A look back at the summer months of June to August reveals some interesting weather statistics.
For England it was the hottest summer on record (in a series starting in 1910) and for the UK it was the joint hottest. It was notably dry and sunny too for the UK;summer finishes in the top 15 driest (topfive driest for England) and the topfive sunniest, with18 days havingmaximum temperatures over 30 Celsiusrecorded at the weather station at Heathrow Airport. At Shannon airport in Co. Clare the mercury hit 32 Celsius, the highest temperature on record for Ireland.
The map above shows the year of the hottest summer across the UK in more regional detail and for more information, you can visit thewebsites from the Met Office and Met �ireann.
Looking forward to the remainder of September � it looks like forecast accuracy will be decreased. That's because we're now in the most active part of the tropical storm season and even though the storms or hurricanes can be thousands of kilometres away from our shores, they can create unpredictable wobbles in the jet streams which can then impact the weather patterns over Europe too.
The MetDeskimage on our main newspage showsa forecast chart from one of the weather models valid for 1300 on 11 September. In the tropical Atlantic from left to right, we have hurricane Florence and (future) tropical storm/hurricane Helene and Isaac.For anyone interested in these, check out the US Hurricane Centre website.
In general terms, we're expecting temperatures for the remainder of September to be near the long term average values for the time of year, occasionally below average in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and occasionally above average in parts of England. It's going to be fairly windy at times in Scotland, with the main Atlantic low pressure being centred near Iceland. The sunniest and driest weather is likely to be across south east England, whereas some wet spells will come across the west and north west facing coasts and hills.
Please check back with us in a couple of weeks as we hope to have some detail for the weather expectations for October.
For more weather information you can follow our senior meteorologist, Simon Cardy on twitter weather_king.