December has been a record breaking month for rain and warmth in Wales

Latest early provisional statistics from the Met Office confirm December has been a record breaking month for both warmth and rainfall in Wales.

The mean temperature in Wales between 1-29 December was a record breaking 9.2°C which is 4.7 °C above the long-term average.

The previous Wales record between 1-29 December was 7.5 °C in 1934.

A humid south-westerly airflow continued the cloudy and overcast conditions seen in November, with little sunshine for most areas.

This ensured several days of near-record-breaking (for the time of year) warmth, many individual stations having set new December temperature records.

Temperatures recorded at the Hawarden weather station on 19 December 2015 peaked at 16°C

Image: wundercorp.info

This anomaly of +4.7 above the long-term average is the highest such anomaly for any calendar month since 1910 – beating the previous record set in April 2011.

This means temperatures throughout December 2015 were closer to those normally experienced during April or May.

Along with the remarkable warmth Wales experienced the wettest December on record with 321mm of rain between December 1 -29.

For Wales, only one calendar month (November 1929) has had more rain than December 2015.

North west England has also seen record-breaking rainfall, but central and southern England have been much closer to average.

For the UK as a whole its currently the second wettest on record

Storm Desmond played a significant part in making this a record-breaking month with a huge amount of rainfall.

Storm Eva brought gales and heavy rain on Christmas Eve with a further Atlantic depression bringing heavy rain and flooding to north-west England, north Wales and parts of Scotland through 25th to 27th.

Storm Frank has since dominated the headlines in the last couple of days.

New Years Eve into New Years Day.

Showers will die out this evening to leave a largely dry and generally clear night.

It will turn markedly colder than recent nights with frost likely.

BBC Weather