Here's some analysis of the weather we've had here since February 2004.
There's one interesting feature of the rain I'd like to point out - the Daily Weather Report shows that the greatest rainfall in one hour was 35 mm concluding at 0:53 a.m. on July 23 2004. But it doesn't say that for most of that hour, it wasn't actually raining! The peak rate was 3 mm per minute and we had 33 mm of rain in only 19 minutes. In the book "Weather Patterns of East Anglia" the author, Alfred Glenn, gives 0.47" of rain in 2.5 minutes as the heaviest rainfall recorded since 1900 - a rate of 11.3" per hour which fell in 1917. Others of 6.2" per hour in 1924 and 7.7" per hour in 1946 are also recorded. The fall in July 2004 was 4.1" per hour over the 19 minutes when it fell heavily.
Rain that heavy and that much in a day is very rare here. The figure below gives the frequency of rainfall per day.
As can be seen, we consistently seem to get rain free days for about 2/3rds of the time.
Between August 2004 and April 2006, the weather was generally dry, leading to a deficit over that period of about 230 mm - about 6 months' typical rainfall. May and August 2006 broke the run of dry weather we'd been having up to then and and the run of wet or average weather we've had since then means we're now in considerable surplus since I started records in early 2004. This is shown in the graph below:
It's interesting to look at rainfall over a period of 15 days, since one definition of an absolute drought is 15 consecutive days without measurable rain. The graph below gives rainfall recorded in the 15 days prior to the date shown on the axis.
We see 2 significant droughts. One was in June 2005, where there was no recorded rain for 24 days and the other is April/May 2007, where no rain fell for 38 days, including a completely rain-free April. Other recorded brief droughts are in June 2004, September 2005, December 2005, February 2006, July 2006, September 2007 and February 2008. Newly notable is the record amount of rain in that fell in 15 days between May and June 2008.
So far, we've averaged high pressure, with the average to date being 1014.9 mbar, compared with the expected "normal" pressure of 1013 mbar. The pressure frequency chart below emphasises this.
This is based on pressure measurements recoded every minute for the period - a total of 2,411,248 readings. As can be seen, the most common measurement (the mode) is 1017 mbar. There's a substantial tail to the left, caused by 5 periods of very low pressure. December 2006 saw my record high pressure - 1044 mbar - and March 2008 a new record low of 963 mbar.
The graph below shows the average temperature for each month since I've had the weather station.
It shows that, generally, each year has followed a pretty close pattern. Feb 2004 was only a part month, and probably should be ignored. March 2006 was clearly about 2 degrees colder than my recorded "norm". The extraordinary month is July 2006, which was about 4 degrees hotter. Felt it, too.
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