What is going on with the weather?
If you look at our
weather archive you can see that we have had a lot of rainfall in the last three months...
Dec. 2013: 194.1 mm
Jan. 2014: 173.5 mm
Feb. 2014: 153.9 mm ... so far
Now 150 mm might not seem like a lot of rainfall but we have been working out how much water that really is ..
Firstly convert 150 mm into metres ... that is 0.15 m
Now, let us imagine that this amount fell over the whole of West Sussex which is 1,991 sq km ... or 1,991,000,000 sq metres.
So to find out ho many cubic metres fell we can multiply the area by the depth of rain water ... that makes ..
298,650,000 cubic metres of water
... or almost 300 million tonnes of water
... or the equivalent of almost 100 million Range Rovers falling from the sky!
Why is it raining all of the time?
It is no longer funny. Matches are having to be cancelled as our pitches are becoming staurated and are looking more like padi fields! But why is it happening? It is all to do with the Jet Stream, a current of fast flowing air in th eupper atmosphere ... it has moved south this year and as a result all of our weather has gone a bit off-piste!
This has led to depression after depression coming across the UK, bringing hurricane force winds and almost continuous rain.
This movement of the jet stream has had several unfortunate side effects and we have been on the brunt of most of them ..
- The wettest January for 200 years!
- Extensive river flooding due to extreme rainfall (Thames, Severn, etc.)
- Coastal flooding due to storm surges and very high tides
- Very high winds causing damage to property
Further afield there is more extreme weather happening:
- Ice storms in the USA: some of the coldest temperatures ever recorded
- Australian bush fires and drought
Is it all linked? Is our climate changing?
Today
The Met. Office are predicting winds in excess of 100mph hitting North Wales.
Click here to see the BBC webpage
When will it go away?
Not for a while ... wrap up warm, keep dry and have a lovely, if slightly damp, half term!
