Autumn 2018 - General discussion

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

And no let up in MTs forecasts. Miserable weather.

It was a classical Irish autumn really

I thought it was going to get a bit milder?

Chilly enough in Dublin today.

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

It was actually nice enough in Dublin today. Bit of sun.

It was good up to now... there's a prolonged shower in Dublin 9 which hasn't stopped for the last hour and a half.

September: Pretty good, especially Storm Ali
October: Best month of the season
November: Atrocious. Not much sun nor frost. Not even a decent northwesterly. Yuck.

178mm of rain in Castlebar for November, a low of 0.3C and a high of 14.2C.

Autumn overall had 486.9mm of rain and it rained 66/91 days, a low of 0.3C and a high of 20.6C, a max gust of 118.7 km/hr.

We needed all the rain that fell in November here in the south east. Ground conditions are still good.
Wells have recovered, so it was a good end to autumn.

sryanbruen wrote: »

In summary,

September - A fairly mild and mixed month. Likely to be on the relatively wetter than average side but no big deviation.
October - Settled and fairly mild again with no big deviation from average. Lot of quiet weather.
November - Very wet, mild and stormy. Plenty of gales and rain.

To start this post off, a review of my Autumn 2018 forecast.

Autumn 2018 overall was a relatively cool season largely due to October and the cold end to that month. It was the coldest Autumn since 2012 though that is not saying much as Autumn has been a mild season lately - and for much of the past few decades too. It was dry for most largely again down to October though November's rain more than compensated for some to make it a fairly wet Autumn. November was the wettest in the south and east of Ireland since 2009.

Both September and especially October were colder than I anticipated though in fairness, I did say no significant deviation from average either way. November was mild and I forecasted it to be mild.

Both September and October were on the drier than average side though September was wet for some. I forecasted September to be fairly wet and October to be dry with a lot of quiet weather. The October prediction verified perfectly whilst September could have been better but for a long range forecast, I think it did well. November was forecast to be very wet and stormy. Whilst it may not have been as wet as I anticipated going by my forecast, it still was a very wet month in parts of the south and east of the country so I think that did ok.

Overall, I think I'll give my Autumn 2018 forecast a 7/10. I'm very happy with it especially for the settled October prediction and November.

Autumn 2018 records for synoptic stations:

Maximum: 25.1c at Phoenix Park on September 2nd
Minimum: -5.0c at Mt. Dillon on November 2nd
Wettest day: 34.1mm at Valentia Observatory on November 27th

How do these temperature records look in the historical record back to 1986? See the graph below.



2018 stands just about in the middle with not a particularly low or high min/max.

Data comes from Met Éireann.