How unusual are deep lows in August?

[xmetman]

The word 'unusual' seems to be cropping up in every weather forecast on the TV when describing low Yap at the moment, but how unusual are deep lows in August?

Well I checked reanalysis data from 1948 to find the lowest MSLP from the 2.5° x 2.5° grid of six hourly data from across the UK and this is a table of the lowest values that I found.

As you can see the lowest pressure of 972.8 hPa occurred on the 30th of August 1992 at 18 UTC. Here is a plotted chart for that date and time, notice that’s when we still received observations from places such as Cape Wrath and RAF Finningley. I mentioned in a recent post about the similarities between 2019 and the Fastnet race storm of 1979 which you’ll notice features at #10 in the table.