I've just been looking back over our sunshine data for this summer so far (I have used the data for Edinburgh Gogarbank for that) and they don't make for great reading at all.
We are now just over a week into this month which means that we are roughly a quarter (which is 25%) of the way into it. This means that for us to be on course to get a sunnier than average month, we would need to have had at least a quarter or our average August sunshine by now.
Yet as at 7am BST (06:00 UTC) this morning, we have had a total of just 27.4 hours of sunshine during this month so far, which is only 18.8% of our 1991-2022 August average, and we have been averaging just a rather pathetic 3.91 hours of sunshine per day during this month so far.
In order for this month to be sunnier than average overall, we will now need to be averaging more than 4.93 hours of sunshine per day between now and the end of this month.
That should be quite an achievable target, but we have been well short of that during this month so far, and it should also be borne in mind that that the days are now getting a lot shorter at an increasing rate which is therefore only going to make that task a lot more difficult.
Looking back over the rest of this summer, we had a total of 145.3 hours of sunshine during June which was 91.2% of our 1991-2020 June average, and a total of 146.3 hours of sunshine during July which was 90.9% of our 1991-2020 average.
Over the summer as whole, this adds up to 145.3 + 146.3 hours of sunshine plus that total for this month so far which as at 7am this morning, was 319.0 hours of sunshine and that is only 68.5% our 1991-2020 summer average.
So far during this summer, we have had an average of 319.0 ÷ (30 + 31 + 7) or 319.0 ÷ 68 which is 4.69 hours of sunshine per day but in order for this summer to be sunnier than average, we need to averaging at least 6.13 hours of sunshine per day between now and the end of this month.
That is already a very tall order which is made even tougher by the rapidly decreasing hours of daylight at this time of the year.
For such a high pressure dominated summer which has delivered very little in the way of rainfall, those are very poor statistics indeed and in fact, we have even had a number of easterly dominated summers (this hasn't been such a summer) in the past where just about every day has started off with a lot of easterly muck coming in from off the North Sea, but with those summers still ending up up being sunnier than what have witnessed during this year due to the manner in which the Sun has usually always broken though by those afternoons.
At the same time, the fact that we can't even get a sunnier than average in such a high pressure dominated summer which hasn't even had anything in the way (or at least, very much) in the way of any sort of cooling easterly winds from off the North Sea, let alone a sunnier than average summer shows clearly, it is obviously asking too much for us to be able to get any of that in this part of the world these days.
Edited by user
Monday, August 8, 2022 6:58:50 AM
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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.