Record breaking March
Post categories: weather
| 14:56 UK time, Friday, 30 March 2012
It sure has been a marvellous March with record breaking daytime temperatures.
The March high of 23.9 Celsius recorded in 1965 still stands but a few local records have been broken.
John Goodger, who runs a weather station at Velindre near Glasbury in Powys, recorded 21.2 Celsius on Wednesday afternoon, 11 degrees above average and the highest temperature John has measured in March in 40 years of record keepong.
While the weather station at Bute Park in Cardiff recorded it's warmest March day on record yesterday afternoon with the temperature soaring to 20.9 Celsius, 70 Fahrenheit making the Welsh capital warmer than Athens, Malta and Cyprus.
Provisionally it looks like this March in Wales will be the warmest since 1957 with a mean temperature of 7.8 Celsius, 2.3 degrees above the long term average.
This month has also been very dry with only 32.0mm of rain (1.26 inches) 27% of the average monthly rainfall of 118.8mm.
March 2011 was slightly drier with 30.7mm. Nevertheless March 2012 is the fifth driest March since records began in 1910.
Wales enjoyed over 141 hours of sunshine this month. 45% more sunshine than normal making it the sunniest March since 2003.
I know some people are worried that this may be our summer. Hopefully that won't be the case and this is a taster of things to come but the current warm spell is on its last legs.
It's going to turn cooler and cloudier everywhere over the weekend with temperatures dropping back closer to the seasonal average.
Some gardeners are farmers wouldn't mind a drop of rain but apart from the odd spot tomorrow the weekend will be dry.
Tomorrow will be mostly cloudy but Sunday should be sunnier.
Next week looks colder and changeable and on Tuesday, some rain and showers are expected.
Wednesday should be fine but cold at night with some frost. At the moment, Good Friday may start dry but it could turn more unsettled over the Easter weekend.
So, the warm spell is coming to an end but we've enjoyed a good dose of sunshine - a real tonic after such a long winter.
Comment number 1.
At 30th Mar 2012, Allan Barham wrote:It may have been a record breaking March in many respects but strangely here in Gower our PV panels have not been as productive in March 2012 as they were in March 2011. Indeed until the recent spell of good weather the output was lagging far behind the 2011 figures. To match last year we would need a record breaking day on Saturday which looks rather unlikely. April 2011 gave us the highest monthly output in the whole of last year so we are hoping that April this year will be equally productive.
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