April 2015 Monthly Report

April 2015 has generally been quite kind to us with fine, dry and quite warm weather the dominant feature during the month, certainly throughout the first 3½ weeks anyway.  The tail end of the month was a let-down by comparison, but even so we recorded our highest temperatures so far (only since November 2014, remember), and the month as a whole came in as our driest yet.

April started cool, damp and dreary, but, apart from Good Friday (the 3rd), the weather improved steadily until a couple of bands of rain brought a brief unsettled spell close to the middle of the month.  After this, the pressure built up again and we had over a week of prolonged dry weather, with warm sunshine and light winds.  During this spell our temperature record was broken twice and we had three consecutive days in the low 20s, reaching almost 70°F.  By the time the fine weather broke on the 24th, we'd also been exceptionally dry (for April), seeing only 21.9mm of rain (and a third of this fell on the first day of the month).

It's a pity the last week couldn't live up to what had gone before - the temperatures dropped dramatically back to what they were at the start of the month, the wind picked up bringing a noticeable wind chill with it, and we had a further 24.3mm of rain, more than doubling our monthly total.



Finding 'typical' stats for Blackburn isn't easy, but the best figures I can find suggest that this year's April holds up well, but not exceptionally so.  Our average high was about 1½°C higher than we should expect, but our average lows were cooler by a similar amount.  April is usually one of the drier months, but, depending on which figures you use, this year has been slightly drier than usual.

The unsettled weather to end the month has carried into May, but by the time we can produce May's report then there's still every chance of us having some more better weather once again.