CEH Blog on the summer and water resources – full of useful graphs and descriptions

Submitted by Mr. Jamie Hannaford on Thu, 09/08/2018

CEH ‘The summer of 2018 has continued to deliver plenty of reliable holiday weather, but the heatwave conditions have also caused significant impacts on people and the environment. The persistent hot and dry conditions have led to concerns over water supplies. Here we continue our blog post series helping to put the current weather and water situation in context.

What is the situation and is it exceptional?

Continuing the trend of summer 2018, July was another exceptional month, with very hot temperatures and little rainfall until the end of the month.

At our meteorological station in Wallingford, we saw no rain days (i.e. with >1mm of rainfall) between 1st June and 20th July – this spell of 48 days equals the record (from spring 1997) of consecutive dry days at the site, which has been observed daily since 1962. As a result of intense rainfall in the closing days, the July rainfall was not as exceptional as June. The UK as a whole saw 73% of average, but parts of the Midlands and south-east received less than half the typical July rainfall, while Northern Ireland and parts of western Scotland saw near-average rainfall.  Click here to read more