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Average temperatures in Graham's Garden

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Category: Climate
Published on Monday, 19 January 2009 08:20
Written by Graham
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Graham's Garden is located in the Charente-Maritime which is the Departement with the second highest hours of sunshine in France. Typically the summers are sunny and dry, and winters are relatively mild. In our eight years here, the hottest period was the notorious heatwave ("canicule") in the summer of 2003. We recorded some 14 consecutive days during August when the shade temperature was at or above 40o C. Our coldest period to date is the recent cold snap in January 2009. During that time temperatures in the garden fell to overnights of - 7o C, and we had a couple of rare days when the thermometer stayed at zero during the daytime.

First frosts have been recorded in mid-October, though often a cold snap is followed by milder weather through until the end of the year.

The last frost usually occurs before the end of March, and we have never seen a frosty morning in April since we arrived here (2001)

Being about 35 km from the coast means that temperatures are somewhat buffered by the sea, and also gives us slightly above average windy days. From the literature, we have found average climatic conditions for La Rochelle, but since that is coastal the climate there will be a little different to that in our garden. Thus we have been monitoring day-time and night-time temperatures in our own garden since 2006. Here is the result so far: