Another mild month in the UK, making the 1999 autumn one of the 10 warmest autumns ever recorded in this country. The month started and ended very mild, but the first taste of winter was felt between the 16^th and 21^st of the month. The whole country enjoyed the mild weather, with the east being perhaps slightly favoured compared to the west. The Channel Islands had the largest warm anomaly of over 1.6° C.

A dry October was followed by an equally dry November, although in relative terms November was the drier month with an anomaly of -22 per cent. This was the driest November in the UK since 1993. The rainfall followed the mild weather and nearly all the rain in November fell during the first and last weeks of the month. Bonfire Night, 5^th November, was the wettest day of 1999 so far, with a nationwide average of over 16mm of rainfall. Scotland mostly recorded above average rainfall totals, Tiree being the most anomalous with 45 per cent more rainfall than in an average November. Despite these last two dry months, the last two years in the UK have recorded abundant rainfall (see Graph).

Another sunny month, with November totals averaging 15 per cent above normal for this time of year. With the exception of a few Scottish locations, the whole country enjoyed this excess sunshine, most notably the south coast where sunshine anomalies reached +50 per cent or more. The sunniest day of the month was Saturday, 6^th November, which followed the wettest day of the month. Only two of the last 14 months have been cloudier than average in the UK.

Dr Mike Hulme is a Research Climatologist at the University of East Anglia

(more details at web site: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~mikeh/)

Daytime Temperature: 0.8°C above average; Rainfall: 22% below average; Sunshine: 15% above average.

[all average figures are based on the 1951-80 average]

Mean monthly extremes:

Warmest Guernsey 13.8°C

Sunniest Folkestone 111 hours sun

Wettest Eskdalemuir 194mm

Coldest Lerwick 8.1°C

Cloudiest Lerwick 33 hours sun

Driest Folkestone 35mm