April 2020 was the sunniest on record for England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole. The rain at the end of the month brought an end to the overall warm and dry theme.
April 2020 was the sunniest April on record for the UK. It was also very warm and very dry, and we all had to stay at home. The main time of UK lockdown, which started late March and was still continuing by early May, meant that an incredible month of British weather was seen from the window or garden by many or perhaps helped encourage people to venture out for their daily exercise.
Sunshine
The UK Met Office issued their monthly figures showing 224.5 hours of sunshine beating the previous UK record from April 2015 which was 211.9 hours.
Records started in 1929. England, Scotland and Northern Ireland had their sunniest April. Wales recorded its third sunniest April behind 2007 and 2015. The Isle of Wight had 279 hours of sunshine, that is over 9 hours per day on average.
Temperatures
It was significantly warmer than average for most of the country and the fifth warmest April on record. At times it was still chilly by night (particularly for northern Scotland) and along North Sea coasts but thanks to all the sunshine, daytime maximum temperatures were higher than normal with many areas in southern Britain seeing temperatures more than 3.0 °C above average. The mean temperatures image shows above average for SW Britain, benefiting from the mostly easterly winds.
Dr Mark McCarthy, head of the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre. “The UK climate is warming, and it is notable that in a Met Office series from 1884 the Aprils of 2003, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2020 are all in the top ten warmest.”
Rainfall
You can see from the dark brown areas on the April rainfall map how dry parts of Scotland and northern England were, particularly the northeast of England. Morpeth, Northumberland had its driest April on record, going back 126 years. Just 1.6mm of rain with an April average of 56.6mm.
We’d usually expect April showers to come and go making a more unsettled, unreliable month but the rain only appeared in the last week as finally, the high pressure over Scandinavia shifted.
Thinking back to February 2020, that was the wettest February on record for UK, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the second wettest (behind February 1990) for Scotland following the 5th wettest UK winter on record. There was widespread flooding with the Environment Agencies and councils battling with flood defences seemingly every weekend. We’ll see what May brings next but there are signs of something colder in the forecast, the frost risk hasn’t gone yet.
