UK Has Wettest June In Over A Century

(Newsroom America) -- Provisional UK Met Office figures for June show double the average amount of rain has fallen, making it the wettest June since records began in 1910.

This is the second record breaking month of rainfall this year, with April also topping the rankings. The period from April to June is also the wettest recorded for the UK.

It is also the second dullest June on record with just 119.2 hours of sunshine, narrowly missing out on the record of 115.4 hours set in 1987. To complete the disappointing picture, it has also been the coolest June since 1991 with a mean temperature of 12.3 deg C.

Unsettled weather has never been far from the UK during the past three months, with only the latter half of May seeing a spell of prolonged fine weather.

Movements in the track of the jet stream, a narrow band of fast flowing westerly winds high in the atmosphere, have contributed to the weather, Met Office said.

This June has seen periods of heavy and prolonged rain, as well as short but exceptionally heavy showers.

The total UK rainfall was 145.3mm - exactly twice as much as you would normally expect compared to the 1971-2000 average. This beats the previous record of 136.2 mm set in 2007.

Looking at individual countries, it has been the wettest June on record for Wales and Northern Ireland, the second wettest in England, and the eighth wettest in Scotland.

Many areas have seen extremely high rainfall - with 83 (out of 237) observation sites marking their wettest June on record. Some of these aren't significant as they have very short recording histories, just a year in some cases, but others have been operating much longer - Otterbourne in Hampshire has been operating for 119 years.

One of the key features of the month has been that the far north west of the UK, traditionally the wettest part of the country, has been remarkably dry.

Up until quite late in the month, a few stations in this area were below their record lowest rainfall amounts - but they just missed the record books with rain falling in the last few days of the month.