Social media posts and the news have been full of details of the hot weather, storms, and torrential rain that have been around over the last week. I've got the impression that the whole country was affected by the storms judging by the pictures of lightning and flash flooding. A new term has even cropped up on the weather forecasts now "Tropical Nights" and apparently we're getting a lot more of them now than we use to. A tropical night is when the overnight temperature doesn't fall below 20°C or 68°F.
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| Temperature & Rainfall Records 10-16 August 2020 |
Our weather then didn't match up with the rest of the country. We certainly had a couple of hot days on Tuesday and Wednesday when the temperature made it to 31.2°C and 31.0°C respectively. That's 88.2°F and 87.8°F and high enough to get them into my list of top twenty hottest days. You'll see from the temperature records above that overnight temperature fell below the 20°C required for a "tropical night" and checking through my records we haven't managed to achieve that over the last 10 years. The nearest occasion was 01 June 2010 with 18.9 or 66.0°F.
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"Tropical night" is a new weather word for me, so I looked it up. It is not a term used by the weather service in the US only in Europe and and Singapore and South Korea among other places. The threshold differs as well being 25 in South Korea (according to sources I could find on the Internet.) Here it was 77, but you might expect that there would be warmer nights at lower latitudes. However we are in the midst of a prolonged heatwave, several days above 100F.
ReplyDeleteI saw some reports about the temperatures in California and how hot it is. If we reached 100F it would signal the end of the world to our weather forecasters. They seem to forget that lots of people around the world live in temperatures much higher than we ever get.
DeleteEdinburgh Max for August is only 23.9C We did manage 29.9C on 31 July, just 0.1 below the 1975 long standing record of 30.0C (Although this has been broken once already in 2019 with 31,2C)
ReplyDeleteAll the same we got a night time lightening storm on the 11th with a max temp of 23.7C but rainfall 37.5mm mostly falling in a couple of hours.