April brought its usual crop of showers, but there were also some prolonged downpours which triggered local flooding, notably in southern Scotland and northern England around mid-month. There was also one extended spell of dry and sunny weather, but that was confined to the northern half of Scotland between the 16th and 26th.

Temperatures fluctuated either side of the average, but the warm days outnumbered the cold ones, and the mean monthly temperature was between 0.5 and 1.5 degC above the long-term average in most parts of the UK. The average afternoon maximum temperature ranged from 8.0°C at Fair Isle, between Shetland and Orkney, to 14.9°C in central London, while the average overnight minimum temperature varied between 1.2°C at Braemar in Aberdeenshire and 7.9°C at St Mary�s in the Isles of Scilly.

There were few individual temperatures of note. The 20°C threshold was not seriously breached until the last day of the month when 22.6°C was reached in Charlwood in Surrey; the lowest reading of the month happened during the early hours of the 9th when a minimum of minus 5.2°C was recorded at RAF Benson, between Oxford and Reading. On the 8th the temperature climbed no higher than 0.1°C at Lerwick in Shetland, making this the coldest April day there since 1985.

Rainfall, averaged over England and Wales, totalled 80.6mm which was 28 per cent above the long-term average, but it was not quite as wet as April 2004. The equivalent figures for Scotland were 274.5mm and 22 per cent above, and for Northern Ireland 65.2mm and 16 per cent above. It was an exceptionally wet month in much of southern and western Scotland, in northern England, and locally in Devon, and all these areas reported two to two-and-a-half times the normal amount of rain. The largest total to hand was 225mm at Capel Curig in Snowdonia. It was not a wet month everywhere, though: parts of northeast and central Scotland, Lincolnshire and the Midlands had a rather dry month. Driest of all was Lossiemouth in Morayshire where the month�s total of 19.4mm amounted to exactly half of the normal figure for April. A modest shortfall over much of the London area meant that this was the sixth consecutive drier-than-average month in the capital.

Much of northern and western Scotland enjoyed eight consecutive days of almost unbroken sunshine from the 19th to the 26th totalling 89 hours at Kinloss, Morayshire, but this barely offset the exceptionally cloudy first fortnight. In the Midlands, northwest England and north Wales, where there were few sunny days, this was the dullest April at some stations since 1993. Valley, on Anglesey, reported a sunshine deficit of 30 per cent.

© Philip Eden