Sunday, February 05, 2017

L'oratge

Writing the blog entry the other day about the two weather stations and the variations in a very short distance sent me looking for those weather reports I mentioned. I found both the January 2017 report and the full roundup for 2016.

Apparently in Pinoso in the whole of 2016 we had 54 rainy days, 12 days with sub zero temperatures, 165 days with dew, 23 foggy days, no snow, no hail, 4 days with electrical storms, 163 sunny days, 133 days with sun and clouds, 45 cloudy days and 25 days with complete cloud cover.

Some of those I'm not so sure about. First of all I don't quite know what it means. If the day starts with full cloud cover and then the clouds part and the sun shines through is that both complete cloud cover and sunny or is there some sort of generalisation made? If it's a combination then why were there 624 days in the year? There are other things I doubt too - OK we may not have had torrential rain and what not from more than four thunderstorms but I'm pretty sure there were a lot more storms than that flashing away in the sky. And no hail, really? I don't like hail, I don't like the idea of great lumps of ice falling from a great height and bouncing off my car; off the cats. I'm sure that I had hail on my head more than once in 2016 - we get a lot of hail, it smashes down crops, it breaks things.

The factual stuff is much easier to interpret and to agree with. Apparently the hottest day of the year was September 5th when we hit 41ºC and the coldest day was 17th February when we suffered -4.5ºC. We got 359 litres of water per square metre in the 366 days. When I was at school I'm sure that my Philip's Atlas used to show the average rainfall for Manchester as being around 40" per year but I've just looked now. Manchester 33", Cambridge 22" and the wettest place in the list is Dartmoor at 77". It turns out that 359 litres per square metre (which sounds like a lot) works out at about 14" per year (which doesn't). By the way if you lived in Mawsynram in India close to the Bay of Bengal then you would get 477" of rain in a year which is a lot. The highest wind speed recorded in Pinoso was 77k/h in February. We had 87 days, nearly three months, with maximum daytime temperatures over 30ºC (that's more than 86ºF mum - just a bit warmer than your living room).

For January 2017 from the same weather station in Pinoso: 4 days with rain, 15 days with temperatures below zero, 11 days with dew, 2 days with fog, no hail, 1 day with snow, 12 sunny days, 12 days with sunny spells, 4 cloudy days and 3 days with complete cloud cover.

The last two days of the month tied as the warmest days, though they weren't very warm, at a miserable 16.5ºC and the coldest was the 18th of January. with -5.5ºC. We got 63 litres per square metre over the month (2.48") and 54 litres of that came on the 19th as snow. Maximum wind speed was 54k/h.

And today it's very breezy, sheets of cloud but with occasional sun and occasional showers too. I wonder how Capito will list this one?

By the way I hope the title means "The weather" in Valencià but I may be wrong.

No comments:

Post a Comment