ASCENSION:

Fine and sunny at first, but later in the week wet bulb temperatures rose to high levels. When the wet bulb temperature is high the body’s ability to cool itself effectively is reduced. Many people commented on how ‘humid’ and ‘sticky’ it felt on the weekend. When some showers eventually developed the high moisture levels led to some patches of very low cloud over the island, together with poor visibility. Fortunately these were fairly short lived.

ST. HELENA:

Rather cloudy and damp last week, especially on the eastern half of the island, where the sunshine figures only added up to 15.9 hours in total. There were more breaks in the cloud over western areas.

UK:

After a generally dry and rather cool start to the week,

(- 4 Celsius at Redhill in Surrey), milder but very moist air from the Atlantic began to spread over the British Isles. Eastern areas remained brightest longest, e.g. there was 8.6 hours of sunshine at Hunstanton on the Norfolk coast on Monday. In the west it was a different story. Extensive deep cloud led to long periods of rain with Capel Curig in Snowdonia being one of the wettest spots. On 10^th February 46.2 mm of rain fell on this very damp patch of North Wales, followed by another 53mm two days later! Over the weekend it was a case of ‘all change’. A deep low ran eastwards into the Baltic and in its wake this feature pulled in a cold northwesterly airstream over UK. Before the cold air arrived in the Southeast, however, the week’s highest temperature was realised down in Sheerness, which recorded 14 Celsius on Saturday.  The aircraft passengers left the tropical warmth of Ascension on Saturday evening to alight at Brize Norton on Sunday morning to a bitter northwest wind and a temperature of only 3 Celsius. It must have been a shock to the system.

FALKLANDS:

The Falklands enjoyed a real taste of Summer on Tuesday last. The temperature climbed to a splendid 23.5 Celsius! This little sniff of balmy weather proved to be very short-lived. It was back to business as usual on Wednesday when the daytime high was no more than 13.8 Celsius, and then fell overnight to a chilly 5.1. On the positive side the week was largely dry, only 1.7 mm of rain, but there was some very windy weather as well. On Sunday a powerful Northerly gale was blasting across Mount Pleasant. Peak wind speeds were a mean of 44 knots with gusts reaching 57 knots.