Northern Ireland has had easily its sunniest ever spring weather, Met Office confirms

While meteorological spring does not in fact end until midnight tonight (ie Saturday into Sunday), with summer beginning on June 1, it has been clear for days that it is the sunniest spell on record for this particular season.

Northern Ireland and Scotland had in fact provisionally both recorded their sunniest spring more than a week ago, before the UK as a whole did on Wednesday.

As of Thursday, with two days of May/Spring to go, the province had had 603.2 hours of sunshine, which is a mammoth 139% of average. It comfortably exceeds the previous sunniest spring which was 2020 which had 559 hours of sunshine.

It means that on an average spring day in a typical part of Northern Ireland, there was almost seven hours of sunshine. This was at a time when, on average, there is about 14.5 hours of daylight. In other words, it was sunny for almost half the time over this spring, which is far higher than normal for NI which is so often grey.

March was drier, sunnier and warmer than average and April was the second sunniest on record.

There were also multiple days in spring in which some part of the province reached 20 degrees Celsius or warmer, which is far warmer than the norm. In fact, 20 Celsius is warmer than average for summer in NI, when the typical daily maximum temperature is 18C or 19C.

Meanwhile, temperatures in parts of Great Britain were expected to hit 27C today during the final weekend of the sunniest UK spring on record, before changeable weather is forecast next week.

A balmy end to spring comes as provisional figures from the Met Office show 630 hours of sunshine were clocked up across the entire nation between March 1 and May 27.

While the warmer weather will be welcomed by sun worshippers, forecasters have also warned about the possibility of wind and rain.

Temperatures hit 25.7C at Heathrow on Friday, about 7C hotter than the average for the time of year, and it is due to continue into Saturday with highs of 27C potentially in some areas.