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The thread on 'How hot is too hot?' currently running has got me thinking about the current state of the weather and the after-effects if last summer's drought.
As you all know last year was a record breaker for the UK. Dry reservoirs, scorched fields and consistently high heat throughout the day. Follow that but a pretty dry winter and that has led to the water table being rather low coming into this summer.. I know cavers who were able to access caves all throughout the winter that are normally flooded then drain down over the summer, showing how low underground water storage is. Already we are seeing seriously cracked ground, yellow grass, localized wildfires and the temperature is sky high again. I haven't seen any rain for a few weeks now, it's just dust out there.
If we don't have any significant rain soon (as in prolonged wet spells that soak into the ground, not heavy downpours that run off into drains and rivers) are we staring at another summer of empty reservoirs, hosepipe bans and uncomfortable night time temperatures? Certainly feels that way to me.
Before this month we'd had the wettest ever May on record i believe, it was a pretty wet winter down in the south west, only the last month has it brightened up and we've suddenly had uninterrupted sun, the last couple of years does feel like the UK is getting more monsoon style weather over the year, summers that not many are full prepared for or able to deal with, and winters that are wetter and more risk of flooding.
In Scotland we are already being advised to monitor our use to avoid wastage.
it’s certainly possible to get several dry years on the trot, ISTR some areas of the uk were extremely dry in’95-‘98, so much so that house foundations were shrinking and cracks appeared in walls etc. climate change will be a part of it too i guess.
Dry weather is most likely to continue into late June and early July. The outlook for the June/August period also suggests that across the UK there is double the likelihood of the period being hotter than normal.
@argee - the Met office says otherwise generally:
Rainfall was above average in some southern and eastern counties, but well below normal in many other areas, and for the UK overall rainfall was 55% of average.
<p style="text-align: center;">Not had any rain for 5 weeks in Brighton. It's parched. None showing on the forecast either. A bit worrying for this early in the summer. Perhaps July/aug will be a washout.</p>
Perception's an interesting thing - it's felt like a really wet, grey Spring, but I trust the Met Office to know better.
There is no long term trend either way for summer rainfall. The lesson from the past is that dry years are regular and normal. Maybe building a few more reservoirs to match the increased population would be an idea?
April was one of the hottest ever for Spain and Portugal.
Was in Seville and a few days later Córdoba.... 38°C walking around the old town and its tiny alley ways. Got back to the van and the temp said 49°C! Took a while before I could touch the steering wheel.
Many of the reservoirs we saw in Spain were low..... Like you could see where the river had cut a channel/gorge through the uncovered silt layers, I guess its original course.
I think this year is going to be one of the hottest. El Nino effect has kicked in and average sea surface temps are already much higher than normal which drives more dry warm air.
And the demand for air conditioners has meant old coal power stations are being fired up. What's Alanis?
It was pretty wet from mid 2000s to about 2018, since then trails have been much drier and dried out most of the summer, which they rarely did in the decades previous.
Hard to predict anything, but there is a loose trend for cyclical weather e.g. a period of wet summers, a period o dry summers, or cold winters etc.
El nino has started and will affect global weather through to late 24 I think, hence the warning that this year could be the hottest ever globally and break the significant +1.5C mark.
Maybe building a few more reservoirs to match the increased population would be an idea?
But in the SW we haven't filled our existing reservoirs, so not sure how this helps. Still have a hosepipe ban from last year.
We are just draining them quicker down here.
can’t let the grockles go without a shower 😉
Many of the reservoirs we saw in Spain were low…
They are... In southern Spain There was record levels of extra rainfall earlier in the year, but it's not enough to compensate for the general dryness.
Seems to be going from one extreme to the other.
Many of the reservoirs we saw in Spain were low…
Glencoe Lochan is empty....
We've been travelling around Spain for the last 6 weeks and it's been wet (and cold) in lots of the places we've visited from Cordoba to the Pyrenees
We’ve been travelling around Spain for the last 6 weeks and it’s been wet (and cold) in lots of the places we’ve visited from Cordoba to the Pyrenees
Think yourself lucky!
Was in Spain from end of Jan till the end of... where are we now... June, so till the end of May.
From near Santander, via Pamplona, Zaragoza, along the med coast all the way to the Algarve and back to France via Córdoba, Cuenca and Aínsa. Until reaching the Pyrenees ee had five days with rain.... Not give rainy days, just days with some rain. The most rain we had was in the Algarve!
Was nice sitting up a mountain in the Pyrenees watching the storms roll in!
Been in France for two weeks and had one day of thunder clouds in the Charente, but other than that no rain!
Hot, dry summer in UK = lots of chavs/chavettes out'n'about with their chavvy behaviour.
We’ve been in Spain and France for the last 6 weeks in the Caravan and the weather down south has been mixed. Very windy and cool as far south as we went ( Valencia, we intended going further south) so have been chasing the better weather north. Several savage thunderstorms with hail but the last few days through France have been scorching. Reservoirs south of the Pyrenees in Spain were virtually dry with the old village walls visible. Home tomorrow to a heatwave apparently.
Some interesting forecasts here:
https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2023/forecasts-show-growing-el-nino-event
I imagine my brother hopes it’s not a stupidly hot summer as he’s been called out to fires every day/night for the previous 9 days, plus one day with 2 call outs for two farms, he’s pretty knackered.
Brother is just home after being called out to another fire at 6pm tnight, scrub/hill fire where the local army range fire their shells into, someone’s been careless.
Dolgoch hostel close to Devil's Staircase seems to have only just missed being incinerated. About a mile of the upper Tywi valley has been burnt.
Do hill/ heath/ bush/ forest fires just happened? I suspect not.
2.9bn litres lost a day through leaks. no incentive to repair the leaks.
I fear firefighters are going to have a very busy year somafunk, especially with lots of felled areas currently having lots of grass, ferns and brambles covering it here in South Wales. Always a recipe for fires, deliberate and accidental.
Could be a World Record. (Guardian)
Really worrying about El Nino not having much effect until the autumn plus sea temps being high too, lots of factors lining up to have a big effect.
Everyone loves summer, even I do. Whats everyone doing for summer?
Here in Shropshire it has been pretty much wall to wall sunshine for over 5 weeks now, with the occasional thunderstorms and torrential rain.
It feels very much like the weather you expected to get in mid Europe in the middle of summer, not in England late spring/early summer. Last night it was 27 deg at 7pm which is nuts for mid June. God knows what temps will be like mid August !
I fear firefighters are going to have a very busy year
Some farmland was on fire yesterday near us, and there were 3/4 pumps in attendance. Where it was probably wasnt malicious, not sure how it would have started though
Europe's been in "severe drought" since 2018. satellite study of groundwater levels in Jan showed no signs of recovery:
The results are worrying, but the way they measure it is amazing!
Personally I’m all for long dry summers and dusty trails. I just don’t buy this ‘not enough rainfall’ narrative as the statistics don’t support it. The real problem is a 20+ years of under investment I’d capture storage and leaks from the privatised water companies. That’s where the focus should be, and the real pressure to resolve the problem. I know the current government won’t do anything as they aren’t going to upset the city by holding companies accountable.
A lot of fires start due to discarded bottles, especially if they're broken. The glass can act as a magnifier focussing the sunlight and creating a hotspot. Another reason why littering is a bad thing.
@chrismac - same old, same old.
I just don’t buy this ‘not enough rainfall’ narrative as the statistics don’t support it.
source?
Do you know that leakage from water distribution systems is not the same as precipitation?
The real problem is a 20+ years of under investment I’d capture storage and leaks from the privatised water companies.
There is a bit of a 'yes, but…' here. Getting planning for reservoirs is a bit of a battle.
As with rain related sewage overflows there's also a bit of an issue with the urban/suburban environment becoming increasingly impermeable due to people paving their front gardens and so on, which means that rather than rain soaking into root systems/groundwater, it runs straight off into drains.
Good long read in the Guardian today
It's dry enough here that they've rolled out the BBQ and open fire ban across a lot of Scandinavia.
i'm not even allowed to use a gas grill, because i live within a forested area.
But it's midsummer next weekend, so true to form, there's rain on the way. Who knows how much!
Usually round here you hide under the trees to avoid the rain, but it’s aphid season and the trees are literally raining sap/honeydew in puddles. I’ve seen people walking through and have shoes come off it’s so sticky. A good downpour would put a stop to it.
I was riding down a road like that on my MTB the other day. Passing under trees made a loud squelchy sticky sound from my tyres and I actually started to slow down a bit.
2.9bn litres lost a day through leaks. no incentive to repair the leaks.
The issue is a bit more complicated than that.
Fixing leaks is expensive. So fixing a leak puts your bill up.
Yes there are profits, but they're not big, they're in the order of 2%, effectively controlled by OFWAT. Think of privatisation more like paying a 2% service charge to a company to specialise in supplying water, rather than a civil servant bouncing between f***** up MOD procurement, rolling out yet another education curriculum and then getting promoted to fixing water leaks.
Unless OFWAT allow them to put bills up leaks can't be fixed as currently they're balancing the fines for not fixing Vs the value of the water. And as there's little money left over you can't just ramp up the fines.
So yes there's no incentive to fix them, but there's also not much room for them to be alturistic about it either.
They could fix a lot of leaks if they paid less dividend to shareholders
I do think I'm acclimatising. Out for a dusty gravel ride today and didn't feel the 25 degree temperature* was affecting me much. In fact, I scored a couple of PRs in Strava.
* Yeah, but hot for me, ok?
That's what happens when you leave your bike/Garmin in direct sunlight.
Also, there must be millions of miles of pipe, each of which could be leaking a tiny amount. So each leak might need a road dug up and resurfaced etc costing tens of thousands, for a leak which might itself only have been leaking a hundred quid's worth a year.
I'm no fan of privatisation, for the stated reasons, but the reality is usually more complex than it appears.
In England there are clear issues with the privitised water companies taking profits out rather than doing infrastructure repairs. there are also population pressures.
However this is only a small part of the issue - the issue is climate change. Eco collapse is coming, its been visible for a good few years and this is now where its starting to impact on our lives. Yes we will still have wet and cold years and hot and dry ones - however the frequency of extreme weather events will increase, Average temps will continue to increase, giga death is coming
Massive lifestyle change is needed to even just contain climate change and to keep below 2Cwarming but nowhere is there the political will to deal with this on the scale needed
Basically
Go to southern Spain, or the Canaries, or any number of other hot dry countries and see what they do with a tiny rainfall.
If we improved our water delivery infrastructure just a teeny bit, there would be plenty water all the time. Default for UK infrastructure is always to do just enough.
Spain is in such a drought now and has been for 18 months ( unless a lot of recent rainfall) that the reservoirs and rivers are very low with not enough water to irrigate the crops that provide a lot of europes fresh veg. they have a plan in place but again its only mitigating the impacts.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/11/spain-approves-unprecedented-drought-recovery-plan
As my comment on the previous page - Brother was called back out at 5.30am this morning till 11am at the army firing range and then out to his work (builder/joiner) on a roof all day - he's now passed the point of being ****ed, apparently they're not allowed to get close enough to the fire to douse it with water as they have been firing "special shells" and the testing needs to be done (DU shells for Ukraine?, residue burning in the fires) so all they can do is dampen the surrounding area and avoid the smoke, seeing as there's a big dirty cloud of smoke wafting from the fire that you can see from my house 5 miles away id hazard a guess at its now out of control, Personally I'd tell the army to sort out their own ****ing mess but then again that's probably why i'm not a retained firefighter 😉
Anyone been over to the continent yet? Seems like they're having more trouble than we had last year with record daily temperatures and record weekly averages.
This thread aged well.
Been in Hourtin, not bad with sea breezes but burnt my knees cycling in the forests, bug fest, Bordeaux kin hot, then N Aquitaine, hot but comfortable, now Loire Valley, hot enough to make you walk slowly, 33 forecast tomorrow.
Me/family been in Mallorca on/off over the last month and it is most hot. Spotter planes flying around all the time looking for wildfires, got to watch a firefighting plane fill up in the bay. Air quality poor as the southerly hot wind brings desert dust with it
<p style="text-align: left;">Went for a 60km ride to meet an old friend in a Biergarten on Saturday.</p>
I nearly f**f*ffg*f died in the way there. Totally miscalculated how far it was, but most importantly how hot. 38°C.
The first three Weißbier disappeared within minutes.
Turned out the village had a festival in so I stayed for X more drinks.
Stupidly made the decision (not that I was really in the right state of mind to decide) to ride 40km "home" at 2am. Arrived back at the van just after 4am, the last 40 mins or so spent trying to outrun the thunder clouds.
It's been silly hot around upper Bavaria since I've been back. Three or four days or intense heat and then massive downpours.
Have always had an eye on moving to Italy, but am seriously reconsidering where to go. With such extreme temperatures making life almost unbearable I'm starting to look elsewhere. But then again, I don't much fancy the long dark months of Northern Europe so places life Sweden, Norway or the UK are off the cards.
Not had any rain for 5 weeks in Brighton.
Traditionally, the SE of the country is technically a desert; parts of Spain get more rainfall than that part of England. Also, the SW has rivers that would dry out in the summer, mostly the chalk ones, that get their names from that, the Winterbournes. The River Kennet* that runs through Marlborough starts as the Winterbourne.
The problem is, though, that increasing amounts of abstraction via boreholes has reduced the levels of those rivers so they’re increasingly dry right through the year. Why is there increasing abstraction from boreholes? Because towns like Swindon and Chippenham are getting bigger and bigger, and reservoirs have been closed and filled in, and no bigger replacements built in decades.
*It changes name where it meets the Swallowhead spring just across the road from Silbury Hill, and I’ve walked the length from Silbury Hill to just below West Kennet Long Barrow in the winter because it’s been completely dry.
This thread aged well.
It did seem to curse things a bit, sorry. With any luck we'll have a decent Indian Summer in September.
Trust me, you don't want an Indian Summer the way things are going there.
The main reservoir for the London bassin is the chalk aquifer, Countzero. Manage that well and you don't need surface reservoirs. My knowledge is 35 years out of date but I doubt the strategy of (artificially) refilling aquifers when water is available and drawing them down in dry periods has changed. You may be interested in reading this:
Reading thorough it appears the situation is better than when I last took an interest.
Traditionally, the SE of the country is technically a desert; parts of Spain get more rainfall than that part of England.
There are no parts of the UK classified as desert, and parts of northern Spain are quite wet.
One of the RAF bases in Hampshire has had 150% of the average July rainfall already this month. Mentioned on the BBC weather, so must be true, although I might be miss remembering it as it was a few days ago
Have always had an eye on moving to Italy, but am seriously reconsidering where to go. With such extreme temperatures making life almost unbearable I’m starting to look elsewhere. But then again, I don’t much fancy the long dark months of Northern Europe so places life Sweden, Norway or the UK are off the cards
Well it depends on your job and money but if you have flexibility you could have two houses in two cheap areas, one in north of Europe one in South.
Having a pretty hefty Summer here in western USA. It got to 41 today at altitude in Fruita.
I can't imagine what Death Valley is doing as California are getting it.
I was in Bordeaux, Cognac , Loire last summer and it was ferocious.