2021 Weather Report for Pinoso

Pinoso has a weather station that forms a part of the AEMET network. AEMET is the Spanish Met Office, Agencia Estatal de Meteorología. So far as I know the weather station for AEMET is in the centre of Pinoso, at the Instituto José Marhuenda Prats. I think it's at the school because the bloke who started it all up taught there though that may be wrong. The man is real enough though, Agapito - always called Cápito - Gonzálvez. He's been Mr Weather in Pinoso for over 30 years now. 

If you haven't seen the AEMET site this link should go directly to the observations over the past few days. Click around the site and you'll find forecasts and a whole lot more.

There is another weather station out at Rodriguillo, which was damaged when the reed beds there went on fire in the summer. Capito got it up and running again within 8 days. There's another another on the Yecla road out of Pinoso. These two stations log their recordings on the Valencian Meteorological Association website - AVAMET. According to that website there's a third station in Pinoso at l'Herrada which, I think, is just off the road from Culebrón to Ubeda. 

If you want to have a look at the Valencia website it's on this link though it does tend to be a bit fickle and constantly change from the Castilian version to the Valencian version. If the site plays up you want Alicante Province and mid Vinalopó or in the Territori section Província d'Alacant and El Medio Vinalopó or el Vinalopó Mitjà. You can choose the date for the records too. The button to change between Castilian and Valencian is at the top right but, as I say, it's all a bit wobbly.

Anyway Capito does these roundups for the monthly weather reports. Again they tend to get published in Valenciano so this is my interpretation of his roundup for 2021. 

During 2021 it rained 68 days and there were 15 days when the temperature fell below freezing. On the other hand there were 128 days of full sun and 163 days with sunny spells as against 52 cloudy days and 22 days with full cloud cover. 

There were 162 days with dew, 22 days with mist and 2 days with hail. There was no snow recorded in 2021. There were storms on 6 days.

The hottest day of the year was the 15th August when it got to 42.5ºC and the coldest day was the 6th January when the temperature dropped to -5ºC. 

The mean high was 23ºC and the mean low was 9.7ºC.

Over the whole year 313 litres of water fell on every square metre of Pinoso and the wettest day of the year was 23rd May when we got 44 of them.

There were 808 hours when the temperature was 7ºC or below but just 60 hours when it was below freezing. Those 60 cold hours being spread between 20 different days. 

There were 80 days when the temperature was greater than 30ºC and 7 days when more than 10 litres of rain fell.

The windiest day was 12th February when it blew at 73km/h

The day when the highest recorded temperature was the lowest of the year (get that?) was 8th January, when it only got to 4.5ºC  and the day when the lowest recorded temperature was the highest was the 12th July when it never dropped below 22.5ºC. 

The overall coldest day of the year was 5th January with a mean temperature was just 2.5ºC, and the opposite was the 15th August when the mean temperature was 31.8ºC.

The rain saves a soggy post

I started to write a blog earlier this week. I didn't post it because it was boring. That's not going to stop me now though. Here it is.

"Leaves are swirling around in eddies outside our front door. More sweeping. It's what I expect. September has come, the weeds have started to grow again, there are piles of rotting figs under the trees. Where the branches overhang the path it is painted purple with gravity squashed fruit. The flies are out in squadrons and the crickets have stopped singing. Out in the vineyards the tractors and grape harvesters are doing their stuff and the air smells of sweet fermenting wine. Temperatures have dropped considerably and before setting the washing machine going I need to scan the sky to decide whether it will be a good drying day or not. This morning I couldn't even sit outside to read with my second mug of tea because it was a bit nippy and a bit blowy. The one good thing about the hot weather going away is that everyone stops moaning on about how it's unbearable and how did people manage without air conditioning ad nauseum and I can go back to wearing shoes and socks and jeans without lots of stupid comments.

When I was at school, sometime shortly after the wheel was invented, my headteacher often said that whilst  most of the world had a climate the UK had weather. It's one of the few things that the bullying fathead said that I would not disagree with. In England, in August, one day can be sunny and the next can be cool and wet. It's not like that here. Obviously the weather can change, a cold front can come in or we can find ourselves in a heatwave and time after time we have tremendous storms with torrential rain or hailstones the size of Cadbury's Creme Eggs but, in general, we get the same sort of weather for days and days, and sometimes weeks and weeks, on end. It makes it easy to predict. It will be hot and dry in late June and all through July. August will be hot to start and cooler later and by September the cooling will be noticeable. Although most days from November to February will be sunny with bright blue skies we'll be cold in the house. And March will be a terrible disappointment, temperature wise, and we'll have to wait for the official Spring before we can change to lighter bedclothes".

That's as far as I got. Now to start again. Our yard is awash, the garden looks like a lake, there is water everywhere. The kitchen floor is a pattern of muddy cat paw marks. Lots of schools, including the Pinoso ones, were closed today because of the threat of rain. It has been wet, the rain has been heavy but we've been lucky.  So far as I know, it's not been catastrophic locally. Close at hand though it has; utter devastation. Torrents of water flowing in and out of people's houses. People killed in Caudete (not far away) when their car was washed away with them in it, two more killed further South, Orihuela cut off, both local airports under water and big towns like Cartagena and Murcia with serious problems.

As I was checking closed windows this morning Maggie made a throwaway comment "Well, it'll soon be back to being warm again, we're not done with the decent weather yet!"

You see she agrees with that long dead headmaster too!

As it should be

Coming home was just brilliant - that feeling of being in Spain when Spain is almost a parody of itself. It's not really hot but it's very definitely summer. Probably in the low 30s. Nice and warm, hot enough to make anyone sweat, hot enough to make it dusty, hot enough for those sudden gusts of wind to be very welcome and nearly hot enough for a spaghetti western snake to slither by. I finished teaching the last of my courses this morning. No more work for a few weeks. I'd celebrated with a beer and a chat in the market square. The streets were lunchtime deserted as I went for bread. The cicadas sang. My sandals kicked up little swirls of dust as I walked.

In the car, on the way home, I had the windows open and the new Florence on quite loud. Loud enough for the bloke working on putting up the dodgems in the market car park to look up as I passed. I waved and wondered why he was working at such an odd time. Coming around the Yecla-Jumilla roundabout they're redoing the tarmac. Blokes in the shade of the road rollers eating their pack ups in the midst of the none too subtle aroma of fresh and glistening tar. A few kilometres later, as I turned up our track, I had to give way to the bin lorry which left a trail of 7th Cavalry like dust that settled gently on my car. The bin lorry was aromatic too. Rubbish cooking in the heat has a very particular smell.

Red in the face

My mum was unhappy about the heat in St Ives, in Huntingdonshire, unbearable she said. Somebody here in Pinoso was complaining to me about how hot it was too but, because I keep a little record in my diary, I thought I was aware that, so far, both June and July have been a little cooler than usual.

So I did a bit of checking. I was a bit surprised how difficult it was to find full sets of data for past years  and I could only really get fullish sets for 2013, 2014 and most of 2015. All of these results are from the same weather station so any microclimatic differences are evened out. And it seems to be true. Both June and July this year (so far) have had lower maximum temperatures than in the previous quoted years. Mind you the difference isn't really that much and the nightime temperatures are much as usual.

In 2013 in Pinoso the highest June temperature was 35ºC, for 2014 it was 32.5ºC, for 2015 it was 37ºC and for 2018 it was 31.5ºC
In 2013 in Pinoso the highest July temperature was 36.5ºC, for 2014 it was 35ºC, for 2015 the records are missing and for 2018, so far, the highest is 33.5ºC

In 2013 in Pinoso the lowest June temperature was 8ºC, for 2014 it was 7ºC, for 2015 it was 9.5ºC and for 2018 it was 8.5ºC
In 2013 in Pinoso the lowest July temperature was 12ºC, for 2014 it was 11.5ºC, for 2015 the records are missing and for 2018, so far, the lowest is 12ºC

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.

The crickets still sing in October

We've had some decent weather until recently - in fact I keep hearing how it has been unseasonably mild and suchlike. That may be true, they, whoever they are, may have reasons for lying to me about all sorts of things but I'm sure that the weather isn't one of them. So, if they say it's been a warmer Autumn than usual I am happy to believe them. 

It's started to cool down now though. For the past couple of weeks, we have sometimes turned on one of the butane heaters in our living room just to take the chill off. We put the slightly thicker duvet on the bed too and I've put some pullovers back into my wardrobe. Yesterday Maggie said it was cold so I trundled another heater into the kitchen just in case. She even fired up the pellet burning stove for our telly watching last night. We are right on the cusp of it getting cold. Inside, in our bit of Spain, over the late autumn and winter it can be unpleasantly unpleasant in our house when the heating isn't on. Outside of course it's nice, or at least it's usually nice. Cloudless blue skies and sun being the standard.

Oddly enough the Town Hall website just published the round-up of the October weather. They used to do the monthly report without fail but I haven't seen it for a while so here, for your delight, is the October 2017 Pinoso weather.

The highest temperature on the 27th was 29ºC and the lowest, of 5ºC, was overnight on the 26th/27th. So quite a temperature range on the 27th! The median daytime maximum through October was 23.7ºC and the median minimum was 8.8ºC.

We had just one rainy day but, on that day, the 18th, we got 16.5 litres of rain per square metre. That day was also classed as stormy because we had gusts of wind of up to 87km/h.

We had five misty starts and 26 mornings with dew but 22 of those turned into clear sunny days and there were another five with sunny spells.

All in all then the sun shone for 27 out of 31 days, the standard daytime temperature was in the mid 20s and it only rained once. That does sound like a pretty decent October then.

Into each life some rain must fall

It's raining in Culebrón. This is unusual. It's not unusual in the North of Spain, it rains a lot there, but here in sunny Alicante, well, it's usually sunny. 

It does rain of course. A quick check on a couple of past years and we seem to get about 50 rainy days a year. But that means any rain. The number of days when it rains and rains are few and far between. It's raining now though and it has been for a couple of days. Fortunately, for the local farmers, it's not torrential and there's no hail. Hail is a remarkably common component of the infrequent but heavy storms we get. The number of dimpled cars is testament to that. Big blighters. Balls of ice cracking and smashing down on things. There's thunder and lightning too. The sky alight with lightning is pretty common but the fireworks don't always lead to a downpour. Rain, like everything else in our neck of the woods is very localised. It can be pouring down in Paredón, drizzling in Ubeda yet still dry here.

Our house is miserable when it rains as it is now. All of our external doors lead directly into rooms - there are no hallways - so we traipse the filth from the patios into the kitchen or living room. When the rain comes down in sheets, as it is wont to do at times, the streams gouge suspension breaking channels into the compacted earth of our track. The resultant mud is transported, by wheel arches, to our patio where it combines with the pine needles, leaves, palm fruit and other plant debris to produce a gooey planty mulch through which we have to paddle.

There are Spanish reactions to rain that I still find noticeable. The umbrellas come out. I don't understand how someone wearing shorts and a T shirt can magically produce an umbrella when the rain comes. I don't like umbrellas. Unmanageable brutes that force me to step off the pavement or risk anophthalmia. I'm more of a hooded raincoat person myself which Spaniards must find slightly eccentric given the number of times that I have been offered the loan of an umbrella.

There are like minded Spaniards though. The umbrella-less ones. In towns we hug the walls of the buildings where the overhang from the floors above provides some sort of protection. We walk in single file with the occasional chicken like confrontations of pedestrians headed in opposite directions. Spanish drains don't always cope with the sheer quantity of water so whoever finally gives way can expect sodden shoes and turn-ups.

One compensation though. We're not in Galicia or Asturias, the País Vasco or Huddersfield so it will soon be over. The sun will come out, the sky will be blue and things will be back to normal.

¡Uff, que calor!

I wandered in to do my session with 4A, the fourth year is the last year of obligatory secondary school. It was my last lesson with them before my contract ends at the end of May. They're a nice bunch but it's a big class and they tend towards noisy, no let's be honest, loud. I said hello and started whatever it was I was going to do but they weren't paying much attention - their energies were being taken up by an awful lot of fanning and expelling sufficient breath for top lips to oscillate. It's too hot, it's suffocating, we're going to die. The class teacher who makes sure that the noise doesn't turn into a riot, looked up from her computer. A brief conversation and she set the air conditioner going. My guess is that there are guidelines as to the temperature setting for the air-con and the youngsters wanted it lower. With a big grin on my face I set into one of those "When I was a lad air conditioners didn't exist, what a bunch of whiners you are etc".

It made me laugh, outside it was probably around 30ºC, not exactly roasting. It was warm but I was perfectly comfortable in my habitual boots, jeans and T shirt. Most of the pupils were in shorts.

in the staff room, after the ritual greeting, the first and main topic of conversation between any two or more teachers was the temperature. I was asked several times what I thought about the heat; unbearable eh? It must be worse for me coming from a country where polar bears and penguins roam. Lots of Spanish people aren't that hot on geography.

There's no doubt that it's warmed up in the last fortnight or so. It's still a long way from being hot but the summer sounds have begun. The spring flowers and green plants have taken on their summer shades of yellows and beige. The cigarras are singing in the garden but wood and metal aren't yet creaking as they expand or contract. The flies are out in annoying numbers. Everything is covered in a fine patina of dust and cars have a rugged he-man sort of dirty look. We haven't used any heating for ages, getting out of bed in the morning involves no more discomfort than creaking bones and heaving lungs. I've turned down the gas flame and upped the water flow on the water heater.

I've been asked three or four times whether I've been to the seaside - this is presumably because my arms, but only to the sleeve line, have got a bit of colour. It's because of the weeding I say. It has even been suggested to me that I may like to abandon long trousers for shorts.

It always amuses me. We Britons often complain about the weather - too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, too windy, too still. Spaniards do exactly the same.

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.

Weather report

Cars have thermometers nowadays. Cieza is lower than Culebrón so, as I drive to work, the temperature increases but it's interesting that there are lots of local variations all along the route.

The temperature differences between the villages that surround Pinoso can be quite marked. It's usually one or two degrees colder in Culebrón than in Pinoso for instance. In fact the weather in general can be very different over short distances. Back in 2013 to give an extreme example a hailstorm caused havoc in Paredón. In Culebrón, at the same time, it rained a bit. The distance between the two places is just over 5km.

Pinoso has an official weather station, it's official in the sense that it contributes to the AEMET network with AEMET being the State Meterological Agency. As I understand it this is because a local teacher, always referred to as Capito, started a weather station as a school project which, slowly but surely, became more professional. From time to time I have used the monthly report from that weather station on this blog. At one point the Pinoso weather station stopped reporting to AEMET and I ended up in a bit of correspondence with a local blogger about what had happened. He told me that there was another weather station In Pinoso used by IVIA - the Valencian Institute of Agricultural Research.

Whilst Capito's station is in the centre of Pinoso the IVIA station is on the Yecla road: looking at the map on the IVIA website I'd say that means they are maybe 4km apart. Yesterday AEMET gave the temperature maximum and minimum as 12.9ºC and 1ºC whilst the IVIA site 12.61ºC and 5.05ºC. That's a pretty considerable difference on the minimum temperatures. And it's not just the temperature - all of the data such as wind speed and precipitation also differ, sometimes by significant amounts.

The last time I saw a weather station it consisted of some kit, like thermometers and rain gauges, inside a slatted white painted box. The little picture at the top of this post shows the IVIA station. No slatted box to be seen. I presume that it collects and transmits data automatically to somewhere or other.

One interesting little extra on the IVIA site is that it lists "representative" local crops as artichokes irrigated almonds, celery, aubergines, broccoli, onions, plums, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, asparagus, lettuce, peaches, melon, nectarines, olives to eat and olives for oil, potatoes, cucumbers, peppers, leeks, romanesque salad leaves, watermelons, tomatoes, grapes for eating and for wine and carrots. I would never have guessed that Pinoso was good for brussels.

Snow

My guess is that you know that it snowed here yesterday. A good thick layer of snow in Culebrón. I missed most of it. In fact I must be the only person in Culebrón who doesn't have a photo of somewhere looking very Christmas card. I took a few snaps today but by then the thaw was well under way.

There was 33mm of precipitation in Pinoso which, Google tells me, normally bulks up to about 33cm of snow. I'd have said it was less than that, maybe 15cm, but I wasn't here to see the snow at its height so I am not a reliable source.

I drove to work through reasonably heavy falling snow but, by the time I got to work, the snow was nasty wet rain instead. Cieza is nearly 400 metres lower than Culebrón. By the time I came home the ploughs had done their stuff and I followed the car width wet tarmac ribbon, hemmed in by snow, occasionally hitting big compacted lumps, all the way home. It wasn't easy getting up the slope to the house though and I had to dig the snow away to actually get the car into our yard. It's been melting like mad today. Water pouring off buildings and roads looking very picturesque in the bright sunlight.

At the height of the snowfall Maggie was persuaded by friends to take the lift offered in a four wheel drive and leave her car in town. She probably couldn't have got home anyway as the main road that passes our house was closed. Apparently the closure was because so many cars were sliding off the road that the Guardia Civil thought it the best move.

Lots of the comments against the photos that Britons living around here posted on Facebook were from friends surprised that it had snowed in Spain. Actually Spanish snow isn't at all unusual.

For a long time now Spain has often claimed to be the second most mountainous country in Europe after Switzerland. Again, with the help of Google, I understand that the criteria for that claim are not clear and that places like Norway, Slovenia, Greece, Austria and Italy beat it on most of the obvious measures. Nonetheless it is a pretty high country in general and it can, authentically, claim to have the highest percentage of its population living in high areas in Europe. Everybody knows you get snow on top of mountains. Any photo of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania proves that. So lots of Spaniards who live in the Pyrenees, up the Sierra Nevada or in the Picos de Europa have to live with plenty of snow every year. Spain has stacks of ski resorts.

The Spanish word for Hell is infierno. The Spanish word for winter is invierno. An old joke about Madrid says nine months of winter and three months of Hell. It's droller in Spanish.

We originally considered living in Burgos. Some Spanish chums warned us off by saying it was like Siberia in winter. We had a couple of different pals who lived there. One of them told the story of entertaining a group of Muscovites on some sort of International Exchange. The Muscovites complained that Burgos was too cold.

One of the WhatsApp jokes that I got yesterday about the weather was a temperature scale. It argued that when the temperature dropped below 24ºC people from Seville put an extra blanket on the bed. The mentions of Burgos suggested that its people would button up their shirts, as they drank ice cold beer and ate ice cream on the cafe terraces, as temperatures sank to -8ºC and that they would only actually go inside the bar when temperature dropped to absolute zero.

Whenever there is a description of the Spanish Civil War Battle of the Ebro, fought around the area that includes the city of Teruel in Aragon, there is always mention of the number of soldiers who froze to death because of the low, low temperatures. Figures vary but it seems that they were regularly below -20ºC

Maggie and I were trying to decide if it's the third or fourth time it's snowed on us whilst we've been here. My photo albums seem to suggest that it has been two reasonably heavy snowfalls, with another that barely counted, before this one. This weeks fall is definitely the heaviest we've experienced here. So, it may be relatively unusual that it snowed in Alicante and Murcia this week but it's not at all odd for it to snow in Spain.

And, whilst we're on the topic of sunny Spain I'd just warn you that should you ever decide to go to Galicia or any bit of Green Spain, up Asturias and Cantabria way, whenever those places are on the news for whatever reason it always seems to be raining.

Wrap up warm.

Realising you need new windscreen wipers

When Spanish people here in Spain talk to me about the winter weather in England they usually talk about the cold. Obviously it's colder in the UK, in general, than it is in our bit of Spain. I explain that whilst it may be colder outside it's usually much warmer inside. I go on to say that the most depressing thing about the UK in winter is not the cold but the light, or the lack of it, that sort of grey miserableness and the all pervading dampness

Well, for the past, maybe, three weeks, it has been wet and miserable here. It's not quite the same. It's not been cold and we haven't had any of those English type days where a grey dawn turns into a grey morning and then it's night again. Light by 7.30am and not dark till around 6pm. But we haven't had our normal sunny and blue days either.

Our floors have muddy trails across them. Both our front and back doors lead directly to the outside world. The doormats are sodden and dirty footprints (and paw prints) mix with the loosened wet coconut matting fibres just inside the doorsteps. The paw prints are in other places too.

I've had untumbledryerable washing hanging on the line for days - nearly dry before another shower or another downpour lengthens the arms of the pullovers once again. And I'm dead against clothes horses in front of the fire. It looks fine on the B&W version of The Thirty Nine Steps and it serves a purpose in Love Actually but I don't want it in my house. It reminds me of miserable winters and miserable times in England long long ago.

I tried to weed and clear the garden but got as bogged down as the troops at Passchendaele. The carpets of my car are littered with gravel and caked in dried mud. All in all, not nice.

Maggie came in to Alicante airport this morning after a few days of gladdening the hearts of retailers in Liverpool. It was misty and windscreen wiper weather as I left Culebrón but it brightened up as I neared the airport. Re-united we spent a couple of hours wandering along the coast. The sun was shining, my coat remained in the car. There were two people swimming in the sea at Santa Pola.

Perhaps we should move.

Feeling Big John

It was hard to believe but, when I got up yesterday morning, the sun wasn't shining. In fact it was trying to rain. All day it was dull. Of course half of Spain is similar to the UK for summer rain with lush green meadows and contented cows but not our bit, our bit, not far from the Med, is picture book Spain. I've written about summer before but it's just such a wonderful thing that I can't not mention it again.

I haven't worn socks for weeks. My only real fashion choice is which colour T shirt to choose today. The sound of flip flops on the pavement is a summer sound. Generally the sun just comes on in the morning and goes out in the evening. And the light; it's just lovely - crystalline skies so blue that they're like a child's painting. The air is dry, a sort of dusty yellowy dry, that plays hell with the cleaning and makes the plants wilt but just makes it feel so - well, summery. And there are noises too. Things sort of move with the heat. Lifeless things move, things creak with the warmth. Live things move as well. The damned flies, millions of them. Little lizards often turn up in our living room as do any number of strange creepy crawlies. Nothing untoward, nothing too bity so far, but lots of them. And here, in the country, it's just one long sound concerto. The birds are relentless - chip, chip, chirruping as long as there is any light. Then of course there are the cicadas and the grasshoppers, with their incessant reverberating drumming. The dogs don't care whether it's winter or summer. Country dogs bark and bark and bark and shatter the evening quiet whatever the season.

Beer is always cold in Spain and chilled glasses are as common as muck. In winter that can seem out of place but in summer it's as right as right can be. The drops of water form on the outside of the glass. You have to be careful though - it's so easy to just have a "cervecita",  in the shade, without thinking about it being alcohol. If you have to drive, never mind, the pop is just as chilled but, somehow, it doesn't feel quite so Mediterranean. And if the drinks are chilled so is the food - fruit and salads and things that glisten with summer colour replace those tasty but drab and calorific winter dishes. Lovely.

Alicante summers are simply splendid.

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.

October weather

Here's the October weather report for Pinoso prepared by Agapito Gonzálvez.

The highest temperature was on the 5th when it got to 28ºC.and the lowest temperature was 4ºC overnight on the 22nd. The mean daily high was 22.2ºC and the mean daily low was 10.3ºC which all averages out at 16.2ºC.

The rain was just 9.4 litres of water on every square meter in October and a third of that came down on the 20th.

We only had nine days of clear, sunny skies and another fourteen with sunny periods. Less to my taste we had four days when the sun didn't come out at all and it rained on seven days.

Everyone tells me that this is good for the olives. Personally I prefer the searing heat of August.

Microclimates

I've written a diary every day for the last forty six years. For several years now I've put a little footnote to describe the weather - hot and sunny, wet and grey - and, alongside, the maximum and minimum temperatures. I bought a thermometer for the process but, when I lived in La Unión, there was nowhere I could site the thermometer in the shade so I started to use the data from the Spanish equivalent of the Met Office.

The weather, here as everywhere, is a talking point. It's been hot for the past two or three weeks generally in the mid to high thirties. Some parts of Spain have been over forty on occasional days. People often exagerate the weather. They tell me that it was 53ºC in their patio or somesuch so I try to slip into the conversation, gently of course - well, the highest temperature ever recorded in Spain before today has been 47.2ºC in Murcia and, according to the local weather station it only got to 38ºC (or whatever).

But local variations are very noticeable. Spain is the second highest country in Europe and there are mountains all over the place. They affect the microclimate to a remarkable degree. Driving from home in Culebrón to Pinoso just five kilometres away the temperature can rise a couple of degrees whereas Rodriguillo, on the other side of Pinoso towards Fortuna, is often a couple of degrees cooler than Culebrón. Humidity is another startling varaible.

Last year, I think it was last year, hail destroyed rooves, furniture, cars and whatnot in Paredón, another of the villages that encircle Pinoso. In Ubeda, on the same day, the same hail storm but with less intensity smashed the windscreen of a friend's car and put hundreds of little dents into their neighbours car. Just 3km up the road, in Culebrón we got heavy rain but no hail.

Yesterday it rained heavily for the second time this week in Culebrón. When it was over we had large pools all over the garden and I had to mop up in the back bedroom where I'd left a door ajar. I have proof that it rained, I was on the phone to my sister and I made her listen to the noise as the big drops collided with the tin roof.

This morning, when I checked yesterday's temperatures (High 33.6ºC, Low 21.8ºC) I  noticed that the rainfall recorded in Pinoso, where the official weather station is, was zero. In fact none of the weather stations in Valencia, in all three provinces, recorded any rainfall whatsoever.

So was Culebrón the only place it rained yesterday?

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.