A total of 82.5mm this month.

96.6mm My final total for this month. 

Final total here is 80.1mm which is 123% of the local average.

Final figure 81.0mm

Final July total here comes to a very wet 104mm, more than double our average of 51mm.

Checking my records, it is the 5th wettest July I've recorded going back to 1982.  Top 5 wettest July's here are

2002.....122mm

2012.....118mm

2009.....115mm

1992.....105mm

2017.....104mm

Unexpectedly finished just below average at 51.8mm (96%). Seem to avoid all the shower activity there was between the 27^th and 31^st with only a few light showers and nothing measurable at all during that five day period.

However because of June the summer rainfall is 169% of average and will finish above average no matter what August brings.

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.

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.

I wouldn’t take much notice of the Met Office maps as the scale used is too wide. They class 75% to 125% as average whereas 90-110% would be more reasonable to me. 120% is definitely wet and 80% dry as far as I’m concerned but they would shade both the same.

Also with rainfall there can be big differences over short distances. They have all of Aberdeen shaded as having over 75mm whereas it was much drier in the city than at Dyce. I only recorded 51.8mm, due to missing a lot of the showers, and Nigg had 56.4mm whereas there was about 80mm at Dyce.

July 2016 was hideous here. One of the very worst. 93.8mm of rain recorded on 24 days. It was just unrelentingly awful. Every weekend was a write-off. This July nowhere near as poor here apart from the week 19th to 26th which recorded over 60% of the month’s rain.

74mm at Swanston, my nearest site. Slightly above average

That sounds representative for where you are, but my local weather station is at the Botanic Gardens where the official record was set for Edinburgh's wettest ever June. However, their website hasn't been updated for a while and they also haven't supplied any rainfall data to other websites which use that data for a while either. That means that I don't officially know whether it was wetter or drier at this end of Edinburgh compared to where you are during July. However, I suspect that we might have been slightly drier here because a lot of the showery activity over recent days was either passing just to the south of us (and therefore more likely to have affected your side of the city) or just to the north of us.

This showery activity was then either missing us altogether where I live, or we were ending up just on the fringes of that, resulting in the rainfall being much lighter here or only lasting for very brief period at times, not even being enough to wet the ground.

 

I wouldn’t take much notice of the Met Office maps as the scale used is too wide. They class 75% to 125% as average whereas 90-110% would be more reasonable to me. 120% is definitely wet and 80% dry as far as I’m concerned but they would shade both the same.

Also with rainfall there can be big differences over short distances. They have all of Aberdeen shaded as having over 75mm whereas it was much drier in the city than at Dyce. I only recorded 51.8mm, due to missing a lot of the showers, and Nigg had 56.4mm whereas there was about 80mm at Dyce.

I have noticed when we get showers in the summer, they often seem to travel just to the north of Aberdeen. Not sure if you have a reason for this Richard?

 

I have noticed when we get showers in the summer, they often seem to travel just to the north of Aberdeen. Not sure if you have a reason for this Richard?

Not sure why but Dyce definitely picks up more showers than the city. However today it was the opposite way round. I had a very heavy shower this afternoon giving 4.2mm but only 0.8mm at Dyce.