No air con, seems a rarity in these old Italian houses. Managed to sleep ok with adapted houses/shutters,  wine, fans and open windows  at night,  not perfectly,  but enough to not spoil the holidays. Opening the front door first thing at 7am @ 22c feels amazing though , cool down the house whilst we can. 

---

Well whilst Aberdeen suffers (although I see it was 23 C there today), Edinburgh wasn't bad again with some sunny spells and 21 C. We are still 1.5 C above normal.

Incredible temperatures around the Med still. Over 40 C over most of inland Spain, south of France and even 40 C in Florence!!

I'm heading to Italy for two weeks on 31st Aug so hoping it will be back down to 27/28 C

---

Well, I guess that Aberdeen would usually always appear to be suffering if you went by Richard's take on things all the time.

There is hardly ever an occasion when Richard isn't pessimistic about the weather in his part of the world and so, it's not surprising that he has made no mention whatsoever of 23°C being reached in Aberdeen.

If you compare that with Michael's (DoctorMog's) reports, it can sometimes be as though they were actually in completely different parts of the world, rather than in the same city and because of that, I'm almost certain that he would have been more likely to have picked up on yesterday's temperatures in Aberdeen in any report which he had given.

In fact, yesterday's temperature up there has been on a par with our warmest temperatures of this entire month here in Edinburgh.  So far, this month's highest temperature has been 23.9°C at your own local station at Swanston, 23.6°C at the botanic gardens and 22.77°C at Gogarbank. For the very heart of summer though, this isn't exactly all that great, even for here in Edinburgh.

In addition to that, this is almost certainly, now going to be our second sub 80°F summer here in Edinburgh in the last three years.  Even at Swanston (which I would normally expect to be warmer than the north of Edinburgh during the summer months), the temperature during this entire summer has never got above 25.9°C at any point in point, although that is actually slightly lower than the highest temperature at either the botanic gardens or Gogarbank during that same period.

The temperature anomaly for Edinburgh Gogarbank is around +1.2°C just now which is slightly less than what you have reported for the south of Edinburgh, but there isn't really much in it in that regard because the important thing in both cases is that this temperature anomaly is still more than 1°C warmer than average (if we assume that you have gone by the same 1991-2020 average which I have), although I must also add that this has been largely down to consistently warm overnight minimum temperatures as the daytime maximum temperatures haven't exactly been exciting in any way.

This month has also been much drier than average here and it looks as though that will now be the final outcome. As far as I can see, Swanston has been the wettest part of Edinburgh with a total of 56.3 mm of rain, but even that is still less than what most of the rest of the UK has been getting during this month. Nevertheless, the north of Edinburgh has been even drier than that and with just over a week left of this month, Edinburgh Gogarbank has still not even had half of its average August rainfall during this month so far.

What has really let the side down during this month though, has been the abysmal amounts of sunshine which we've been getting and in that regard, Richard from Aberdeen has actually made a very valid point. With just over a week to go of this month, Edinburgh Gogarbank has only had just the one completely sunless day during this month so far, but has only had just over a half of its average August sunshine up until now.

Swanston has done a bit better though in that regard with a total of 91.16 hours of sunshine and just the one completely sunless day but for the height of summer, even that isn't exactly all that great.

Adding all of that up, this hasn't actually been all that bad a month overall. This month hasn't been as good as June, but it also hasn't been as bad as July and so, I would still say that this summer overall, is on course to be a roughly average summer which we can't really refer to either way as being particularly poor or decent (this summer after all, hasn't been as decent as the last two summers which preceded it, but also hasn't been as bad as other summers such as 2007, 2012 and even 2020 which was a very wet summer here that came after the exceptionally sunny spring which marked the start of the COVID-19 lock-downs).
 

---

For context the horrible grey Monday had 7 hours of sunshine and the max temperatures have been in the low 20s here for the past 4 days. Today may not be quite as warm but it looks pleasant enough.

---

Looks to cool down significantly next week. As it stands 12 days in a row 37c plus in Florence, average August high 35c (+3c), July similar. Relentless heat.  Heading to the beach today where it will be cooler! 

 

---

Yet another hideous Sunday of vile grey skies, drizzle, cool temperatures and wind 🤢 Once again nothing like what a NW'ly would have produced at this time of year which would have been clear skies overnight and a min well into single figures. Wouldn't have been at all unusual to see a sub 5C min by now as opposed to the rank 12.3C min from which it's barely risen despite being mid-morning 🤬

Absolutely shocking. I haven't seen a properly sunny Sunday here since February. The only Sunday all year to manage 10 hours was 2nd July and that was when I was in Portugal and even that had a short shower 🙄

3.76 hour daily average for Sunday this year - more than 1 hour behind the second worst performing day which is Thursday with 4.78 hours 🤢 Saturday recovered from rock bottom thanks to a good run through June and July but the lack of decent Sundays still means the overall weekend average falls well short of the weekday average.

July wasn't great but it was better than August which has been a really tedious month. Weekends were better and there were 3 days which managed 12 hours sun. Not been a single day managed that in August for the first time since 2011 👎

In fact I'm struggling to recall a single occasion all month when there was a clear sky even for the briefest of periods. As a result the sunniest day has managed only a pitiful 10.3 hours sun which is only just ahead of 2008 which had 10.2 hours on the sunniest day 🤢 It's so poor that even September hasn't recorded such a low total for the sunniest day since 2010 🤢

---

The nicer spell in August never reached these parts.

Was lucky to have been away last week (got home yesterday) but here, a week that had looked promising was unsettled and coolish. 

We had some torrential downpours overnight (I've seen some clips from Creamfields, taking place not that far away)

Forecast going forwards isn't exactly inspiring. Output showing the potential odd glimpse of promise as high pressure builds in, only for it to be knocked away from the NW after a depressingly brief 24-48 hours.

It's been an appalling summer (away from the SE, apparently) barring that spell covering late May and first 3 weeks of June.

Maddening how frequently over the past almost two decades the school summer holidays have coincided with the poorest weather of the summer; either the summer has been crap overall (2007-2012) or the best spell(s) have been in the period covering June to mid/late July.


​​​​​

---

Summer has gone ,its over! The last couple of days or so,since thursday have felt distinctly autumnal with daytime maxes only briefly touching 18c for a an hour or two plus the last 3 nights have been noticably chilly. Except for June, summer 2023 is one to forget.

In my books, May is technically not even a part of summer as it is part of the meteorological spring, so you're really only talking about three weeks of decent weather in your part of the world during the whole of this actual summer.

Here in Edinburgh, we're talking about an even shorter period of decent weather at around that time, at least in terms of it actually being all that warm because we had a lot of cool winds coming in from off the North Sea during the first part of June, so it took quite a while to eventually warm up here.
 

---