John
I should have probably copied in what I wrote in the blog:
Now that summer has finally drawn to a close I thought I would look at how the astronomical summer finished in the Central England Temperature [CET] series.
The mean CET of the astronomical summer was slightly higher than that of the meteorological one (1st June – 31 August) at 16.70°C, or +1.36°C above the 1961-1990 long-term average, which made it the warmest since 2006, and the 19th warmest in the daily series that started in 1772. A couple of caveats to all this are (1) the values are based on September provisional values (2) I use fixed dates in my climate statistics for the seasons, so summer starts on the 21st of June and ends on the 20th of September, and yes I do know that the date and time of the equinoxes varies.
But If you look 1976 isn't the warmest astronomical summer as it is in meteorological summers [JJA] coming in at only 5th, behind 1995, 2006, 1947 and 2003 - but not a lot of people know that, maybe not even John Hammond.
Here's the table of meteorological ranked summers from that
blog:
Bruce.