Irish Summer Weather

One useful comparison between countries would be to check the weather over a period of time in a particular region. The Armagh Observatory has being publishing weather data for the last 200 years. The summers (June, July & August) in Ireland have been really bad over the last 3 years. For example, here is the rainfall data since 1838 for the 3 month summer period. You can see a peak rainfall datapoint to the right of the graph that represents the amount of rainfall for Summer 2007 (377mm) which was the worst rainfall since summer of 1958 and before that we did not have as much rain in a summer since 1861.

Despite the heavier than normal rainfall over the last 3 years the trend is down slightly over the period of 170 years (slightly drier summers on average with a reduction from 235mm to just over 200mm). Hopefully we might get a decent summer again like in 1995 when we got just under 80mm of rain during the summer and a decent amount of sunshine (more later when I collate the sunshine data).