June 1960

[Optimus Prime]

I don't know whether this has been covered here, I can't find it.

June 1960 was one of the rare notably warm months of the 1960s with February and April 1961, May 1964, June 1966, October 1968 and 1969.

It had a CET of 16.1c, 2.0c above normal. The UK national average temperature was 14.4c and ranks 7th warmest in a series from 1914.

UK Mean Max 19.3c (5th warmest)

UK Mean Min 9.6c (12th warmest)

It was less warmer than average towards the South than what it was towards the North.

It was the final in a 17 month long sequence of warmer than average months. It contained notable thundery outbreaks through much of the month after the cool second week. There were local high temperatures rather then any nationwide high ones. 32c was reached at Wyton RAF (Cambridgeshire) on the 18th.

Any other information anyone can give on this month? It's a bit of a dark horse.

[reef]

Both January and February 1960 were both 0.1C below the 1921-1950 average but 1959 beforehand did have a rather impressive 11 month above average run.

Nevertheless June 1960 at 16.1C wasnt beaten again until June 1970. In fact in the 1960s, 22 out of 30 summer months were below average, 11 of which were more than 1C below!

Decadal means for the three summer months during 1960-69 (2000-2009 averages in brackets):

June: 14.6C (15.0C)

July: 15.4C (16.6C)

August: 15.2C (16.7C)

7 out of 10 summers during the decade were colder than summer 2007.

[Optimus Prime]

Just shows you how even the very warm Summer months of last decade meant iot was only 1c - 1.5c above the 60s July and August. Just goes to how how dramatic even a 1c warming has.

[Sprites]

The journal of meteorology has an article about the severe thunderstorms that occured during june 1960,a family member told me about the scarey storms during this period, i enquired to torro about any info on these storms and after jonathan webb looked into it ,the article was put into the jounal of meteorology

[damianslaw]

Yes a notably rare warm June of the 60's. Most summers in the 60's were poor by recent standards. This trend continued until the summer of 1975. Indeed June 1971 and 1972 were very cool. People moan about recent summers but in temperature terms they were not half as bad as some of the cool summers of the 60's, 70's and indeed the 85-88 summers, its just that those summers were not always quite as wet as recent summers, though some were like 1968, 1978 and 1985 and 1987. I think it is because in the main the summers between 1989-2006 have been very good for sunshine, warmth and dryness that our expectations for summer have been raised, though this has changed a little now thanks to the past 4 summers.

[Thundery wintry showers]

June 1960 was the penultimate June in a long run of warm, sunny Junes ending in "0", however this run came to an abrupt end in 1980.

The period 1957-1970 contained a surprisingly large number of notably sunny Junes (1957, 1959, 1960, 1962, 1967, 1968, 1969 and 1970), contrasting with the generally dull Julys and Augusts. Also notable was that only two of those Junes were particularly warm (1960, 1970), one was rather cool (1962) and the other 5 were characterised by warm days and cool nights. In addition rainfall during those Junes tended, averaged nationally, to be only a little below normal.

June 1966 (as Optimus Prime mentions above) was the other notably warm summer month of the 1960s but ironically most regions were dull and wet.

Regarding June 1960 itself, I can't find much info on it either, but the Wetterzentrale archive suggests a mostly anticyclonic month with high pressure centred close to the UK, but a cyclonic west to north-westerly second week, and some thundery-looking lows to the south around the 22nd-26th. Although rainfall, averaged nationally, was only a little below normal, it was locally very dry, e.g. just over 5mm rain at Durham all month, suggesting that much of the rain probably came from thundery downpours.

Trevor Harley has an account here- it rather confirms what I suspected above based on the WZ charts.