For those who collect weather data at their location or for some location of their choice, I am wondering how 2014 is shaping up for you.

At the moment this is entirely a matter of curiousity, being a weather fanatic and all that 

So to kick things off, 2014 January-July for a rural location close to Fordingbridge, Hampshire (not far south of Salisbury)...

Temperatures

The mean temperature sits at 11.11*C, beating the old record in my series (2003-2014) of 10.88, set in 2006, by a country mile considering that the 2nd, 3rd and 4th warmest years all lie within a range of just 0.14*C. This new record is 0.23*C higher than the old one!

Truly staggering, and yet this year has featured nothing in the way of extreme high temperatures, and a fairly ordinary number of heatwaves. This is reflected to some extent by the fact that the mean maximum of 15.28*C is easily beaten by 2005, which managed 15.50*C, though admittedly this is the only year to do so. The average minimum for 2014 is 6.94*C, beating all other years, even the 6.75*C of 2006, a year that saw an average July minimum of 15.77*C.

This leads on to my next point - no individual month in 2014 has been exceptional in terms of mean temperatures, in the sense that months like April 2011 and July 2006 were. As for the maximums, July was the first month in 2014 to draw close to being exceptional (but for me 2013 set the bar on that one).

It's the persistently above to much above average temperatures through all of the months that's done it. For me, this is one of the strongest indicators of an overall climate warming that I've seen - the record warmest year January to July has occurred without much in the way of exceptional synoptics.

Precipitation

After exploding out of the starting blocks with 413mm Jan-Feb, annihilating the old 214.8mm record set by 2008, precipitation has been variable March-July. March was a bit drier than average (a deficit of 18mm), April a soaker (a surplus of 47.4mm), May also very wet (surplus of 32.1mm), then June and July on the dry side (deficits of 17.5mm and 9mm respectively). Clearly, though, the net value is still positive, only adding to the total surplus Jan-Jul, which stands at a mind-blowing 318.7mm.

For context, the second wettest year, 2007 saw 632mm, with 269.7mm of that falling in June and July. This year, with its somewhat dry summer so far, sits at 702.9mm. The lead was a good deal higher two months ago though, when 2014's 633.8mm blew 2008's 440.7mm out of the water.

Sunshine

With a mobile pattern producing lots of cloud breaks in winter, a higher than usual occurrence of relatively clear continental airflows in spring and then few problems with mist and low cloud in summer (perhaps due in part to the warm sea temperatures), 2014 has seen an insane amount of sunshine at my location.

Yes, I do mean insane; the previous record holder, 2011, had an impressive 1182 hours of sun compared to a regional LTA (1981-2010) of 1055.5 hours. 2014 has delivered 1351.4 hours. Honestly, that had me checking and double-checking my data in search of errors!

Despite this, the only monthly record set was for June - though of course, that does have a big weighting, being the month in which the sun spends the largest amount of time above the horizon.

Again, it's an example of persistence paying off - and I can't so easily attribute this to climate change, unless perhaps the persistently above average SSTs throughout the period have played a strong role.

There. It feels good to have done some data analysis for fun (i.e. outside of my dissertation) for a change. Sadly it looks like it'll be the last for at least 10 days, but that's life.