This evening I've been thinking about my 'fun forecast' for the summer and how well it did regarding conditions IMBY (I have not the records, memory nor time to provide an adequate analysis regarding the whole of England, let alone the UK!)

It wasn't a particularly detailed affair but it called for a summer that tended to improve as it went along, saw rather a lot of rain until early to mid July and featured some decent plumes of hot air which tended to miss us to the east quite a lot but with a few good hits especially later on.

So, did the summer as a whole tend to improve as it went along? IMO it did, somewhat erratically, until mid-August, beyond which it really let itself go. The first two weeks of August were statistically the warmest of the summer here and didn't do too badly for sunshine either. A significant rainfall event meant that it was wetter than average, though, with a few cloudy days still cropping up. Yep, no fortnight delivered better conditions than that this summer!

There was rather a lot of rainfall until a little way beyond mid June, this persisting until mid July, beyond which it became rather wet again. So it turned drier a bit earlier than I envisioned and the drier conditions failed to last even to the end of July, let alone well into August not a particularly good call there, then.

A couple of decent plumes were noted this summer, one at the end of June (not expected in the grand scheme of things) and one to start off August (more like what I was imagining). Neither were as intense as I reckoned was possible in terms of ground temperatures, although the late June one did see 21C uppers scraping the south coast in the early morning and the highest maximum in the UK since 2006

All in all, I think I did alright for my own location. It was never as warm as I hoped for in any summer month, however; my CET predictions of 16.1C for June and 17.1C for July were a reflection of my fun forecast. My 16.1C prediction for August was not - this was me throwing my fun forecast out the window and expecting a rather unimpressive August instead