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Old October 3rd 11, 10:53 AM posted to uk.sci.weather
John Hall John Hall is offline
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First recorded activity by Weather-Banter: Nov 2003
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Default Welsh October record-length

In article ,
Martin Rowley writes:
... I see from the Met Office press release he-

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/...t_weather.html

That the *previous* record for Wales is given as 26.4°C at Ruthin in
1985 (1st October).

But I have a note, taken from 'official' sources some years ago, that
the highest October value for Wales was 26.7°C (presumably 80°F
observed, subsequently converted) on October 3rd in 1908. This was
recorded at Betws-Y-Coed (Conwy/Snowdonia) and was part of a
remarkable very warm/hot spell that also gave Scotland its October
record of 25.6°C at Elgin on the 2nd in 1908 ... both these values are
absent from the Met Office 'extremes' data base via this link he-

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/extremes/

Does anyone know what happened to these values? Were they found
'wanting' with the passage of time, or is this a case of the database
not 'starting' until a certain point?


Maybe it's been decided, not unreasonably, that it's not really pukka to
convert a value that was presumably only recorded to the nearest whole
Fahrenheit degree into a Celsius value incorporating tenths of a degree.
If you argue that that 80°F value would have been at least 79.5 (or
maybe 79.6) and at most 80.4 (or 80.5), then we get a range from 26.4 to
26.9 for the "true" Celsius value.
--
John Hall
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
by those who have not got it."
George Bernard Shaw