its been very sunny today here despite thunderstorms rolling on past to my north,  but i guess that is to be expected given we are on the southcoast.

Today's weather is quite typicall for these parts to be honest during showery type weather. The convection happens just on the mainland and coastal areas within around 4 miles of the sea stay dry and sunny.

Today's sky

  free photo host 

Often true, but not when the gradient wind is this brisk. The upwind line is what you need to watch for when usual convective behaviour is disrupted.

Look at this from 3.45pm. The coast of Sussex gets a douche, and even Pompey gets a hit! 

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/observation/rainfall-radar#?map=Rainfall&fcTime=1590201600&zoom=8&lon=-1.59&lat=50.32

'Course, by the time you read this, the link will have updated. Shame we can't post screenshots.

This is from today :)  

That shower your referring to had a couple drops in the wind which was the most all afternoon. The shower passed north of here towards Cosham area which is on the mainland. :) 

 I guess the radar shows what's falling, higher up, but that doesn't mean it all reaches the ground.

Reading University weather station has already recorded its sunniest Spring on record (records only go back to 1956).

The previous record was 604.6hrs in 1990. 

This article states that the total was already over 610 hours by 20 May

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-summer-sun.html

This Spring is likely to bring higher sunshine totals than the summers of some years.

I tracked down the data page for Reading University. It doesn't update at weekends so the latest data is up to 09z on Fri 22 May.

http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/weatherdata/Reading_monthly_summaries.html

Total sunshine to date this month is 218.8hrs and for the Spring as a whole 640.2hrs.

This is the data from the traditional Campbell Stokes recorder which I think is what they use for the official data. They also have an electronic Kipp & Zonen recorder which has a higher total of 675.2hrs.

There has been limited sun from Friday to today but we should probably get at least 15 hours from those three days. For the final week of May my Weatherpro app is predicting about a further 90 hours.

So best guess at this point is that the Reading University site could get close to 750hrs of sun for the whole of Spring this year which is 23% higher than the previous record.

No doubt places near the coast will see higher figures. Manston was 25 hours ahead of Reading in total for the months of March and April. Shanklin was 29 hours ahead of Reading in April alone.

So I would not be surprised to see one of the usual suspects - Shanklin, Bognor Regis, Eastbourne etc. exceeding 800 hours of sunshine this Spring, if the final week of the month is as sunny as currently forecast.

Sods law definitely in full effect here. The first time in history the country is locked down for weeks on end and we have the sunniest Spring on record by some distance (at least down here in the south).

If somewhere exceeds 800 hours this spring then as far as I can discover that would be a UK spring record back to 1929 when sunshine data was first collated

My map on the previous page at post #4 is the highest total I could find 799 hours at Selsey for March to May 1990 with Folkestone just behind at 791 hours

Some of the south coast resorts have around 660-670 hours at the moment and with 8 more days to go and a sunny forecast they could get another 90-100 hours but my guess that it will be too big an ask to get over 800 but we shall soon see

That same year Eastbourne saw 753 hours of sunshine between March & May. 

Correct; Lanky pointed that out in post #4. 

He doesn't mention Eastbourne just a general area south of Selsey. To be honest if the metoffice released other stations such as southsea or those on the IOW for example, then i think the 800hr would be beaten.

I have read somewhere that the Met Office use all the station data available at the time in order to construct these 1km and 5km grid analyses but of course there is also a degree of interpolation needed to get every grid square populated

If you right click the map I showed in post #4 to get a much bigger image you can see the data for the IOW and Eastbourne quite clearly and the two locations I mentioned above (Selsey and Folkestone) are just ahead of them for this particular season

Ah yes thank you pointing out the map enlarges  Pretty impressive 755 hrs for Southsea.

It is a shame though that historic data isn't easily available for some more of those stations as i suspect there will have been other incidences of sunshine records hitting close to the 800hr mark in spring. Southsea for example was recording way back at the beginning of the last century.

Here comes the  Sun King.

We're about to get over 100 hours of sunshine in the next 6 days in many places. Will be good to see the sunshine totals for this May.

268 hours at Bournemouth so far this month. That is 138% of the mean. Only 1% of mean rainfall.

I've just discovered that as at 8am this morning, a minimum total of just another 14.6 hours of sunshine was needed to be recorded at Edinburgh Gogarbank between then and the end of this month, in order for this spring to go down as the sunniest spring on record at that particular station.

That record was only set as recently as 2015 with a total of 501.7 hours of sunshine altogether but given that the forecast for the next few days is still mainly sunny, it looks as though that record is about to be broken at that particular station after all.

I must stress though, that this was a very unlikely scenario just over a week ago when the sunshine totals for this month were struggling to even exceed the long term 1981-2010 May average for that particular station. However, the sunshine totals for this month have really picked up over recent days, and that has now been enough to bring this record for the spring into touching distance.

Added to that as well, is the fact that this spring is also about to go down as our driest spring on record at that same station and in terms of breaking records, this spring has been very remarkable indeed.

BBC weather with Matt Taylor about 20 minutes or so ago confirms this spring as the sunniest on record for the UK, with 2 days to spare.

Lets have some good stats from all those in the know on this.

May has been amazing and April pretty good as well.

In addition to what I have found out about this spring being likely to be the sunniest spring on record at Edinburgh Gogarbank, I have also just discovered that there is also an outside chance of this month being the sunniest May on record at that same station.

For that to happen, just another 23.0 hours of sunshine or more need to be recorded there between now and the end of this month as at 7pm this evening. That is obviously a very tall order with just two days left of this month after today, but that is a perfectly achievable target given how sunny it has been here recently.

For the record, the sunniest May on record at that station as it stands just now, occurred back in 2009 with a total of 218.9 hours of sunshine. The one thing which could scupper that is the fact that the wind is likely to take on more of an easterly component over the coming days.

That could result in some easterly muck being brought in from off the North Sea, especially during the early part of the day which could be enough to scupper those record chances, even if those last two days of this month end up being mostly sunny in the end.

However, we have had a lot of easterly winds during this spring and yet, we haven't had anything like as much easterly muck from that as what normally get from that. This means that there is every chance that we could still manage to escape any low cloud from off the North Sea and if that happens, our sunniest May on record could be very much on here.

The record was broken some time ago. Met Office blog post from today:

https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2020/05/29/spring-2020-the-sunniest-on-record-in-the-uk/

For the UK as a whole the Spring record is 555.3hrs in 1948. As at 27 May we had recorded 573hrs this month. So the UK record would probably have gone on Monday. We will certainly exceed 600hrs when the final numbers are in.

Here is a chart of the sunshine data across the country this Spring

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EZL31FfWsAAknuH?format=png&name=900x900

This clearly shows that Eastbourne will not be taking the record this Spring. My money is on either Bognor or Shanklin getting ahead of the figures for Manston below.

Sunshine at Manston up to 28 May

May 287.2hrs
Apr 260.3hrs
Mar 185.7hrs

Spring 733.2hrs

With 3 days to go the total should end up close to 770hrs. Surely somewhere will beat the magic 800 figure.

Reading University is now over 300hrs for May (including today) standing at 303.1hrs

Total for the Spring at Reading Uni (with 2 days to go) is 724.5hrs. They should reach at least 750hrs. I doubt anywhere that far inland has seen 750hrs in Spring before.

Also incredibly dry this month. Benson has so far recorded no measurable rain. For England as a whole May is the driest on record since 1896.

The England and Wales precipitation series (EWP) goes further back to 1766. Driest May on record was 1844 with 7.9mm. So far in 2020 we have had 9.6mm which is the second driest on record. This is followed by 1896 with 12mm and 1991 with 13.7mm.

I believe it is yes but not sure which stations are included.

Yes the North Sea cloud has been well behaved this year. We normally by now have had several infuriating days where cloud stays here well into the afternoon and we are nearer the Irish Sea than the North Sea. The forecast usually underdoes the extent of the cloud making it sound like an eastern coastal counties issue adding to the frustration . But this year no issues. Today it disapeared before 8am.

44.5 + 72.9 + 136.3 + 224.5 + 212.2 = 690.4 hours (up to 27th).

To avoid 2020 being the dullest year on record we need to beat 1,208 hours from 1954 (at the height of the London smogs), another 518 hours. Across 218 days - from 28th May, and it’s a leap year which has of course helped, that’s 2.3 hours per day.

To beat 2003 as sunniest on record (1,586 hours) we need another 895 hours. That’s harder: 4.1 hours per day. Doesn’t sound much but this is UK which includes Scotland and Northern Ireland, including Aberdeen where based on richardabdn average annual sunshine is 0.3 hours, all falling on weekdays.

Another thing which comes to mind is the fact that we are also less than a month away from the summer solstice which means that we are now well into the time of year when the available amounts of sunshine which any location can get on any given day is more or less at its maximum for the entire year.

Here in Edinburgh, we started the year off with a substantially duller than average January at Edinburgh Gogarbank, but even that probably won't matter too much in terms of our sunshine totals for the entire year since that came shortly after the last winter solstice at the time of year when the available amounts of sunshine at any location on any given day were at their minimum for the entire year.

We then had around average amounts of sunshine during February with every single month since then being sunnier than average overall. This means that most of this year's sunshine in terms of the overall anomaly for each month has actually been coming when there has been more available sunshine which we can get which means that even if the autumn and early part of next winter end up being substantially duller than average, it is going to make it very difficult for this year as a whole, to end up being anything other than sunnier than average overall as a result, especially if all of this really sunny weather which we are currently getting, continues quite far into the summer as well.