Revealed: The snowiest, coldest and windiest places in Britain
With a freezing weather front arriving from Siberia this week - nicknamed, not for the first time, the Beast from the East - we go on the hunt for Britain’s sunniest, coldest, wettest and windiest places.
Snowiest
Millions awoke to the sight of falling snow this morning, but which corners of Britain get more than their fair share of the white stuff?
It shouldn’t take a genius to guess mountainous and northerly parts of the country are most prone to powder. According to the Met Office, the weather station atop Cairn Gorm mountain sees 76 snowy days per year, on average, while nearby Aviemore welcomes 66.
At a glance | UK snow facts
Next up it’s the Baltasound and Lerwick, on the Shetland Islands, with 65 and 64, respectively, followed by the lonely outpost of Fair Isle (population: 55), with 63.
Copley, County Durham, in the Pennines, is England’s snowiest spot.
As the map below demonstrates, snow phobes would do well to relocate to the south coast, or the low-lying powder-free enclave of Lincolnshire.
Windiest
The remotest corners of Scotland are not conducive to outdoor table tennis. The Met Office lists Shetland as the gustiest place in Britain, with an annual average wind speed of 14.7 knots (that’s a shade under 17 mph), while Orkney (14.3 knots) and the Outer Hebrides (12.6 knots) also make the top five.
It is westerly locations that are buffeted the most, with Bute and Argyll in Scotland, and Caernarvonshire and Anglesey, in Wales, all appearing in the top 10, while St David’s and Liverpool are Britain’s two windiest cities.
“There are also a lot of localised effects with most hills, mountains and coasts being windier than low-lying inland areas,” the Met Office explains. “In southwest England it is possible to pick out the windy Dartmoor National Park which has some of the highest land above sea level in southern England. You can also pick out the windy mountain tops and relatively calm valleys in Wales, northern England and the Scottish Highlands.”
Wettest (and driest)
Once again it’s bad news for Scots. The Highlands receive more rain, on average, that any other part of the country – poor Argyll gets 2274.9mm a year (for comparison London only gets around 600mm). Dunbartonshire, Inverness and Ross and Cromarty, all in Scotland, all make the top five, alongside Merionethshire in Wales. Cardiff, meanwhile, is the rainiest city.
The Met Office’s map shows a clear divide between the north-west and south-east of the UK. London is the country’s driest city, while demand for brollies is also low in Essex, Kent and Cambridgeshire. St Osyth, a village of 4,000 near Clacton-on-Sea, receives a mere 513mm of rain a year, making it a contender for the driest place in Britain.
The world's 15 wettest places (including Britain's rainiest city)
Sunniest
That north-west/south-east divide is also obvious when it comes to hours of sunshine. West Sussex tops the charts – so start planning that summer holiday in Bognor Regis.
Warmest (and coldest)
Sunshine equals warmth, of course, so Britain’s hottest places are also in the south.
On August 10, 2003, the temperature reached 38.5C in Faversham, Kent - the highest ever recorded on UK soil.
At a glance | Britain's weather records
The Isles of Scilly, however, have the mildest average year-round temperature, a balmy 11.9C.
The coldest? Yes, it’s Scotland again. The lowest temperature ever recorded in Britain was -27.2C. Three times this reading has been jotted down by meteorologists (twice at Braemar, Aberdeenshire - on February 11, 1895 and January 10, 1982 - and once at Altnaharra, Sutherland, on December 30, 1995).
Yes, -27.2C is pretty chilly. But spare a thought for the residents of the coldest inhabited place on Earth: Oymyakon, Russia, which earlier this winter saw the mercury fall to -62C.
Welcome to Oymyakon, the coldest inhabited place on Earth
Most tornado prone
It has been quoted that Selsey in West Sussex has more tornados that America’s Tornado Alley. Several twisters there have made headlines in the last couple of decades, with one in 1998 causing ￡10m of damage. A 2015 report even claimed that the UK witnesses more tornados per square mile than any other country. But ours are rarely as powerful as those that rock the Great Plains.
West Sussex is clearly prone to alarming weather. A record-breaking 141g hailstone was found in 1958 at Horsham.