Yes, the weather has been disappointingly cool since the beginning of June and, to add to poor feel, wet since beginning of July too. But it may come as a surprise that such cold weather we've had was actually fairly normal back in the 1960, 70s and 80s.
Plenty of people are probably fed up now of the relentlessly cool and, recently, wet weather that we’ve endured since the beginning of summer. The statistics suggest it has been unusually cool up to this point in summer, certainly in comparison to recent summers. But is it really that unusual?
Although there was a brief heatwave in late June, with 30C breached for the first time this year on the 25th, the weather has generally been cool since the start of June. The first half of June saw below average temperatures, but the brief hot spell did see this June’s average temperature recover closer to average, finishing 0.4C below for the UK as a whole.
Current July average rolling temperature anomaly from Starling Roost Weather
However, July so far has been decidedly on the cool side, the rolling UK average temperature is 13.2C, which is 2.1C below the long-term average. And it’s been wet too, with parts of southern Britain seeing over a month’s worth of rain already.
July rainfall so far, data from Starling Roost Weather
The weather has been so cool since the beginning of summer, because the jet stream has been much further south than it normally is, with the UK more often than not on the colder northern side of the jet stream, where areas of low pressure pass over or south of the UK, pulling in cool air from polar regions and also bringing unsettled conditions, particularly recently.
Jet stream (green/yellow) was displaced to the south of UK over SW Europe and Italy since start of summer, as shown by 300mb winds June 01 - July 10:
The UK’s summer so far has certainly been unusually cold by recent standards. Since the year 2000, only 2012 was this cold from 1st June to 8th July.
However, pre 1990s, such cold periods in summer were more common and fairly normal. In the 1960s and 1970s, Aidan McGivern from the Met Office on x highlights that five summers were as cold or colder up to the 8th of July, these were 1962, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1969,1971, 1972, 1974, 1977 and 1978. The 1980s saw summers that were as cold or colder up to this point. These were 1980, 1981, 1985 and 1987.
So, the cold since the beginning of summer was fairly common back in the mid-20th Century. However, it feels unusual now because we have become used to warm summers in recent years, which have had spells of very hot weather, such as 2022, when 40C was breached for the first time. Last year saw the warmest June on record. Summer months since 2000 have been mostly above the long-term average, just a few below average summer months in some of those years.
How June 2024 ranks amongst Junes in the last 10 years, in the 2000s, 1990s and 1980s:
Climate change has made our summers generally warmer than they were pre-1990s, so when it becomes as cool as summers that were fairly typical in the mid-20th century, it feels that more unusual.
There are people who are old enough to have lived through worse summers than this that were prevalent in the mid-to-late 20th Century, but memories can be short and only remember the hot summers such as 1976, 1990 etc, rather than the cool ones that were prevalent at the time. For younger readers, who may only remembers summers since the 1990s or 2000s, the cool summer weather we’ve had so far may seem more unusual, given the increase in hot summers over the past 20-30 years.
Loading recent activity...
