The summer has certainly been very good with a large number of sunny, warm and dry days. I wouldn't describe it as a 'heatwave' summer though - the typical decent day in Manchester in July seemed to be 26C. We certainly had a few of those, but few scorchios. What the highest temperature in Manchester by the way? I think we just scraped 29C one day? My memories of 2006 by contrast though was quite intense heat. I recall it was 27C at just 9am on a number of occasions.

Just shows how good the weather normally is in the south east when a summer like this one comes out at average - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2411000/UK-weather-Two-day-heatwave-hottest-September-days-seven-years.html

To be fair, it wasn't exceptionally warm here. It was very dry, with all three summer months being consistently warm. At Leeming, the mean max in Jul '13 was 23.5C, exactly the same as in Jul '76.

I have worked out a Summer Index using the daily CET data, rainfall stats and sunshine hours supplied by the Met Office for download

The main difference from Kevin's (apart from it not being for Manchester !) is that instead of taking the avarage max temperature, I used the difference of the number of warm days (CET max 22C or more minus the number of cool days of 16C or less)

The table only goes back to 1961 as the current rainfall daily stats only go back that far

I used "Midlands" entries for Sunshine and Rainfall for consistency with the CET

2013 came out better (just) than 2003 but not as good as 2006 as shown below

Pretty flawed article, the 2013 temperature anomaly is to the 1981-2010 average, all other to the 61-90 average! 2013 would sure look a lot better with the correct reference point...