Summer 2023 - General Discussion

Cracking afternoon in Cork 😍

Monsoon rain here in Kildare

Positive as always amigo 😁

Celebrating the end of a poor summer that resembled autumn when all we're doing now is transitioning into actual autumn is a bit nonsensical but each to their own I suppose!

Looks ok to me, what would we have done for this in July and August?

I thought exactly the same 😀

Agreed. Maybe it was the extra fine June or could be my holiday spacing this year but whatever the reason the past 2 months have given me SAD.

Normally I'm fairly positive re the weather and when it gets too much I head for the continent but as said, this year has been brutal. Maybe it's age.

My cousin Vincent is obsessed with hurricanes. We hopefully won't get that far but with El Nino it won't be the calm Winter of 22/23.

Some genuine heat in the sun today, great to see.

Love days like this in September.

Sadly the way statistics works is like this in the case of summer 2023.

June is over 2 degrees cooler than the average July. This often brings down the summer mean down. This year, June 2023 was so ridiculously anomalous and it brought the summer "baseline" so well above any other precedent. It was a full degree warmer than any prior June on the national average.

This means it will take a serious cool July/August to bring the summer mean down. A July below average within a degree for example will not do anything as the average June will still have been a degree cooler. July 2023 was well within a degree from average (on the below side) rather than being a proper cool month. Part of this is thanks to the frequent cloudy nights and wet nature of the month - clearer nights and drier soils allow heat to be lost quicker at night. August was similar but on the above side and even stronger influence from mild nights.

Let's use Valentia's mean temps as an example as it is one of the stations that is used to calculate the national mean the 4th warmest on record refers to (Year June July August)

2023 16.4 15.3 15.9 = summer mean of 15.87C

2022 13.7 15.7 16.2 = summer mean of 15.20C

See here, June was almost 3 degrees cooler in 2022 whilst July/August were warmer in 2022 albeit not by a significant amount there due to the heavy maritime influence. June made the difference in 2023. It did all the heavy lifting. Don't forget in 2022 too, August had relatively cooler nights thanks to the above normal sunshine and clear skies as well as dry soils.

Got to say though, I'm very very surprised it is not at least 5th because I'd have 100% thought 2018 would have been warmer. That too had a very warm June and July was way warmer than 2023. August was also, whilst disappointing, far from cool.

This summer is a clear example of how statistics can be heavily skewed and they are not without issues just like people's perceptions or memories. They too can have biases. In this case, June has a significantly cooler baseline on average than the other 2 summer months so when a very warm or record-breaking June happens, it will completely skew things. This warning sign was there from the beginning but I did not anticipate 4th warmest at all. The Met will need to be very careful with their messaging on this or it will be like the Simpsons Movie outside HQ in Glasnevin with the pitchforks. Just straight up saying 4th warmest on record without context is misleading. I don't envy them in this time.

In my opinion anyway, the mean max is a much more important and useful indicator for summer than the mean temp. Would be nice if they made it more readily available.

Where is this nice weather, dull and drizzly here in NCD, ah well have kids match anyway so don't want it too warm for that and hopefully will improve later on.

June was around 3º above average in many places. That's huge. Mind you, everyone seemed to have forgotten that come July.

July was marginally below average.

But August had above average temps almost everywhere again. There was no heatwave but some stations were around 1º above average.

MET E is using facts and data. Whether someone got to go to the beach is irrelevant for their reports.

But yes - there were hardly any 'beach days' as it was often cloudy and rainy and windy - especially in July - but it was also consistently mild by Irish standards. Some of it was due to warm nights, which people often won't notice. But the days were mostly in the range of 18º to 22º consistently and over the course of 3 months that built up to a warm summer by our standards. Even if it won't be memorable for the right reasons.

Also, our weather is so cool anyway that even if we had the warmest summer on record it would still probably feel cold to some people unless it involved heatwaves.

But MET E has also clearly stated that it was a very wet summer too.

First summer i've ever recorded June as the warmest month, I'd say that's very rare overall.

Yes, it was often blustery alright. But when the sun was shining it felt pleasant (for me. Everyone is different).

Given how dire July was, and with El Niño, I’d expected August to be much worse. But it was grand in the East.

They're now saying it is the 5th warmest in the new provisional stats and 2018 was warmer. Knew it being warmer than 2018 sounded too crazy to be true.