‘Modest’ June might have been peak of our summer

Country Living with Francis Farragher

As much as we all bitched about June being only a middling month, it ended up delivering quite impressive statistics in terms of modest rainfall amounts, easily being our driest month of the year so far. So why were we less than enthused about our month of summer solstice, you might well ask.

The two main reasons for this were temperature and sunshine, both of which were in pretty short supply, especially during our early days of June. We certainly didn’t have any t-shirt weather during that first week or two of June and it was no surprise to see people out the fields well wrapped up in winter jackets.

We also had a lot of dull days through the month and that absence of sunshine always provides a very drab backdrop to the countryside even if it isn’t lashing rain. Abbeyknockmoy weather recorder Brendan Geraghty showed June to be our driest month of the year so far by a country mile with only eight wet days and two extended dry spells from the 5th to the 16th and the 17th to the 25th.

We did have a pretty horrible start to the month on the Bank Holiday Monday of June 1, that most of us will remember as a wet, cold and windy day that delivered close to half an inch of rain in some places across the county.

As might be expected, the Met. Éireann figures for June at Knock Airport, showed it to have the lowest sunshine intake of all its stations across the country. During the month, they had just 136.7 hours of sunshine at Knock Airport while in Dublin their sunshine figure of 204.3 hours was 118% of their long term average.

Rumour of a heatwave last week provided to be greatly exaggerated, well in the West anyway, with the top temperature for June recorded at the NUI Galway Weather Station a very modest 20.1°. As usual here in the West, we drew the short straw as on the last day of June, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, the mercury touched the 25.6°  Celsius mark.

Maybe though not too bad of a scenario really as temperatures reached 41° in Wimbledon and at different locations across continental Europe, as red hot air from the Saharan Desert blew up across the Mediterranean. Much and all as we crave good summer weather, this is quite literally ‘killer heat’ and as sure as night follows day, it will leave people dead in its wake, more than likely the elderly or those with health complications.

Anyway we seem to have the ‘all-clear’ in terms of any such troubles in our perch on the edge of the moderating Atlantic and through the month of June across the network of Met. Éireann weather stations, the temperatures were well below what is known as the Long Term Average (LTA).

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune