaged statistics (whether averaged over space or time - or both) can give a misleading impression if local and temporal variations from the average are not taken into account.  It all reminds me of the joke that someone with his head in an oven and his feet in a freezer is, on average, perfectly comfortable.

I agree with the other posts from the SE. We could see storms over the Downs inland, my sister in the New Forest reported flash floods on a couple of occasions in August but it stayed bone dry here along the coastal strip. The lawn is still showing bare patches but I think it will come round. 

Brian in Hign Wycombe posted a rather complacent post in mid-August about having no more need to water the garden when I was still pouring large quantities onto ours, and continued to do so until just over a week ago.

Perfectly describes the Summer over here too. Sunny first 3 weeks of June and with some nice thunder at times, but it went rapidly downhill in the last week of that month and hasn't recovered since.