Abstract

On 20 March 2015 a deep partial eclipse of the Sun, the most significant since the 11 August 1999 total solar eclipse, occurred over the UK. No comparably deep UK solar eclipse will occur until 2026 (e.g. Williams 1996, Espenak 1987). It is well known that solar eclipses cause transient meteorological effects, the most obvious of which is a drop in temperature, but – because total or major partial solar eclipses are fairly rare from any one point on the Earth’s surface and many areas are not well instrumented - there are relatively few systematic studies covering a wide region. The UK has one of the densest networks of weather stations compared with many other parts of the world. This applies to both amateur and professional station networks. Therefore the 2015 event was a unique opportunity to gather and analyse meteorological data. This has already been done for the main Met Office network of Meteorological Monitoring System sites (Hanna et al. 2016, Clark 2016), so here I present the results of a similar exercise based on amateur weather stations. I compare the meteorological effects of the 2015 eclipse over the UK with the 11 August 1999 eclipse for which I carried out a previous study (Hanna 2000).