Huddersfield Weather Watch - December 2015
Widespread flooding was seen in December with just one day of the month escaping rain.
Wed, 06 Jan 2016 23:58:00 GMT
Record-breaking month for rainfall and warmer than November
DECEMBER was an exceptional and record breaking month. The UK was in a warm and moist tropical air mass for most of the month, bringing unseasonably mild conditions to England and Wales. It was also exceptionally wet and windy including storms Desmond, Eva and Frank which brought record breaking rainfall over much of the country (Met. Office, Jan 2016). The culmination of records amounts of rain fall for November and December lead to wide spread flooding in many places in Yorkshire as well as other areas in the north of England and Scotland. The average figures are those recorded from the Applied Sciences weather station since 1990.
December was exceptionally warm and followed a very warm November; it was actually warmer in December than November! On seventeen days of the month the average daily temperatures stayed above 10˚C. The monthly mean temperature was 9.64˚C which is 4.4˚C higher than the average figure for December of 5.24˚C; by far the warmest December since our records began! The warmest day of the month was Saturday 19th December with an average temperature of 14.4˚C (average 11.17 ˚C), this is by far the highest figure recorded for December since our records began. The highest maximum temperature of 16.6˚C was recorded on Friday 18th again a record breaking figure for December (the previous record was 15.2˚C recorded in 1998). The coldest day of the month was Saturday 12th with an average temperature of 3.4˚C.
The lowest minimum temperature of -0.4˚C was recorded on Thursday 31st. Temperature fell below zero on just two days of the month.
A total of 178.4mm was recorded during the month (average 100.9mm) making it the second wettest December since our records began (wettest 1993 with 208.7mm). In terms of two consecutive months with high rainfall figures, November (218.4mm) and December (178.4mm) were by far the wettest since our records began with a total of 394.6mm of rain: The previous record was 311.8mm recorded between December 2007 (93.4mm) and January 2008 (218.4mm). The wettest day of the month was Friday 25th when 34.4mm of rain fell (19.2% of the month’s total), Saturday 12th was also an exceptionally wet day with 32.4mm of rain fall. Just one day of the month escaped rain!
It was the windiest month of all months since December 2011 with a mean wind speed of 17.17km/hr. The highest mean wind speed was 42.12km/hr recorded on Saturday 5th, which is the second highest recorded for December since 2005. The highest gust of wind for the month was 126km/hr recorded on Friday 4th and was the highest gust of wind recorded for December since our new weather station was installed in 2005.
The prevailing wind direction for the month was south west.
Julie Walker
Resource Centre and Environmental Technician
School of Applied Sciences
