Kev, are the figures for previous years just up to the current date, or are they final summer figures? What did we end up with last year?
I do like to see the Manchester index and I wish someone would do it for other areas for comparison! I know. I said that last year and you explained the formula that you use!
Rather interestingly, I was looking back on the archives and found an old post on the netweather forum from back in 2009 where KevBrads (who has the user name of weather-history over on the netweather forum) posted the formula which is used to calculate the Manchester Summer Index.
I'm sure that there has been at least one similar post here in the TWO forum as well, although I'm not sure how easy that would be to find because I'm sure that Brian cleared out a lot of the really old posts from here at around the time when he moved everything over onto a new server.
Anyway, the formula according to that post states that the Manchester summer index = 10 x [(mean maximum temperature during summer) + (total hours of sunshine) / 67 - (rain days)].
I'm not sure if that is the formula which he still uses for that today, but it was the one which he used back then in 2009 on that old netweather post.
A lot of the replies in that old netweather forum post questioned what he meant by rain days, but I always go by number of days where there has been at least 1.0 mm of rain since that is the only such measure against which there is an actual long-term 1981-2010 average as defined by the Met Office, although that might not necessarily be the same definition which Kev uses here.
Furthermore, I would also imagine that the data for this would need to come from a whole range of weather stations across Manchester which is after all, one of the largest cities in the UK (that would equally be true even for a much smaller city such as here in Edinburgh).
Kev could just use his own data for that and refer to the result as the Manchester Summer Index. However, Bolty (as just one other example) could equally use his own data for that and the result of this could equally be referred to as the Manchester Summer Index which would be equally valid since he is also within that same city of Manchester.
Yet, the results of that from Kev would technically be different from the results for that from Bolty because although this comes from two sets of data for the same city, this data would be different for each of those two locations and as we all know, data (such as rainfall amounts) can vary quite a lot even within the same local area. That is why I'm assuming that the data is taken from a number of locations spread right across Manchester, rather than just a single location.
Nevertheless, there is no reason why a similar thing can also be done for other towns and cities across the UK and it would be interesting to see what the results of that actually were.
Edited by user
05 July 2019 13:30:43
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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.