Put another log on the fire mother

I'm a bit of a softy weatherwise. We get  a lot of extreme weather here  and I don't like it. Well, I don't like most of the extremes. When the sun's beating down in June, July and August that's an extreme I can be doing with. I don't like it though when the wind blows hard. I expect the garden chairs, or something else not firmly anchored, to smash into my parked car. I can visualise the pine trees outside the house toppling over and taking down the roof of the house. I don't like it when it hails. Again I worry about the motor. Cars with hundreds of little craters, in the skyward facing bodywork, are commonplace around here. I don't like it when it rains hard. I am quite sure the drain in the back patio will block and that water will flood into our living room and even if that doesn't happen it's a certainty that the water will gouge deep channels into the track outside our house. I don't like it when the temperature drops either and our water pipes freeze.

As I typed this thunder was booming out. The rain had been coming down in sheets. We've had sleet and snow and there has been a biting cold wind. I can see snow on the hills opposite our house. In fact we've been lucky. Yecla and Villena, which are within 40 kms of here, have had heavy snow; Villena was even isolated for a while. Down on the coast the waves have been going over the top of beach side houses. The TV news has been much more about Borrasca Gloria than it has about Trump losing his few remaining marbles or politicians suggesting direct rule from Madrid of Murcia to stem the homophobia of the far right party Vox.

We've been doing our bit to bring about the next mass global extinction by pouring heat into our house to keep warm the past few days. As we have almost no insulation of any sort, anywhere, the heat just flies out of the doors, windows and roof. I've been looking for figure, that I'm sure I saw a couple of years ago, that said something like 80% or 90% of all new builds in Alicante province had the poorest levels of insulation using that Energy Performance Certificate rating. In the hunt I found that Spain ranks as No. 7 in the most energy efficient countries in the World (Germany No. 1, UK No. 5) which would seem to go against my half remembered fact. There is a difference though. When Spaniards ask me what I least like about Spain I always say the horrid winters. For most of the year we have blue skies and sun outside but in winter, when the midday outside temperature is 12º C, it can be T shirt weather in the garden and mitten weather in the ice box that is our living room. It's dead normal to see people sitting in offices around here wearing coats as they work. Now in the colder parts of Spain, like Burgos and Pamplona, houses and buildings in general are set up to deal with the bad winter weather but in Alicante and Murcia people stubbornly cling to the belief that we only have a couple of cold months. The table below shows the figures for our nearest weather station for 2019. 

I'll leave you to decide but I don't think that 3ºC is very warm, it's when the ice warning pings on my car. There were only 6 months last year when it didn't get that cold overnight on at least one day in the month. On average there were just four months when the mean temperature was 20ºC or more. Bear in mind that the World Health Organisation's standard for comfortable warmth is 18 °C for normal, healthy adults who are appropriately dressed and for the sick, disabled, very old or very young, a minimum of 20°C. Again, just to stress, that there is a lot of difference between the air temperature, the accepted norm, and how you might feel sitting out in full sunshine with the same temperature.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
Low	-4,2	-0,7	1,0	3,2	6,9	8,9	15,3	15,3	11,9	6,6	1,4	0,5
High	19,2	24,3	25,1	25,0	31,0	35,0	37,1	39,4	32,8	30,2	23,5	22,4
Med	8,8	9,9	11,4	11,6	16,7	21,2	25,4	25,3	20,0	16,6	11,8	10,4

The photo is of Villena yesterday.

Inconsistent

I have a pal, Carlos, who has one book published and a second well under way. Carlos is obviously driven to write. I think he's pretty good. There's a bit of a tendency to too many trade marks and too many adjectives along the lines of  "He moved forward. His Doc Savage jaw and aquiline nose crossed the threshold of the door in a dead heat and just in time to see the pneumatic blonde kick off her black Jimmy Choo Aimee pumps, flick open her ancient IMCO and gently scorch the end of the pink Sobranie Cocktail clamped between her glossy red lips." He can be a bit repetitive too (then again Dickens has scrooge eat dinner twice) but the story lines and plot development are good. If you read Spanish then give it a go and help to make him rich and famous - El Legado del Mal by Carlos Dosel.

I have no ambitions to write, other than for my own amusement. I also keep a diary. I have for years. Most of it is along the style of I got up and went to get a coffee before going to the supermarket but, hey ho, such is life. At the bottom of the pages, for years, I have written a little comment on the weather.

In winter I find inland Alicante very uncomfortable. It can be difficult to keep warm and life can be a bit miserable. If we ever move house buying one we can keep warm in winter will be a priority. But if winter can be hard then I just love summer. The never ending, inescapable, unremitting heat of it and especially the sound the heat makes. Things expanding and contracting. Cigarras singing nonstop. Brilliant. Spring and autumn are good too. Not hot but warm enough.

It's been warm for weeks now. Warm in the sense that a British summer is usually warm or maybe better said that it's not cold. You may occasionally feel a bit chilly, you may have to reach for a big woolly or roll down the sleeves of your shirt, but the gloves and overcoats disappeared weeks or maybe months ago. The outflow of cash on gas bottles has slowed to a trickle. I forget exactly when it was but there's a moment when I quit the electric blanket from the bed  - the blanket that hasn't been used for quite a while but is still in place, just in case. Probably it was the same weekend when the pullovers were folded up and put away ready for next November.

It's probably not been a warm May though and there has been a fair bit of rain. Torrential rain at times. At least that's what people have been saying. "Cool for the time of year", "Will it never stop raining?", "It's usually hot by now," and so on. I'm never sure. People have their own ideas about weather just as they have about Coke and Pepsi. I often think that June is one of the more reliable months with plenty of sun whilst July can be a bit unpredictable but I'm pretty sure that weather service could prove me wrong.

Lunchtime news today and just a short piece to say that May has been, temperature wise, pretty average if a bit wet. They popped a bit on the end to say that the reservoirs were filling up nicely. Strange that, last time I heard it was unlikely we would recover from the drought for years.

Anyway, back at my diary - June 4th 2018, this year - Sunny and pleasant. High 26ºC Low 11ºC. June 4th 2017, last year - Occasional sun, occasional showers, cooler. High 26ºC Low 15ºC.

So last year I thought 26ºC was a bit cool and this year I thought it was pleasant.

Lost in the mist

I seem to have lost the Pinoso weather station and, like my mini loud speaker, I can't find it.

The state weather service here is called AEMET, La Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. The service uses all sorts of mechanisms, including data collected from a series of traditional weather stations dotted around Spain, to build up its records and to make weather predictions. One of the weather stations is, or at least was, in Pinoso. From what I can make out this is because a local teacher, whose nickname is Capito, started to collect basic weather information as a classroom project. With time the project, and the equipment, developed to the point when his data formed a part of the AEMET network.

There was an event in February 2015 to celebrate 25 years of Capito's weather recording in Pinoso.

I check the website on an almost daily basis but, for the past few weeks, the Pinoso data has been missing. I presumed it was a technical problem. Then, a couple of days ago the Pinoso name disappeared from the list of Valencian weather stations.

Something else that has not been in its habitual place for a while is the monthly weather round up. This was a regular feature on the Town Hall website for nearly three years with a monthly round up appearing a few days into each new month. That stopped in June 2015.

So, when the AEMET site changed I went looking for the explanation. The first thing I found was the missing monthly round ups on another local news site. So that wasn't really a mystery at all. Just the Town Hall website not being indexed as before. But I could find no information anywhere on the missing weather station. So, if anyone knows please let me know.

Meanwhile here is the report for March 2016. The highest temperature was 25.5ºC on the 30th March and the lowest temperature was -1.5ºC on the 9th. Although we have a minus figure there is a little note, on the round up, to say that the temperature was below freezing for just two hours during the whole month. We did have 12 days with dew though. The mean temperature in March was a high of 17.6ºC and a low of 4.6ºC. We had 37.7 litres of rainfall per square metre over the month though 15.5 litres of that fell on one day, the 21st, which is probably the one day we had a thunderstorm. In total we had four rainy days against 25 days when the sun shone though 17 of those included cloudy spells. We had just six days where we didn't see the sun because the cloud didn't break.

June weather

The average maximum daytime temperature in Pinoso during June was 29.2ºC and the average low was 13.7ºC. There was a tie for hottest day with both the 28th and 30th coming in at 37ºC and we had eleven days when the temperature was over 30ºC. The coldest day was on the 7th when we got down as low as 9.5ºC.

We had nineteen days with sunny clear blue skies, eight with with sunny spells and three cloudy. It rained four days and we had thunder and lightning twice.

Overall we got 53 litres per square metre of rainfall but 30 of those litres fell on one day, on the 13th.

May weather

Only a little while ago one of the chief weather forecasters from the state TV broadcaster came to Pinoso to celebrate the 25 years of weather data collection in the town. She was here to praise the efforts of a local chap called Agapito Gonzálvez better known as Cápito. Because of him Pinoso, which is no more than a village really, has a weather station that provides data for the Spanish equivalent of the Met Office - AEMET or Agencia Estatal de Meteorología.

Each month the Town Hall publishes Cápito's summary of the previous month's weather. Here is my summary of his summary.

In May we got eighteen days of sunny and cloudless skies and another twelve with sunny spells  - that leaves just one sunless and cloudy day. The highest temperature, of 38ºC, was recorded on the 14th of May - that was one of the seven days when the temperature got above 30ºC. The lowest temperature was 5ºC on the 23rd May which was one of the five days when temperatures dropped below 7ºC. The mean maximum across the month was 27ºC and the mean minimum was 11ªC. We got 10 litres of rain per square metre for the whole month but 7 litres of that fell on the 7th. Rain fell on just three days across the month.

I agree, it's desparate isn't it?

Here is the weather for 2014

It's just four kilometres from Pinoso to Culebrón but despite that the weather can be significantly different. Not significant in the sense of Vladivostok to Kingston but a couple of degrees, rainy or dry, windy or breezy.

La Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET) is the equivalent of the Met Office - it supplies meteorological services to the state and to the armed forces. I presume Pinoso has a little weather station somewhere because the town features in the list of official daily weather reports. There's no AEMET presence in Culebrón so readings from Pinoso will have to do. I notice in the blurb for these figures that a chap, Agapito Gonzálvez is credited with the data. He may just have compiled the information or maybe he's a local meteorological version of Patrick Moore; an amateur with standing. Anyway.

During last year 214 litres of water fell on every square metre or for those of you raised on inches of rainfall a bit under 9 inches all year. The highest temperature recorded was 37ºC  the same as body temperature or 98.6ºF on the 26th August. The lowest temperature was -5ºC just a few days ago on New Year's Eve. The windiest day was the 2nd March when there were gusts of seventy three kilometres per hour (about 45mph.) The wettest day, almost certainly the one on which you came to see friends who live in the area, was the 28th November with 25 litres per square metre. In fact there were forty six rainy days, five stormy days, seventeen with no visible sun and only one hundred and ninety five without a cloud in the sky.