It is strange as Jeremy Clarkson has described his year at the farm as the worst ever citing the drought. He's only a few miles from Witney

Amazing how wet your vineyard has been. As I've said before, 70mm here in July, 8 miles away from Canterbury, and just 0.6mm in August so far. Even this morning so far there's been heavy rain again near Canterbury but nothing more than a few spots reaching the ground here.

I'm hoping that big load of rain to the west will finally wet the ground here! Even then, the MetO raw has gone from 7 continuous hours of heavy rain in last night's run to 4 hours in this morning's output. 

MetO raw forecast for 7AM - heavy rain, >95% chance.

The reality?

https://ukwct.org.uk/weather/aug.jpg 

Hmm. That heavy rain is still to the west, fingers crossed it manages to get here!

Looking at the data for Brize Norton, and assuming similar applies to Witney, and also assuming that a "wash out" in cricket means persistent rain for several hours (never heard of a match being cancelled due to a 5 minute shower), so, for the sake of argument, more than 2mm of rain falling, we can see that Moomin played cricket (or wanted to play cricket) on the following dates:

Mon 12 May

Tues 3 Jun

Thurs 5 Jun

Sat 7 Jun

Thurs 12 Jun

Fri 27 Jun

Thur 15 Jul

Sat 19 Jul

Sun 20 Jul

Thurs 31 Jul

Weds 27 Aug

Thurs 28 Aug

Those being the only dates since 1st May that more then 2mm has fallen at Brize Norton.  Of course, some of those rainfall events may have been at night and/or been just a brief heavy downpour .....

I woke up about 2am to hear heavy falling rain. Looking at the radar the heaviest precipitation passed over me.

My rain gauge arrives today which I'm looking forward to using. 

BBC weather this morning of the opinion that a small area of LP will form on the front as it reaches the far SE, and slow down its progress. So you may get your wish as it would then rain all day in Kent

Moomin needs to play for the illustrious Witney Mills Cricket club (Witney's oldest cricket club with the lovely motto 'weave truth with trust') - they've been most lucky with their fixtures this year having only had 1 match abandoned during the season.

Microclimates can be both a blessing and a curse I suppose.

0.75mm of overnight rain brings my month total up to 3.8mm - hardly drought-breaking!   Showers predicted again today - but last 2 days have failed to result in any measureable rainfall so we'll see.   Saturday might deliver?   Or will it ....   

We'll have to see about Saturday as it's been sort of played down from a couple of days ago.  But Tuesday is the next contender. Tuesday looks to see an area of rain arrive from the south-west and persist through much of the day. say the BBC for here. Which will be interesting but then or will it? 

Hopefully I can measure rain again from today and get a better idea of amounts IMBY. 

You would think so but apparently Witney is on another planet

Last nights rain was played down a few days ago and even yesterday the M.O. were not very confident . The BBC were however predicting heavy overnight rain which amazingly turned up. Following heavy showers yesterday the fields are greening up.

It's amazing isn't it? Love it. The freshness, clean foliage in the garden and so on. 

Witney. Incredible it's been so wet in such discrete/micro places. A cricket field too.

I recall looking at the radar with incredulity last year as thin ribbons of rain moved in from the channel and snaked their way right over the top of my house. This happened consistently throughout the summer and led me to believe i was living in a cursed place. This year its been the complete opposite with some kind of invisible rainshield being in place since March. Local, and i mean VERY local, rainfall variations are a real thing. 

Not necessarily in Witney, but local frequent torrential downpours at the wrong times has absolutely decimated my cricket season. It's been one of the worst years I can remember for wash-out days of cricket. And that is no exaggeration. 

The torrential nature of the downpours that have decimated my cricket days have pretty much all fallen on the above days.

Literally every day I had cricket, we had one or more torrential downpours which completely ruined the day and forced multiple abandonments.

Probably extremely bad luck, but honestly, the days I had cricket coincided precisely with the days of torrential downpours, such is my luck!!!

We seem to have missed most of the recent showers IMBY - only 2.5 mm since the 4th of the month.

14.7mm for month to date, but could well be more later today.

We've been lucky up here. I think a couple of wash outs and thats it really. But we avoid a lot of the convective stuff on the NE tip of scotland... all in all a good summer for cricket being played in this locale. 

In certain threads on this forum, I'm starting to see other members question where those people are who have been complaining about a drought or a lack of rainfall now that we have had a bit of rain in recent days. I can't obviously speak for those other members but from my perspective, I would say that the drought is over as recent days have been wetter than of late but there continues to be a very serious water scarcity crisis in many parts of the UK and it is going to take a lot more than a few days of rainfall to eradicate that. That is shown up very well today in the latest water scarcity report which has just been released by SEPA because this is showing us just how certain parts of Scotland are continuing to experience the effects of that exceptionally dry August in particular despite those greater amounts of rainfall in more recent days.

In fact, there has even been another three areas in NE Scotland and the Scottish Borders which have now joined those other areas which are at significant water scarcity status having had their status upgraded from moderate water scarcity status. In addition to that, three areas in the far north of Scotland which were previously at early warning status have now had their status upgraded to alert status.

Nevertheless, the more recent rainfall has been very welcome and has had the benefit of allowing the cities of Perth and Glasgow to have their statuses downgraded from alert status to early warning status.

All of other areas which haven't been mentioned remain unchanged in terms of their water scarcity status and this means that Edinburgh is still at moderate water scarcity status for now.

It is clearly going to take quite a lengthy and sustained period of wetter weather to ease the water scarcity situation and this report shows that very well but if the recent flip to wetter weather can be maintained in the longer term which we have been seeing in recent days, those water scarcity statuses will hopefully gradually improve in the coming weeks due to the ongoing recpvery in response to that.

The absolute drought is over here (20mm of rain this month already), but the ground remains rock-solid for now and the trees continue to shed their leaves.

It'll take more than a couple of downpours before we're back to normal in terms of vegetation and ground conditions.

Quite, although the poster is known for baited exagerrations and doom mongering.

It reminds me of another comment earlier in the week noting how green and verdant everything was looking literally hours after the first rain shower, which i can only imagine was related to the posters mood rather than anything they actually observed.

The IMBY deluge this week has only just started to manifest itself in the greening of the lawn but little else is changed and the ground is still very hard. The plants and trees, for the most part, still look pretty stressed if you know what you're looking at.

Its a relief to get the rain but more is needed. Unfortunately its too late now this year for any so called recovery to occur. Lets hope next summer we finally get a well rounded season that delivers plenty of fine weather, but keeps everything in equilibrium. 

I'm a keen metal detectorist and was out on a dig in the Vale of Glamorgan on Wednesday and was surprised to find that though the top couple of cm of soil was damp below that it was bone dry and crumbly. That's after a fair amount of rain this last week.

I'm not surprised about how dry the soil is not so far down. A couple of articles some might find interesting.

The first on food resilience and the second about the spring drought earlier. Appologies if you have already seen them. The second I'm sure is on TWO somewhere.

https://theconversation.com/the-uks-food-system-is-built-on-keeping-prices-low-but-this-years-droughts-show-up-its-failings-263939?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-gb 

https://theconversation.com/how-the-weather-got-stuck-over-the-uk-and-produced-an-unusually-dry-and-warm-spring-255987 

I’m sure some of here on TWO recall the ‘food mountains’. The Mail and so on loved to mock them. On the Continent they were referred to more as ‘strategic surpluses’. Wartime memories of nothing to eat but tulip bulbs and worse helped this approach. Those memories are generally remembered only in the archives nowadays even though another unsettling period perhaps approaches.

From the previous post.

Strategic storage – whether in the form of grain reserves, frozen produce or regional “cold-chain” hubs – could provide resilience without undermining freshness for short-life products.

Here in Edinburgh, yet another weather front has just moved through without hardly producing any measurable rainfall here and it would appear that this weather front more or less disintegrated just as it was about to reach here.

Once again, we have now had over 4 days without any significant rainfall and since there isn't expected to be any significant rainfall here until the middle part of the coming week in particular, we will then have gone virtually an entire week without any significant rain here by then.

This is shown that although the last couple of weeks or so has been a bit wetter than of late overall, that rain is still not really getting through to those areas which are carrying the biggest impacts of water scarcity and which therefore need it the most. Without that much needed rainfall, the water scarcity situation is only going to get even worse with more areas likely to see their status upgraded to significant water scarcity status. In fact, I wouldn't even be surprised if Edinburgh ended up being one such area if there is no further significant rainfall by the time that SEPA release their next weekly report for that on Thursday.