It has always been a popular pastime to try to find a link between our weather and the moon. By and large such attempts are unsuccessful - and yet it has been shown in recent times that the moon is not totally irrelevant in this context.
We all know, for example, that the axis of rotation of the Earth is not tidily perpendicular to the plane of our planet's orbit of rotation around the sun. It is, in fact, "tilted" at an angle of about 23 to this "vertical", and it is this axial tilt that gives us our seasons. It follows that any changes in the tilt would affect our climate.
Now quite recently, scientists discovered from computer simulations of the Earth's behaviour that if the moon were not there, the axial tilt would be unstable. Without the moon's torque, it seems, the Earth would wobble somewhat chaotically on its axis - rather like a spinning top in the course of slowing down; the axial tilt would vary widely, increasing at times to as much as 50, and the climate of the Earth would fluctuate accordingly. The moon, therefore, by stabilising the earth's rotational characteristics, acts as a kind of regulator of our climate.
It has also been discovered recently that the average temperature of the Earth rises and falls ever so slightly during a lunar month, oscillating over a range of 0.02 of a degree Celsius as the moon waxes and wanes. This variation can be traced to the kind of pas de deux performed together by the Earth and moon as they travel side by side in space.
The gravity that holds the moon in thrall also exerts an attractive force on the Earth itself, tending to disturb it from its own solar orbit. Rather than thinking of the moon as revolving around the Earth, therefore, we should more properly regard both bodies as orbiting around their joint centre of mass, which is close to, but not exactly at, the centre of the Earth.
Viewed in this light, as the Earth-moon combination rotates in space, the Earth moves slightly closer to the sun than it ought to be at full moon - when the moon is on the other side of the Earth from the sun - and slightly further away when the system has swung through 180 degrees to the new-moon phase.
The difference is a mere 9,000 miles, a tiny fraction of the 90 million miles that we are distant from the sun, but enough nonetheless to account for some at least of the observed increase in temperature when the moon is full.