Sunday 16 August 2020

A Week of Storms and Torrential Rain?

Social media posts and the news have been full of details of the hot weather, storms, and torrential rain that have been around over the last week. I've got the impression that the whole country was affected by the storms judging by the pictures of lightning and flash flooding. A new term has even cropped up on the weather forecasts now "Tropical Nights" and apparently we're getting a lot more of them now than we use to. A tropical night is when the overnight temperature doesn't fall below 20°C or 68°F.
Temperature & Rainfall Records 10-16 August 2020
Our weather then didn't match up with the rest of the country. We certainly had a couple of hot days on Tuesday and Wednesday when the temperature made it to 31.2°C and 31.0°C respectively. That's 88.2°F and 87.8°F and high enough to get them into my list of top twenty hottest days. You'll see from the temperature records above that overnight temperature fell below the 20°C required for a "tropical night" and checking through my records we haven't managed to achieve that over the last 10 years. The nearest occasion was 01 June 2010 with 18.9 or 66.0°F.



As for the storms and torrential rain they never reached us either. In the garden, the lawn looks very autumnal covered in leaves and the grass turning brown through lack of rainfall. At the allotment too it's very dry.


These leeks at the allotment look very dry and they've been on the regular watering regime trying to get the young plants established. Strangely at the allotment, the grass paths continue to grow alarmingly quickly despite the lack of rainfall.

The forecast for today, Sunday was for some decent rainfall through the morning and afternoon but that once again has failed to materialise.  We've had some drizzly rain on and off all day ensuring that the ground is wet and putting any gardening on hold but, so far, only depositing 4.2mm or 0.17in of rainfall bringing August's total up to 9.4mm or 0.37in. Midway through the month, on average, we'd expect in the region of 25mm or around an inch of rainfall.

However, those hot days and a lack of rainfall are not a good gardening combination. There's more rain in the forecast for next week so I'm hoping we won't have to do too much watering. For record, purposes here is my table of the top twenty hottest days I've recorded.




Posted by Martyn at 19:13

3 comments:

  1. Jane Strong16 August 2020 at 23:42

    "Tropical night" is a new weather word for me, so I looked it up. It is not a term used by the weather service in the US only in Europe and and Singapore and South Korea among other places. The threshold differs as well being 25 in South Korea (according to sources I could find on the Internet.) Here it was 77, but you might expect that there would be warmer nights at lower latitudes. However we are in the midst of a prolonged heatwave, several days above 100F.

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    Replies
    1. Martyn17 August 2020 at 09:19

      I saw some reports about the temperatures in California and how hot it is. If we reached 100F it would signal the end of the world to our weather forecasters. They seem to forget that lots of people around the world live in temperatures much higher than we ever get.

      Delete
  2. Mal17 August 2020 at 10:22

    Edinburgh Max for August is only 23.9C We did manage 29.9C on 31 July, just 0.1 below the 1975 long standing record of 30.0C (Although this has been broken once already in 2019 with 31,2C)
    All the same we got a night time lightening storm on the 11th with a max temp of 23.7C but rainfall 37.5mm mostly falling in a couple of hours.

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