An extended summer index

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xmetman

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Sep 16, 2016, 7:09:02 AM9/16/16

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Recently I developed an application that uses the Met Office regional and national gridded data back to 1929. I would have used the whole series but sunshine data has only been gridded back to 1929. Anyway my first stab was to list the summer index using the months June, July and August, the ‘meteorological’ summer and wrote this article about it. Now that summer 2016 is finally and fitfully coming to an end I thought I would extend the application to generate and index for the extended summer May through to September.

1976 loses out to 1959

As you can see from the above chart the results for the extended summer are quite different from those of just June, July and August, some summers like that of 1976 lose their #1 rank and drop to #12, whilst the summer of 1959 jumps up to the #1 slot as the best summers in the UK since at least 1929.

The reason why 1976 slipped so much was that May and September in 1976 were both rather wet and dull over the UK so the index is lower, whilst the May and September of 1959 were much drier than the June and July, and in 1959 sunshine was never in short supply during any of the five months of the extended summer. Below is a ranked list of both highest and lowest summer indices for the UK as a whole, the maximum score is +80 and the minimum score -80 for the extended summer, rather than +48 and -48 for the meteorological summer.