Summer 2023 - General Discussion

The squelch sounds are back in my garden. The drainage problem which I had during the winter and Spring was fixed during the dry spell in June so the constant running water out the back is no longer a thing. However it has rained so much over the past 5 weeks that the ground is now saturated by default and is very noticeable this morning after a night of deluges.

Just to add the crap weather of the past 5 weeks has now taken over much of Europe, the cooler than average and very wet conditions is now affecting much of France, Germany, the low countries and indeed Scandinavia as well as the UK and Ireland. Summer has now been very much restricted to the southern third of Europe at this moment in time.

I was hoping to go to the Netherlands for a short break this August but have binned that idea as the weather there is forecast to be every bit as rubbish as here in Ireland.

June 24th must have been one of the better days during the final 10 days of the month. I can't remember that day other than look at the temperature and it was around 22C. Now that final 10 days of the month were mostly warm as we still had some left over warm air to tap into but from what I remember it rained most days. We ended up with about 50mm of rainfall, the vast majority of that fell in the final week of June where the warm weather was offset by the rather unsettled conditions. I do remember the final day of June was when the cool and unsettled pattern really got going, that day was a chilly wet write off not too different from the awful conditions outside right now.

I'm really getting tired of discussing June and I'm sure others are too. I never said June was rubbish but what I did say was June in the east was not as good as what they had on the west coast. Opening 10 days of June couldn't have been more different between say Galway and here in Meath. The east itself also had some variations depending on location. I could be wrong about this but I think coastal parts of Leinster probably did better with the sunshine during the first week compared to more inland areas. I remember I had to put the heating on at least twice during the first week of June on some of the cloudy and chilly days were we struggled to get much above 13C.

It was a very warm month once we got the first week out of the way, It was weeks 2 and 3 of June that brought the temperature anomaly way above the average for the entire month as well as the warm night time values. The final week of June wasn't great as there was alot of rain that week and while temperatures were still warm at times during the final week, things became not great as we eased into the current unsettled pattern.

So what I'm saying is the final 10 days of June weren't great, it was the start of a very unsettled pattern. July was absolute awful and here we are on August 2nd and it's still miserable outside so I think I deserve my opinion to be not overly happy about summer 2023. There are people who love this sort of summer but I'm not one of them. Everyone's opinion about the weather, good or bad deserves to be heard, we all have different opinions on what we think of the weather and our experiences of the weather can be very different depending on where you live in this small country and early June was a perfect example of that.

I only live 25km from Dublin and there has been quite a few times the weather between here in Meath and Dublin can be very different. It could be raining here yet sunny in Dublin and vice versa. There has been times Dublin gets thunderstorms and we don't, same with snow etc. Rainfall amounts per month can also be quite different between Dunsany vs Phoenix Park. Not a huge distance involved but regional variations do happen which is why all our viewpoints are different based on personal experience of where we live.