Another month of record breaking weather started with the warmest New Year’s Day ever. It was also the sunniest January recorded for England, though we experienced many days of continuous cloud cover. Finally, in contrast to December, it was particularly dry, rainfall in England being less than 40% of average. Here, only eight days had...
December is usually one of the wetter months of the year, as was the case this time with 15 rain-days. Storm ‘Barra’ on 7th-8th produced high winds and heavy showers but was nothing like as damaging as named storm ‘Arwen’ in November.
My month with nature started well when Joyce and David Jarvis showed me two flowering Broad-leaved Helleborines at Ainsdale National Nature Reserve. I hadn’t seen this orchid on the Sefton Coast since 2008. Other notable plants during the month included a small colony of Whorl-grass that I found on a freshwater seepage zone on Hightown...
Following on from a rainy December, January was another wet month. Although it rained on only about 14 days, there were two exceptionally wet periods, from 13th-16th and 18th-20th, the latter coinciding with named storm Christophe. This storm produced the wettest 3-days in Northwest England and North Wales since records began in 1891.