East Dorset .... 50 ... almost ....

[Martin Rowley [West Moors/East Dorset]]

... I was poised to post a '50-up' message this morning, as if the rain-day ending 09Z had been dry (or less than 0.2 mm), we would have had 50 days without triggering the climatological 'rain-day' definition (>=0.2mm in 24hr ending 09Z).

49 isn't bad, but the 0.8 mm we did have in the couple of hours before midnight wasn't worth the effort frankly. Had a dig around the soil this morning and where it was loose/open to the falling rain, I doubt it percolated much more than a pencil's-thickness below the surface - and where the surfaces are baked hard/dry, any dampness had evaporated off given the warmth in the soil and the early sunshine.

A lot of 'ye-meeja' are working themselves up over this 'drought' but a quick comparison with the oft-quoted 1975/76 event (by no means THE extreme event by overall PPN deficit/duration) shows just how 'interesting' that drought was:

Data for Hurn (East Dorset)

1975/76 ... "winter-half" [ONDJFM] rainfall = 189 mm (37% 1981-2010mn) ... first 6 months 1976 = 111 mm ... May/June/July = 33 mm

2017/18 ... "winter-half" [ONDJFM] rainfall = 477 mm (93% 1981-2010mn) ... first 6 months 2018 = 372 mm ... May/June/July = 41 mm

One problem is of course, there's more of us, using more water! Without going into too many tedious figures, non-metropolitan Dorset [excludes the Christchurch-Bournemouth-Poole cluster] had ~300K population in the mid 1970s; latest estimate is ~ 420K, an increase of around 40% ... and of course we have many more appliances/facilities that use more water.

Martin.