Stats upate

I think the weather site has reached something of a plateau for now, although as usual interesting events will push the daily visits up at least for a while. A constant feature is the tendency for some visitors to sit on a page for hours at a time. I'm still uncertain if this is deliberate with occasional monitoring, or they left a window open by accident. It does seem that often it's the same user(s) returning over many days so I guess they would have to be very careless to leave it open so often!

August thunder

It seemed to be rumbling in the distance on and off all afternoon today, then about 8pm we had a brief storm which gave about 2mm
.

Waterlogging

The continued rain events mean the ground is once again waterlogged worse than at any time through last winter.
Water is standing on the surface even in fields which are usually free draining.

 Bizarrely July last year was actually wetter but following a long dry period the rain was generally welcome and not disruptive.
 A good example is what happened at the Yorkshire Show yesterday.
 On day one it seemed just possible that if with luck, it remained mostly dry, the event could manage to stay open - but a sudden heavy shower about 4pm meant that the trafficed areas of car parking fields literally turned to running streams in minutes.

 Lots of grass is still to cut for silage and hay, it is deteriorating rapidly now so we do need to see a major change very soon or the coming winter will be very difficult indeed.
Luckily there are increasing signs of an improvement next week.
Not all plain sailing as Friday could see more rain, then there is a chance of some rain mid-week but this may be downgraded near the time.
The last week of July does currently show signs the Azores High may move our way, bringing much more settled conditions for several days.
All is not lost!

Violent rain 28th June

We were lucky really as this passed through in about 5 minutes.
There were two or three lightning strikes close enough by to trip the power out briefly.
Some places had rain like this for an hour or more causing flash flooding and transport disruption.

VP2 set up

A couple of pictures of the Vantage Pro2 in place at the end of the garden.
The heavy wooden support pole is ex-telephone and the metal scaffold pole is about 6metres tall
I have a suspicion that high winds might bump the rain gauge enough to cause false tips, we shall see.
It might need to be mounted on its own pole alongside.

Though technically higher than it should be, being set at 4 feet within the garden would seem likely to give higher readings on sheltered sunny days and lower reading in mid-winter when the garden is often a frost pocket all day.

Edit: Strong winds seemed to be able to jiggle the rain bucket enough to cause a false reading, so I added a second pole for it,  isolating from the taller anemometer pole.
A little ugly but the other option of guy wires does not appeal.

1,000,000

Passed almost un-noticed!

Oh noes!

INSTALLING SUMMER..... ███████████████████████░░░ 95% DONE. 2 minutes left. Installation failed. 404 error: Please try again later.