Preferred Season

Children's Favourite Season

This week's survey reveals that children overwhelmingly prefer summer to any of the other seasons. The summer gathered 54% of the total votes and that is more than the other three seasons put together.

No doubt, the preference is all down to the weather. Those "long, lazy days of summer" mean there are more opportunities to do things outside when the weather is pleasant – not too hot and not too cold, not too windy and not too wet. But what of conditions in other countries? How do our extremes compare with the rest of the world? Here's your chance to find out…

The Hottest

The highest temperature recorded on Earth was 56.7 degrees C (134.1 degrees F) in Furnace Creek, California, United States. You can see why the place is called Furnace Creek! In the UK the highest temperature record is nearly 20 degrees C cooler than that and it occurred last year at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cambridge. For the record, the actual temperature was 38.7 degrees C.

The Coldest

The lowest temperature record goes to the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica on 21 July 1982 which recorded a temperature of -89.2 degrees C (-128.6 degrees F). The lowest temperature recorded in the UK occurred in Bramar Scotland in 1982 when the thermometer went down to -27.2 degree C. The Scottish temperature is over 60 degrees WARMER than the Antarctic record.

The Wettest

The people of sunny Dorset had every right to feel hard done by when a July day in 1955 deluged them with 11 inches of rain. Their experience however pales into insignificance when compared with an island in the southern Indian Ocean (La Reunion) that saw over 71 inches in a day when a Cyclone passed through.

The wettest place in the world is a place called Mawsynram in India which gets an annual rainfall of 467 inches of rain a year. The wettest place in the UK is a small hamlet in the Lake District called Seathwaite and it expects to see a mere 140 inches of rain a year.

The Windiest

The highest wind speed ever recorded was at Barrow Island Australia on 10th April 1996 when Tropical Cyclone Olivia delivered a gust of 254mph. The nearest the UK has ever got to that is a 173mph gust recorded at Cairn Gorm Summit in the Scottish Highlands. There is little wonder that a blizzard on Cairn Gorm in 1971 saw the UK's worst mountaineering disaster when five pupils and a trainee instructor died during a blizzard.

The Sunniest

Let's end on a high note: The sunniest place in the world is Yuma in Arizona, USA where they get an average of 11 hours of sun per day. In the UK, in our three sunniest months (June, July and August) we get an average of over 6 hours sunshine per day. I bet that is a surprise to the people of Seathwaite!

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