Olympic Weather Data-so Far

[johnholmes]

I thought it would be a nice idea to see how the weather has been for the Olympics, that is in London, using the St James Park data.

Maximum temperature each day and rainfall to 0100 BST the next day.

To me it turned out rather better than it was looking in the days immediately before the Opening Ceremony.

data is courtesy of Wx Online and in pdf format as using Excel is not something this site is happy with.

Olympic weather.xls

[Milhouse]

Considering the average max for London is about 23c, then only 1 day so far has failed to reach average.

[Interitus]

Interesting idea, the weather seemed reasonable for the most part apart from perhaps the rain during the women's cycling road race. Of course the weather affects the competitors differently. Some of the sprinters would have preferred higher temperatures whilst it may be uncomfortably warm for some in the men's marathon today, and lack of wind postponed some sailing whilst too much wind caused redrawing of lanes in rowing.

Below is the St James Park temperatures from daily synops and for comparison maxima from hourly data for St James Park, Olympic Park North and South, and Eton Dorney.Seems that the city centre was marginally warmer, particularly in cooler conditions, but with warmer sunnier weather possibly the urban heat island is enhanced and can become focused downwind and also the extensively concrete Olympic Park may overheat in strong insolation, but this would need further investigation.

	synop   hourly  North   South	Eton

1	23.8	23.5	22.7	22.6	22.7
2	22.6	22.0	21.5	21.0	21.2
3	23.3	22.4	21.4	21.6	21.7
4	22.6	22.2	20.8	21.2	20.1
5	21.7	21.1	20.9	21.9	21.2
6	23.0	21.9	20.9	20.9	20.7
7	20.9	19.9	19.4	20.2	18.9
8	24.0	23.6	24.8	23.8	23.6
9	27.8	27.4	28.2	26.5	26.6
10      26.2	25.8	27.7	27.0	27.6
11      23.5	23.2	22.0	22.1	24.2

Don't know if it's been posted already but the Met Office news blog has a number of interesting Olympic related articles -

http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/

Edited August 12, 2012 by Interitus