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weather-uk press pack
Ready-prepared
articles on heatwaves and hot summers
- 980117 Winter warmth Meteorologists and doctors have a lot in common
when it comes to social gatherings. Both try to keep quiet about what they
do. If they fail they
- 000408 April heatwaves April too often brings unexpected reminders of
the winter just past, so let us indulge ourselves a little by turning over
the coin and remembering just
- 000610 Heat and humidity The first heatwave of summer usually reminds us
that heat combined with humidity can lead to considerable discomfort,
especially when we are not
- 000812 Heatwave of August 1990 Who remembers Nailstone now?
Exactly ten years ago this tiny Leicestershire village was all over the
newspapers and it featured repeatedly
- 000902 September heatwaves The years 1865,
1890, 1895 and 1929 were unusual. These were the only ones in the last two
centuries when September was the warmest
- 010609 Our hottest summers We may perhaps console ourselves that the best of
weather of the British summer usually comes during July and August –
"best", that is, in
- 010623 The summer of ’76 A generation has now grown up with no memory of the
famous summer of 1976, for exactly a quarter of a century has now passed
since that
- 011110 November warm spells I have always regarded a temperature above 20C as
"shirtsleeves weather" (Once, many years ago, I was told off for
using that expression in
- 020209 The warm winter of
2002 It has not been
the worst winter on record for the Scottish skiing industry, but there
have not been many as bad as this one. There were
- 020608 “Two fine days and a thunderstorm” Last weekend's brief hot spell amounted to exactly what
the old saying tells us we ought to expect in an English
- 020706
Dog Days The 'dog days'
last from July 3 until August 11. This period of high summer was
reckoned by the Romans to be the period of greatest heat during the entire
- 020810 High
summer humidity "This afternoon will be very warm and sultry
again, with relative humidity of 55 to 60 per cent …" Such a weather forecast would satisfy a
- 030215 February
warm spells Our warmest
weather in mid-winter is "imported", brought to us on cloudy
south-westerly winds whose origin lies somewhere over sub-
- 030824 August 2003 heatwave in France Most of us, I am sure, are familiar with the famous
newspaper placard “Fog in Channel; continent isolated” drawn by cartoonist
- 030830
Are hot summers followed by wet
autumns? The notion that
hot summers are inevitably followed by wet autumns has been floating
around the news media during
- 030905 How hot is hot? Have you ever listened to a weather forecast and found
yourself disagreeing strongly with the forecaster? Maybe his prediction of
a “rather warm”
- 031004
The 2003 heatwave in the UK For some of us,
of course, the heat was too much. The Gravesend record of
38.1ºC established on August 10 has now been officially
- 980215
The record-breaking warmth of
mid-Feb 1998 Outrageous. It’s the only word for it. The stunning
weather of mid-February 1998 was quite unprecedented so early in
- 990815 Killer US heatwave, summer 1999
Across the Atlantic the excessive
heat and humidity which dominated July continued with only fleeting interruptions
during August
- 990926 Do all hot Septembers end in “9”? September 1999
was the hottest for half a century. This reminded me of one of those
statistical quirks that sometimes appear in our
- 010729 Silly
season heatwaves You know the
silly season has arrived when, following two hot days, the tabloid
newspapers begin to speculate about the UK breaking its alltime
- 011104 October
2001 – the warmest ever Final figures
show that last month was the warmest October in more than 340 years of
records, smashing the previous record set in
- 030817 The UK’s hottest day on record A colleague unkindly suggested
that Gravesend is hardly the most attractively
named town in Britain,
and one suspects that its new found