Floods – but it’s set to be hottest December ever
THE high levels of rain lashing the North of England have been described as unprecedented.
Boxing Day floods followed several others in Cumbria this month, and the county has already recorded the wettest December since records began in 1910.
But this month looks an odds-on certainty to set another record nationwide as our warmest December ever. In central England, where they have been measuring temperatures since 1659, the highest average for the last month of the year currently stands at 46.6F (8.1Celsius), achieved in both 1934 and 1974.
At the start of Christmas week this year, the figure was 48.7F (9.3C).
The unseasonal weather could also mean that in Bude, Cornwall, another long-standing record is in peril. On New Year’s Day in 1916, this seaside resort saw the temperature peak at 60.08F (15.6C), the warmest-ever Jan 1 throughout the whole of the UK.
On New Year’s Day 2015, Murlough in County Down did its best to match it at 59.18F (15.1C). On present form, it could be Bude itself that raises its own bar, due to the unseasonably warm sea temperatures in the Atlantic, currently lapping the Cornish coast.
All of which may signal the end of another fine old tradition. New Year’s Day is usually the time when a hardy few attract admiring gasps from the rest of us by abandoning hearth, home and commonsense and plunging into the freezing, grey waves around our shores.
But if Jan 1 temperatures start matching those of a typical August, these hardy souls will look no more eccentric than the rest of us who take a summer “staycation”.