blue&white

Yes, it seems for an accurate portrayal, rains weighting and ability to lower the days score should be decreased if a certain level of sunshine is passed. The greater the level of sunshine, the more weighting rain loses. It doesn't seem right that a downpout at 5am in june could go on to significantly lower the score of a day that goes onto have 10 hours of sunshine.

Would an august day that reached 22c with 5 hours of sunshine and no rain get rated higher than a day that reached 22c with 8 hours of sunshine but it rained constantly for 1 hour at 8.30pm?

I think what people are noticing the most this summer is the fact that we seem to have reverted back to the pattern of nice summer days being evenly distributed throughout the month.It seems to me, and June 2013 is a good example of this, that in recent years we have experienced these 7-10 days in a row of wall to wall sunshine that everybody gets excited about, followed by the rest of the period operating well below expected sunshine levels. So even though these months have on occasions (see june 2013) totalled expected sunshine levels, it really hasn't told the whole story of what the majority of the month was like.

I think it really is a sign of how starved of sunshine we have become in this country since 2006. Looking at the sunshine stats here - http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~brugge/CURR.html it shows that the very vast majority of places are on course to have final totals of average levels of sunshine or just slightly over this month.Yet this feels like a totally different country to me, to the one that I have be inhabitating for the last 6-7 years in summer.

Indeed. I have seen the high ranking of 2013 now on this summer index a few times, and it leaves me a little confused and even depressed! I live about a 20 minute drive away from Manchester, and 2013 doesn’t rank so highly from my experience where I live.July 2013, was definitely a brilliant month, especially compared to the recent summer months of the past 5-6 years. However, when looking at weather records, a month like July isn’t really that far from the norm and is usually experienced every few summers, perhaps a little less sunny on the stats side, but I wouldn’t say it would be noticeable.Where I live, June was anything but consistent, it seemed that 70% of the total sunshine came in the first 10 days, and the following 3 weeks were dull as anything, with just average temperatures. August came in at average temperatures again, but well below average sunshine levels.I’m guessing a lack of rain then has really pushed it up the rankings? Which I find odd, because it could be absolutely torrential rain for 5 days on dull days, but then be wall to wall sunshine for nearly 3 weeks, yet I guess the rain would considerably alter this ‘months’ rating.