Evershot

Evershot weather is no different from anyone else's really: it just seems that sometimes there is more of it. This is particularly so in the rainfall during the winter of 2000–2001.

I have been collecting rainfall data only since the middle of September 2000. I was lucky: the rainfall that autumn far exceeded the average to be expected in the Lake District, one of the wettest places in England.

I have managed to get rainfall figures for the end of the last millennium from Peter Cooper who, local people will know, lives on East Hill. His figures go back many years, but are not in an easily accessible form. So I am most grateful to him for extracting the figures for 1995–2001.

The Met Office often refers to the four seasons of the year, and so I have taken my rainfall figures for the last few years and put them in a table. Winter, according to the Met Office, runs from December (in the table the December of the previous year) to February, Spring from March to May, Summer from June to August and Autumn from September to November. Of course the weather itself does not always agree with the Met Office's classifications!

Temperatures are always of interest: the hottest, the coldest, the hottest winter day, the coldest summer day, the longest spell of double-figure temperatures night and day, etc. I have had thermometers for years, like everyone else, but I have only recently got an electronic device that measures temperatures outside using a sensor and displays the results indoors. More importantly it also stores maximum and minimum readings.

Real weather people like to have the day's average, so I have given this too. I have also compiled a seasonal table of temperatures for the last few years.

Atmospheric pressure used to be measured in inches of mercury. Nowadays meteorologists use the metric unit, the millibar (mb) or thousandth of a bar. Later I learned that real meteorologists now use 'hectopascals' or hPa, which are identical to millibars with just the name changed. Atmospheric pressure in the UK varies around just over 1000mb or about 30 inches of mercury at mean sea level. The tables give a monthly maximum and minimum figure taken from barograph charts I have been keeping for the last fifteen years or so. From August 2007 I have been taking the readings from the new weather station.

August 2007
During July this year I got a new weather station, much more sophisticated than the set-up I've been using up to now. I can read all the statistics in the house, as before, but the station itself is in a better position than the old system, and so should be more accurate, particularly regarding the temperature readings. It will also give me proper wind speed and direction figures, as well as the usual rain and temperature stuff. It also has its own barometer.

All these facilities I have been running in parallel with my existing system for August 2007 to check one against the other. The August figures I have taken from my existing system, but from 1 September I have used the new weather station's figures.