Local Forecasts, History & Records
The Grace Darling storm – it’s the storm that immortalised a young woman and her father as national heroes, and it’s forever tied to the wild seas off the Northumberland coast. The actual storm doesn’t always get as much attention as the act of heroism itself, but it was a ferocious one – typical of the savage gales that can …
A Legendary Summer The summer of 1976 is legendary in the UK. It is often talked about as being ‘The Best Summer Ever’. As a 16 year old kid, there were lots of outdoor activities for us. Tennis was high on the list as the footie season had just finished (I’ve hardly played since 😳). I also remember my paper …
Three Rivers The geography of the North East of England is fairly uniform. Its westward flank is fortified by the rising spine of the Pennine Mountains, of which is embedded the origin point of its three main rivers, the Tyne, the Wear and the Tees, who flow down the hills eastwards into lower plains which then meet the North Sea. …
April 1917 – Perishingly cold at Durham Towards the end of World War 1, with fighting still going on in the trenches of France, April 1917 was quite extraordinary and was the coldest April recorded at Durham. The mean temperature for the month was 4.4C, which is -3.9C when compared to the 1990-2010 normal for April. This was 0.1C colder …
Our North East region of the UK still holds a few daily low temperature records in the archive. Most of the others are held by Scottish border stations, but these are the UK records for the dates below set in North East England. January 5th (1941) Houghall -21.1 degC (Durham University Observatory -13.3 degC). January 1941 was a very cold …
Two amazing photos of the frozen River Wear in Durham. The first, credited to Matthew Avery and Helen Avery is of the Cathedral across the frozen river. Although Helen originally thought it was from 1983, it’s almost certainly from a year earlier in the winter of 1981/82. December 1981 and the first half of January 1982 were very severe, particularly …
During the winter of 1983-84, there was a very snowy cold spell in the last week of January 1984. Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North of England were affected. Here’s a nice couple of black and white photos of the Fulling Mill and Cathedral taken by Craig Oliphant, who has very kindly given his permission to publish. Ice is just …
February 1986 (who remembers that one then?) It was one of the coldest Februaries ever recorded in modern times. Trevor Harley, in his famous weather summaries pages, describes February 1986 like this: February 1986. Extremely cold (-1.1C CET), with frequent light snowfalls. The second coldest February of the 20th century (after February 1947), and fourth coldest month of the twentieth …
The harsh realities of the brutal winter of 1946-47 are chronicled here in a writeup of The Time Traveller clipped from the Northern Echo some time in the 1980s The churches worry about war-devastated Germany, but most people say that Britain has enough to do in feeding herself. Rationing is worse than in the war – dwindling allowances of basic …
I was rooting about in the loft the other day and came across an old logbook of mine from when I lived in Ferryhill. It covered the period of late 1990 and early 1991. Immediately I took interest because there was a memorable period of heavy snowfall in February 1991. What is striking was that snow was 15” deep on …
This is archived content that used to be on the Met Office website, but isn’t anymore so I decided to resurrect it for posterity, adding my own comments and adaptions. It’s a page to refer to when people talk about the harsh winters of 1946-47 and 1962-63, the two UK winters that are used as benchmarks for how bad winter …
The article was produced following a bizarre weather event in July 1968. The month was a very active one for thunderstorms and featured one of the greatest falls of Saharan dust in the UK in recent times. From Trevor Harley’s Weather website: July 1968 Generally dull, cool, and wet, especially in the south, but with two exceptional thundery outbreaks. The …