Friday 7th August
The past twenty-four hours have produced the coolest day and night for over two months. In fact, the maximum of 21.8C, logged at 17.58 on Thursday, was only 0.2C above the average that made it the lowest peak since 14th June. The minimum of 5.7C at 05.54 meant a chilly night being a significant 6.1C below average that made it the coolest night since 16th May. The reason for the low temperature was a clear night, the total lack of any breeze after 00.10 and the cooler air brought on the northwesterly breeze during daylight hours.
Friday began as Thursday, with clear sunshine after sunrise that slowly lifted the temperature to 13.7C by 08.00, the coolest start to a new day at that time since 15th June.
The latest high pressure system is now centred over the UK on its travels eastwards towards Scandinavia. Today will see the air movement light and principally from the west-northwest, still a cooler direction but with a little less cloud in the afternoon than on Thursday, as a result the maximum will begin rise higher than yesterday.
The heat will begin to build from Saturday onwards due to the high pressure being further east that as the day progresses will see the air movement change to a southerly direction that will once again begin to feed in heat from the Continent. As the anticyclone edges further east towards eastern Europe, from Sunday onwards, it will grow in size and link up with a mate developing to the west, a new high pressure system arriving from the Azores. This will result in an unusually very large area of high pressure extending from mid-Atlantic towards Russia.
Recently I was stopped in the street to ask how such a small amount of rainfall, the 0.2mm recorded last month, could be measured. For use with the 5″ copper Met Office rain gauge, records here go back to 1984, the captured precipitation is poured into a hand-crafted vertical glass calibrated in mm, the smallest amount is 0.1mm. It is an expensive item that I recently broke that cost £75 to replace!
The automatic rain gauge uses a tipping mechanism. Once an exact weight for 0.2mm of liquid, the smallest increment that it is designed to measure, has arrived in the very small bucket it then immediately empties, sends an electronic pulse to the memory and the opposite bucket swings into place.
The new series of pictures will be of butterflies captured over recent years. Sadly there seem to be very few, if any butterflies locally the year, even a buddleia had only one over the past few days when being observed on numerous occasions.