Summer just past

 It has been a hot summer with some records broken of course.
Here the highest temperature reached was 37.3C on the 19th.
This was quite a jump on previous record of about 32C!
It was only one day though and honestly don't quite understand why such a huge fuss was made about 'dangers' since high 30s temperatures are common enough in southern Europe where people apparently enjoy it on holiday.
The cause was a pocket of very hot air direct from North Africa and it was less moderated since France in particular was already hotter and drier than normal.

A more significant issue is how dry it has been - building on a dry winter, every month has been below average with only February anywhere near normal.
By mid September we had still had less than 250mm well below half normal.
The result has been scorched up grassland though occasional showers meant it didn't really get as brown as 1976 and some areas to the south of the moors and further west were much less scorched than here towards the coast.

September has gradually built up a more respectable total of about 66mm in fact slightly above normal and the immediate worry of failing water supplies has receded but grass growth can't make up for several weeks when there was almost none.

Some problems with data.

 At the end of August we had a thunderstorm and not quite sure why but when I shut everything down to pull the plug until lightning had passed the final day seemed to get messed up and that also messed up the whole month - though only the rain total was significantly affected.
It seemed like having a few entries missing at the end made it an incomplete or invalid total so it just indicated 0.0mm when it should have been about 12.8mm I think (still very low!).

I downloaded a more recent version of the software in the hope it would behave differently but it still calculated the rain total as zero.

I decided to leave it on the newer software as all seemed OK otherwise.
Month ends are often when issues arise and inexplicably at the very last day of September it *lost* the first six days completely.
The data does back up to server but overwrites at 6am daily so the backup was also overwritten.

Rainfall was hardly affected by that but the September mean temp was about 1C lower than it should be since the first week was quite hot.

There was no obvious reason this happened as the power had not gone out so suspicion falls on the new software since the old version never 'lost' several days irretrievably so far as I know.
So I have put it back on older version but there is still no easy way to retrieve the lost days though they are shown in wunderground page.
In teh past you could download a .csv from there and convert it then replace missing data here but they have hidden or removed that option now.

No big deal but somebody might notice discrepancies.
I can correct those figures manually but not much point doing it until year end as it will overwrite with wrong data at each month end until January starts.