Author: Eric Gilbert

After the wind, rain and thick cloud of recent days it is good to see the barometric pressure rising continuously to the highest value for a month. This brought us 2.56 hours of strong sunshine yesterday and the highest UV value since the end of September. This morning there was early fog with visibility up to a mile and thinning quickly as the sun broke through. The consequence of high pressure is light winds, maximum gust yesterday was 8mph and with clearing skies brings the possibilities of an air frost overnight, last night the minimum was -1.0C.

Thick fog descended overnight, with visibility down to 100 metres, as the temperature dropped to a minimum of 1.7C.The fog thinned and evaporated by 1130.

The deep depression brought a peak gust of 41mph just before 08.30 yesterday. There was an additional 5.4mm of precipitation during the day, some of it wet snow, with no sunshine and a very low UV level. With complete cloud cover overnight the thermometer did not drop below 3.3C.

We were warned about the impending depression and anyone looking at their wall barometer yesterday would have noticed that it fell sharply all day. In fact over a period of 17 hours it dropped over 30MB to a low of 983.5MB at 05.55. The centre of the depression moved very close to Marlborough just before dawn as the wind dropped for an hour before 06.00 but suddenly the wind gusted to peaks of 30 mph and simultaneously backed from a southeasterly direction to a northerly direction. Over the following hour the temperature dropped 4C (8C to 4C) that, combined with the strong, cool wind gave a significant wind chill so that it felt like -1C. The rainfall for the past twenty-four hours totalled 27.2mm, the wettest daily rainfall since last July and significantly, but briefly, between 03.30 and 04.00 fell at the rate of 30mm/hour.
Just after the readings were taken at 08.00 today a gust of 39mph was noted at 08.04.

Update: Wind now gusting to 41 mph and temperature dropped to 3.1C with wind chill of -2C.

Yesterday was an exceptional day with 9.69 hours of strong sunshine, the sunniest day since 2nd October 2015. However, we have had to pay the price of clearing skies overnight with the continuing cool, northerly airstream as the thermometer dropped to -6.1C its lowest point at 0320 this morning. Subsequently, increasing amounts of cloud have obscured the sky with the temperature rising to -0.7C at 0800.