Was April really that cold?

Did April feel cold to you? It did to many people, but apparently it wasn’t all that cold. Our weather data from Invergowrie showed that this April was the joint 17^th warmest month on our records, which date back to 1954, held jointly with 1959.

This was with a mean air temperature of 8.2°C, just 0.2°C above the long-term (30-year).

So why did it feel cold? The Met Office says it was a month of two halves – warmer in the first half of the month (with a peak of 21.8°C in Essex), then remaining below average for the rest of the month.

At Invergowrie, we had a high of 16.1°C on April 11 and a low of 1.1°C on April 5.

Rainfall through the month was high, making it the sixth wettest April on record, with 74.7 mm of rain, 166.7% of the long-term average. Some 13 mm of it fell on April 3.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, sunshine hours were lower than normal, at 139.9 hours, 87.1% of the long-term average. However, that was higher than the average for the whole of the UK, which got 79% of its long-term average.

Meteorological March

Looking back to March, it was the 11^th wettest on our records, with 73 mm of rain, 158% of the long-term average. Of that, 15.2 mm fell on March 25. There were 112 sunshine hours, 92.3% of the long-term average.

March was the 17th warmest March on our records, with a daily mean air temperature of 6.4°C, 0.6°C above the long-term average. The warmest day was on March 19, at 14.1°C and the coldest on March 1 and 4, at -1.6°C.