Here in Edinburgh, June 2025 was a wetter than average month in terms of the actual rainfall amounts but with a below average number of rain days once again. Looking at other posts from other members such as SpeckledJim though, I can see that a lot of areas within the UK were actually substantially drier than average in June once again.

This means that after a very dry spring, water scarcity is still bound to be a major concern in many parts of the UK and so, this thread can also be used to give any reports on that situation in your area if you are affected by that in any way. As usual, I will also continue to post the result of each week's water scarcity report which SEPA produces during this month.

Here in Edinburgh, it might look as our own situation is fine in that regard. However, it is very easy at this time of year to get a few thundery downpours which may well be enough to give us a wetter than average month overall in terms of the actual rainfall amounts even though the number of rain days is still below average.

The big issue with this is that a lot of rain in a short space of time isn't going to soak into the ground very well especially if it is very dry to begin with and which means that if it's still not raining all that often, the moisture levels are still not likely to recover all that well as the ground is still likely to be drying up quite a lot once again in between those spells of rain.

That is why the number of rain days in any given month is also very important, especially at this time of the year. This means that in order for Edinburgh to properly recover from its current alert status as regards to water scarcity, the number of rain days also needs to above average for a period of time as one higher than average rainfall total on its own is clearly not enough for that to be able to happen.

However, the main purpose of this thread continues to be to allow everyone to post their all important rainfall totals for this month regardless of how all of that pans out.

We have sleepwalked into a dangerous situation in this part of the UK. Sometime back, was it the beginning of June? someone on TWO said all those who were complaining about the lack of rainfall now looked rather silly. The long dry appeared to have stopped or was about to they said. Things have changed markedly since then and we are now in the fifth consecutive dry month. Another two months of dry and I guess things will look deadly serious (hyperbole perhaps)  in parts of southern Britain. 

I know Wessex Water are concerned, which is an understatement. Let’s compare today with 1976. That was a dry summer with a far lower population and we struggled in the South. What will happen this year? The worst case scenario is the dry goes on into the autumn or god forbid the winter. I’m sure the contingency planners will now be taking these possibilities into account. Hopefully it won’t come to that but this current dry period is the longest I can remember.

Soon the region will be inundated with holidaymakers and the inevitable increased demands for water. Treatment works will cope and indeed the watercourse flows River Frome et al. will run on treated effluent, which is sort of OK if there are no problems at the works. Then when the holidaymakers leave and we find that some kind of water restrictions are inevitable (timed outages?) just one option, these watercourses will in many cases cease to run with all the environmental and social issues that would come with it. 

Running of course in conjunction with the dangerous geopolitical situation, we live in one of the worst situations we could find ourselves in.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crk661074ejo 

Has summary maps for reservoir levels and groundwater ... suggests that areas in the south dependent on groundwater may be OK for now but a dry winter to follow would be serious

4.8mm overnight/this morning to kick start July.  Perhaps some more this weekend. 

I went out this morning to find my rain gauge on the floor. Put it back about 10am and have just seen it's reading 2mm. 

I'm surprised we've had as much as 4.8mm overnight but I'll go with your reading - you might have slightly more being further up the hill but I'll go with it. 

6.8mm so far this month. 

4.8mm includes all the rain this month (overnight and this morning). I think it was on 3mm after the actual overnight.

SEPA says 13.8mm at Gogarbank, 17.6mm at Murrayburn down the road - John's scripts have shown these usually undercount by about 10% - i.e. they say June's total for Gogarbank was 73.6mm and John reports 81.2mm in the June thread

Out of interest, you can ask chatgpt some interesting things

"show me a table of european countries of their average rainfall divided by population density. Treat the constituent parts of the uk as separate countries"

Only the Netherlands gets less rainfall per person than England. Gets worse for the South if you tell it treat areas of England as separate parts.

Thanks Tim, I think I put my rain gauge back around 10am and you posted around that time so I think I'm right in adding the 2mm from 10am to this afternoon onto your total? 

Might as well get it right this early in the month! 🙂

It's still raining here even as I write as well!!

Previously, I used to use SEPA as my main source for any rainfall data and my main reason for doing that is because in addition to getting data for Gogarbank, I could also get data for the botanic gardens in Edinburgh which is my actual closest station to where I live and those of you will have been following my posts on here for a number of years might well be able to remember that back then, I actually used to report the data for both of these stations on these threads because of that.

Back in those earliest days, I started off just by using Excel spreadsheets for that data but as that was a very time consuming process, I then started to write various scripts for automating that process firstly in VBA within Excel, and then as independent python scripts.

In parallel with that, I was also developing scripts for other aspects of the weather such as the temperature and so on which could be used for my various posts in other relevant threads within this forum and it was as I was doing this that I discovered that I could extract the rainfall data from raw SYNOP/BUFR data as a result of having discovered how to extract all of the other important weather data from that as well. As a result, I then created a MySQL database system which stores all of the weather data which my scripts download from ogimet in raw SYNOP/BUFR form as this means that I have just the one system for reporting everything on this forum which I report on here, thus simplifying everything a lot. For these threads, I then just extract the required rainfall data from that which I then report.

After a while, I was discovering that for certain months, SEPA was reporting Edinburgh Gogarbank as still being slightly drier than average even though that was actually a slightly wetter than average month, so that was when I then decided to compare that data from SEPA with the raw SYNOP/BUFR data to see exactly was going on with that.

There is a good site at Meteomanz.com in which I can get monthly summaries for Edinburgh Gogarbank from the raw SYNOP/BUFR data so I then started to compare my script results with that and this also helped me quite a lot in terms of actually debugging those scripts. What I was finding is that these monthly totals from Meteomanz were consistently just about exactly the same as what was coming from my scripts with only possible slight differencees due to the fact that this particular site might not necessarily follow the same official 9z to 9z observation day which the Met Office uses, and which I go by in my scripts as a result.

That is when I discovered that the data from SEPA was being undercounted, and that is when I decided to just use the rawBUFR data in these threads as a result. Unfortunately, the botanic gardens in Edinburgh isn't a major WMO station as Gogarbank is although it is a SYNOP station. As a result, there often tends to be a lot of missing data for there which makes it rather unreliable at times. In addition to that, the data for the botanic gardens in Edinburgh is much harder to get online so to keep things as simple as possible, I decided to just report the data for Gogarbank on here, and not the data for the botanic gardens.

I do still have some old scripts lying from from when I used to get that data from SEPA but these would need to be updated by quite a bit to be of any use to me today.

As for ChatGPT, that is something which I've never actually used but you might have noticed that Google's search facility is becoming more like that these days anyway as any Google search will now usually start off with an AI Overview because you even get to those traditional web results which that was originally designed to give us.

Funnily enough I was trying out google search before

"0.000895 km * 1 km * 1 km divided by 630 people in litres per person"

And part of the google AI reply is:

Conversion to litres: A conversion factor between km³ and litres is needed to proceed further. There are 1,000,000,000 litres in 1 cubic kilometer.

Err no, there's 1,000,000,000 m3 in a km3. There's another x1000 to factor in for litres.

Still work to do Mr Google

Two parallel streamers in the S.E this morning with me managing to find the gap streamer in between. So 1.5mm total or a third of a water butt full!  21 rain days since the first day of Spring on March 1st. The majority of those were under 5mm. YTD 196mm - does anybody on here have less than that. A friend 5 miles south of me and the other side of a large hill (well 375ft which  is close to the tallest point in Essex) has 173mm although mine is manually calibrated as well.

That’s exactly why I said that it was becoming more like ChatGPT and not that it had actually become ChatGPT.

A surprise 9mm of rain this morning from heavy showers.  Very welcome indeed considering how dry the soils had become around here.

The latest rainfall data for Edinburgh Gogarbank is as follows:

Data For Recent Days

24 hour total up to 10 am BST (09:00 UTC) this morning: 6.4 mm

Total since 10 am BST (09:00 UTC) this morning: 15.4 mm (as at 6:40 pm BST (17:40 UTC) this evening on Wednesday 2 July 2025)

Monthly Data

Total for this month so far: 21.8 mm (30.3% of 1991-2020 July average)

Number of rain days during this month: 2 (17.6% of 1991-2020 July average)

Number of dry days during this month: 0

Seasonal Data

Total for this summer so far: 103.0 mm (47.8% of 1991-2020 summer average)

Number of rain days during this summer: 13 (38.6% of 1991-2020 summer average)

Number of dry days during this summer: 16

Annual Data

Total for this year so far: 290.2 mm (37.0% of 1991-2020 annual average)

Number of rain days during this year: 48 (34.9% of 1991-2020 annual average)

Number of dry days during this year: 107

Note

This data has been obtained from https://www.ogimet.com  in raw BUFR format, and then converted into a more readable form by my own python script.

2.8mm, not much but definitely welcomed

I'm still on 5mm so that is the complete total for the month according to my PWS. It was 3mm before I got up and then 2mm more some time in the morning. Since I posted yesterday it has been dry.

There has been some further rainfall in the last week but as was the case virtually throughout June, the vast majority of that rainfall has once again in the western half of Scotland with some parts of the east seeing very little of that rainfall.

This means that there has been some further recovery in the west of Scotland in particular which means that the whole of the west of Scotland along with the Western Isles and the Northern Isles are now at normal status as regards to water scarcity including the far SW of Scotland which was at early warning status last week.

Even further east, the number of areas which were at alert status last week has decreased by quite a lot and as a part of that, the Scottish Borders has had its status downgraded from alert status to early warning status. In addition to that, the whole of the far north of Scotland is now at either early warning status (in the east) or normal status (in the west).

Even here in Edinburgh, the situation has been rather variable with above average rainfall at Gogarbank in the last month or so whilst other stations such as Swanston has still seen below average rainfall yet again but even at Gogarbank, the number of rain days which is key to all of this has still been below average. As I have been saying recently, that situation here in Edinburgh is not going to improve until we start seeing a higher than average number of rain days because even a higher than average rainfall total on its own is not going to help matters in any way if that rainfall is only falling on a limited number of days.

Because of that, Edinburgh remains at alert status this week along with most of Fife, West Lothian, Clackmannanshire and part of the Moray Firth area just to the east and south of Inverness. Meanwhile, those areas which were at moderate water scarcity status last week remain unchanged this week with those areas including East Lothian, NE Fife and large parts of NE Scotland. Many places in this region have now had 13 months in a row with below average rainfall and some areas have had only around 58% of its long term average rainfall over the last six months, and just 62% of its long term average rainfall over the last 13 months.

That is a situation which needs improve if the overall water scarcity situation is to return to normal right across Scotland, so a period of above average rainfall in the east in particular is still very much needed in order for that to happen.

The hotties can vote for a sweaty summer all they like, but what about the rain that's missing in much of England. Bad enough for my garden, but getting to be a strategic problem widely.

4mm

"........... there may be some heavy downpours perhaps with hail at Wimbledon so take care..." Doh! Is rain  that rare we should be scared of being hit by it.

Had 8.2 mm earlier on this morning from showery rain that moved in from the Channel, brighter now but showers likely this afternoon. All much to the relief of my parched lawn.

Wow - that's a month's rainfall for me!

0.0 mm here so far. We're just on the edge of the rain. 

Edit: since I posted that it has just started to rain!

So far today I've missed downpours (well based on radar colours) 15 miles north and 25 miles S.E. The current batch heading straight at me and intensifying broke up to a few spits just as it got overhead! 5.7mm for last month.