00:00It seems that we've left the mini heatwave that we experienced earlier on this week and
00:08many of us will be very happy that it's just behind us now. Temperatures have been blistering
00:13at times this week, with max temperatures reaching a whopping 29 degrees on Monday in
00:18Ask, making it the hottest day of the year so far in Wales, but there are some promises
00:23that it's only set to get hotter at times in the coming weeks. It's been a funny year
00:29so far for weather, we've seen these boiling hot temperatures come and go a few times,
00:33but we've also seen some heavy rain and thunderstorms just a few weeks ago. And thinking back to
00:38the start of the year, the cold weather was more than we've seen for a while, with some
00:42parts of Wales recording minimum temperatures of less than minus 9 degrees.
00:50We've got a bit of a break from all that extreme weather for now, but you know that there's
00:54just going to be some more surprises at some point this year. This year might have felt
01:00up and down, but it's nothing compared to some of the weather we've seen here in Wales
01:04in the past. So we're going to take a look at some of the historical extremes that Wales
01:08has seen through the years, from the hottest temperatures to the coldest, the wettest months
01:13we've seen in Wales, and some of these are truly extreme. Cast your minds back two years,
01:20it was the first summer that was properly free from the pandemic and the weather came
01:23back for us in a very big way. One might say it came back a bit too strongly. That
01:28year temperature records were broken across the board, a heatwave swept across Europe
01:32and us here in Wales and across the rest of the UK felt the burn with a bang. In Wales
01:37we recorded our hottest ever temperature of 37.1 degrees. It's worth taking a minute to
01:42think about just how hot that really is. For example, the average maximum summer temperature
01:46of the hottest country on the planet in Burkina Faso, which is roughly 39 degrees the year.
01:52Burkina Faso being smack bang in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
01:59Plenty of us would have been torn that summer. Do you appreciate the warm weather or do you
02:03scorn the unbearable temperatures?
02:10Now to get the coldest temperature ever in Wales, you have to go back quite a fair bit,
02:14all the way back to the 21st of January 1940, when in Riyadh we saw the mercury drop to
02:19minus 23 degrees. Again, astronomically cold temperatures, but it's interesting to see
02:24just how long ago that was, considering Scotland set their coldest temperatures in 1995, but
02:29Northern Ireland set their lowest in only 2010.
02:32When it comes to Wales' most famous weather, of course, it's the rain. The wettest month
02:37on record for Wales was back in December 2015, when we had as much rain in 31 days as we
02:42usually do in a full year, and that, of course, is a British record too.
02:47But Wales has some extreme weather every now and then, so it's worth appreciating days
02:51like these when it's not too warm, not too windy, not raining, and not really much at all.
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