Local Forecasts, History & Records
Occasional Weather Equipment Feature – The Campbell-Stokes Sunshine Recorder. This is the Campbell-Stokes Sunshine Recorder. It’s essentially a big glass ball that focuses the sun’s rays onto a curved calibrated card and burns a trace when the sun is out. The length of the burn mark is then measured against the scale on the card, revealing the length of bright sunshine …
Storm Ciara batters the UK After spending a fair bit of time concentrating on the wind speeds, we sort of forgot about the rain that Storm Ciara was going to deliver. Thankfully we missed some of the squall lines that hit further south. My total for rainfall was only 22.9mm, but obviously far more fell on the catchment areas on …
January 2020. Very mild. Anticyclonic for the first week and again from the middle of the month until the 26th. The month saw an intense anticyclone develop; London’s highest ever pressure of 1049.6 mbars was recorded at Heathrow on the 19th, and then 1050.5 was recorded at the Mumbles, Swansea, on the 20th. There were fewer frosts than usual and …
The recent trend has been that winter months in Durham have been on the dry side. January 2020 was very much in that vein. It was also very mild for first week. On the 8th/9th there was overnight snow in the High Pennines, although only rain fell elsewhere. This was heavy in places. This was actually the wettest day in …
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 …
In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m running a weather blog here at Durham Weather, and even though every man and his dog has voiced their opinion on the subject of Climate Change, up until now i’ve kept quiet about it. Suddenly, everyone is an expert It seems that in the last few years everyone has become bolder and added their …
The Weather of 2019 in Durham was quite noteworthy, particularly because there were some very warm temperatures and also the second half of 2019 was very wet. Some very mild temperatures in February Once again, the winter was on the mild side, especially in February when the 20 degC mark was breached in the UK for the first time. In …
This was a video produced by Channel 4 in 2007, supposedly debunking Global Warming/Climate Change. Discussion ensued on The North East Forum at the time. This was in 2007 and the warming has got worse since then. It’s an interesting discussion and fairly typical of arguments at the time. Here’s a transcript. Barcode : I notice the people who were …
Here’s a song by one of my favourite artists, Loudon Wainwright III. It was written during the cold spell in 1987, when Loudon was living in England. Loudon Wainwright III – You don’t want to know (1987) It was colder than a witches tit, colder than a Polar bear’s nose, Colder than the shoulder of my old flame, colder …
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 …
After a late night of revelling, we decided it would be a good idea to go for a walk and get some fresh air. The obvious choice was to head down across the Silver Link Bridge and on into Pelaw Wood, then down to the river and into the City. It was a nice, crisp winters day, with plenty of …
December 2019. The month was unsettled with a very wet first three weeks, particularly in the east and south of England, where rainfall was close to double the average; overall rainfall was 116% of average. It was milder than average with a few colder interludes. It was sunny in the east but dull in the west, with 113% of the …