It's rained in Chichester! So end of drought, even if it was only just enough to lay the dust. Quite a heavy downpour just along the coast toward Littlehampton, though.

Thunderstorm and torrential rain here in Croydon this afternoon broke the drought. A local weather station in nearby Kenley says 12mm has fallen. The first rainfall this month, adds to less than 1mm in June.

It's first time I've seen rain in over two months. I didn't see the rain fall in June, just a bit of dampness one morning. I missed the storms in London on the bank holiday weekend in May as I was in Scotland. I was starting to miss it!

Done it again!  Drove into town and heavy rain.  Got back home, dry as a bone!  I’ve seen plenty of lightning, heard loads of thunder, but still no rain!  I’m either just too Far East, or I’m just too far West and miss the rain by only a couple of miles. 

The drought is definitely at an end here. As of yesterday morning, I had recorded around 8mm in June and 4mm in July. However, we saw 4.8mm yesterday evening and we've had 18mm so far this evening and it's still raining. And there's lots more rain to come this weekend. To be honest, up to now, I have listened to forecasts of fine weather with a little bit of dread because the countryside here was burning up. Now that we've got the rain, however, I'm hoping that this is just a blip. Now that we have a bit of moisture back in the ground, I will enjoy the sunshine guilt free! 

Last night’s thunderstorms again miraculously managed to skirt past, this time by about 15 miles to the east. Everything’s still bone dry and deep cracks have appeared in the garden.

However tomorrow will be a different story...

59 day absolute drought ended with a grand total of 3mm.

The smell was good, but I haven't missed the rain at all!

I’ve missed the storms by a whisker every time, although I’ve been within a stone’s throw because I’ve heard thunder and seen lightning.  But....  it is now raining steadily and has been for half an hour!  Useful rain that will soak in rather than run off.  

I could stand this all weekend just to give the earth a drink and dampen the forest floor to lessen the fire risk, providing we go back to hot sunny weather of course!!!  

We’re back up to 33C+ tomorrow and virtually every day of the following fortnight, with very little rain forecast.

Around here usually gets around 100mm in May (wettest month of the year), 80 in June, 60 in July and August, almost all in thunderstorms. So far 55mm in May, 35mm in June and around 20mm in July. Not as severe as U.K., but the high temperatures mean it browns off quickly.

Martin

The steady rain only lasted for just over an hour.  Everywhere is dry again now with sunshine and a stiff breeze, which will unfortunately dry things out quickly.  Conditions this weekend look good for more rain though, so I’m hopeful.  

The local fire engine has just made a rare return to the station, hopefully this dampening down might give it, and the crew, a bit of respite!   

After 47 days with no rain July will now end up wetter than May and June combined

Today rain would ensure every area have rain and those that missed the storms on Friday would see their dry days tally back to 0.  Now is tall order to get back to over 50 days as it will be early Autumn by then and might not see this for a long time.  It easy to get long dry days in Spring but summer hard to get it because either you get a heatwave that often bring rain/storms while in Spring less risk and often HP stable days only.

Thanks to this mornings rain (still falling) and the couple of mm's that fell the other night we are now approaching 25mm of rain - our July average is just over 30mm. So this month certainly won't be going down as a dry one.

Here we have 20 days where rain falls in the summer months (june-august) on average..

That leaves 72 days where rain doesn't fall!!

115mm is the combined monthly totals average..

32mm for July but May is even dryer with an average of 28mm - these figures are from the met office for southsea which is part of Portsmouth.

Well we appear destined to rejoin the heat and , this time of year, Europe can be getting very hot so temps could start rising even higher?

I do hope this is not the flip side of the 'washout summer' years?

Another 6 summers of this will be rough for the countryside?

(Esp. if winters are equally blessed by H.P.?)

Only about 30 miles northwest of Portsmouth, my July long-term average is 49 mm so quite a difference over such a small distance. It's a reflection of the fact that our climatological westerlies tend to diverge at low levels along south-facing coasts, due to land friction causing a slight leftward shift of the air flow compared to that over the sea.

Now - here's a report of mine on the impact of the weekend's wet and windy weather on my locality:

The landscape is a strange collage of mainly dry artificial surfaces, slightly damp but still mostly brown grass, mainly withered or shrivelled vegetation, drifted leaf litter and a lot of fallen twigs along with a few downed branches.

Coupled with an air temp only just short of 20*C, it's as if we've time-jumped to a late October breakdown of an exceptionally dry first two months of autumn.

That's the thing about this drought-buster (or at least, reducer) - it was also a wind storm of unusual vigour for the time of year. An interesting side-effect has been the quick dry-out of the terrain. Hopefully enough water seeped through during this morning's moderate rainfall to put an end to the blight of the trees. The grass is already showing signs of response, with tiny little sprouts of green at the centre of each plant (if you ever wondered where those are exactly, now's the time to look!).

So after all that, this month now looks likely to finish somewhere between 13 and 15 mm here, depending on how many showers occur overnight and tomorrow. That's a ranking of between 4th and 7th out of the past 60 years. It was within 3 days of being the driest on record, but what can you do?

I'm very interested in seeing how much 'moisture inertia' there is to the conditions as we enter another dry and increasingly hot run of weather starting Tuesday. I expect that very breezy conditions tomorrow and Tuesday may mean the surface becomes bone-dry again pretty fast, and the subsurface will be subjected to a lot of extraction of water by thirsty plants, so I sense that there may not be much inertia at all... but I'm far from an expert on these details!

May 2018 14mm

June 2018 3mm

July 2018 4mm (in the last 2 days).

Recent rain welcome but strong wind last 2 days has dried everywhere out already.

Is there anywhere that avoided rain over the weekend that is still in drought?

No, so the record will have to wait for another year or maybe 40!