June 2017 ... rainfall ... highly regionalised

[Martin Rowley [West Moors/East Dorset]]

... I know I shouldn't get worked up about these things, but I'm getting rather tired of watching breathless weather presenters telling me that .... " June 2017 has been amongst the wettest on record ..." with no qualification at all in many cases.

However, a look at the Met Office's own map (below) shows that, as is often the case, the excess of PPN has been highly regionalised with Scotland, parts of the north of England, some extreme western areas of Wales having the 'wet', whilst large swathes of England & Wales (where an awful lot of people live) have had average, or below-average rainfall. It's sloppy presentation and diminishes the usefulness of such summaries. For the record, the provisional England & Wales PPN value means that I can find at least 35 Junes that were wetter than this one past, and down here, we've just about managed about 10% excess on 1981-2010 climatology. In SE Dorset, 90% of the rainfall for June came in just three 'rain-days' - with the majority of the month dry with lengthy periods of 'NIL' rainfall.

[Tudor Hughes]

   One hardly needs even to know anything about the weather to be able to see from that map that calling June 2017 "one of the wettest on record" is ridiculous.  I'm glad I didn't hear the remark.

The rainfall total here was surprisingly high, 73.3 mm or 142% and as at your location 3 days accounted for 86% of that.

Tudor Hughes, Warlingham, NE Surrey

[Freddie]

Indeed. It has been a dry month here in eastern Powys.

--
Freddie

[Julian Mayes]

Martin, 

Thanks for a really good point, (one that I have tried to incorporate into a small monthly weather review that I have just written for a certain newspaper). Another issue is whether anomaly maps are always presented as such - I wonder if quite a lot of viewers assume it just shows total rainfall - in the few seconds it appears on screen. The wet areas have a + anomaly and the -ve anomaly areas are areas of relatively low rainfall, so the absolute range in totals is much greater of course. 

Cheers   Julian 

[Len W]

Yes, agreed Martin.
A ridiculous sweeping statement. I bet the UK areal average does n't even back him up.

68.7 mm here. Pretty well spot on average.
Hardly anything remarkable.

Len
Wembury, SW Devon