Extreme Welsh weather
Wales isn’t known for its extreme weather. We get plenty of rain, but did you also know that Cardiff for example, get more hours of sunlight per year than Milan in Italy, so it’s not always gloomy. We’re taking a look at some of the most extreme weather Wales has ever had.
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00:00It seems that we've left the mini heatwave that we experienced earlier on this week and
00:08many of us will be very happy that it's just behind us now. Temperatures have been blistering
00:13at times this week, with max temperatures reaching a whopping 29 degrees on Monday in
00:18Ask, making it the hottest day of the year so far in Wales, but there are some promises
00:23that it's only set to get hotter at times in the coming weeks. It's been a funny year
00:29so far for weather, we've seen these boiling hot temperatures come and go a few times,
00:33but we've also seen some heavy rain and thunderstorms just a few weeks ago. And thinking back to
00:38the start of the year, the cold weather was more than we've seen for a while, with some
00:42parts of Wales recording minimum temperatures of less than minus 9 degrees.
00:50We've got a bit of a break from all that extreme weather for now, but you know that there's
00:54just going to be some more surprises at some point this year. This year might have felt
01:00up and down, but it's nothing compared to some of the weather we've seen here in Wales
01:04in the past. So we're going to take a look at some of the historical extremes that Wales
01:08has seen through the years, from the hottest temperatures to the coldest, the wettest months
01:13we've seen in Wales, and some of these are truly extreme. Cast your minds back two years,
01:20it was the first summer that was properly free from the pandemic and the weather came
01:23back for us in a very big way. One might say it came back a bit too strongly. That
01:28year temperature records were broken across the board, a heatwave swept across Europe
01:32and us here in Wales and across the rest of the UK felt the burn with a bang. In Wales
01:37we recorded our hottest ever temperature of 37.1 degrees. It's worth taking a minute to
01:42think about just how hot that really is. For example, the average maximum summer temperature
01:46of the hottest country on the planet in Burkina Faso, which is roughly 39 degrees the year.
01:52Burkina Faso being smack bang in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
01:59Plenty of us would have been torn that summer. Do you appreciate the warm weather or do you
02:03scorn the unbearable temperatures?
02:10Now to get the coldest temperature ever in Wales, you have to go back quite a fair bit,
02:14all the way back to the 21st of January 1940, when in Riyadh we saw the mercury drop to
02:19minus 23 degrees. Again, astronomically cold temperatures, but it's interesting to see
02:24just how long ago that was, considering Scotland set their coldest temperatures in 1995, but
02:29Northern Ireland set their lowest in only 2010.
02:32When it comes to Wales' most famous weather, of course, it's the rain. The wettest month
02:37on record for Wales was back in December 2015, when we had as much rain in 31 days as we
02:42usually do in a full year, and that, of course, is a British record too.
02:47But Wales has some extreme weather every now and then, so it's worth appreciating days
02:51like these when it's not too warm, not too windy, not raining, and not really much at all.