It’s hard to remember the last time we left the house without an umbrella – or kicked ourselves for forgetting it.
After a weekend of yellow warnings for 80mm of rain and 60mph slamming southwest England and Wales, more are in place today and tomorrow.
The rain alert for tomorrow covers a patch of the northeast Midlands and east and northeast England, with the region set to be soaked by 80mm of rain.
And this all comes after even more were issued earlier last week.
So the question on everybody’s minds is a simple one: Is it ever going to stop raining? Before you read on, a casual reminder that this is talking about the UK.
Why is it raining so much?
‘It’s the luck of the natural weather draw,’ says Jim N R Dale, a senior meteorologist at the British Weather Services, the nation’s oldest independent meteorological company. ‘I.e, low pressure as opposed to high pressure.’
‘Pressure’ doesn’t mean the clouds are being peer-pressured to dump rain on us.
The atmosphere above your head exerts pressure on the Earth’s surface and when the air is warmed up, it begins to ascend and leads to low pressure below. When the air cools, it sinks, leading to high pressure.
Low pressure often brings miserable weather as warmer air holds more moisture. As it rises, it forms clouds which can soak it all up like fluffy sponges.
There’s been a large low-pressure system out in the southern North Sea for some time. The jetstream, a band of strong winds blowing from west to east about 30,000 feet from the ground, isn’t helping either, explains Jo Farrow, a forecaster with the independent weather service NetWeather.
‘Mid-September wasn’t too bad but this past week has been very wet,’ she says.
‘The jetstream has moved about a fair bit this month but this week it has been just to the south of Britain with low pressures taking their time to move by.
‘Whenever weather systems get stuck or are slow moving we might see severe weather.’
When will it stop raining?
Sadly, forecasting the weather is easier said than done. An astronomer can predict the path of planets for centuries to come as the sun’s brawny gravitational pull makes it easy-ish to predict.
Weather, on the other hand, doesn’t have a cut-and-dry way of being anticipated (no pun intended). As the Earth wobbles and slingshots around the sun, all while the moon lurks just behind it, the planet’s atmosphere becomes a massive mess of wind, rain, air pressures and temperatures.
In other words, none of the forecasters Metro spoke with could say with 100% accuracy when it’ll stop raining – but they do have a decent idea when.
‘A high pressure will build over the UK midweek,’ explains Farrow. ‘This will help clear away Monday’s rain, although taking its time on Tuesday from eastern England.’
Ruby Warner, a senior meteorologist with WeatherQuest, a private weather forecasting and weather analysis company, agrees.
‘The rain will become lighter, more intermittent, and increasingly confined to East Anglia and Kent by Wednesday when the high pressure begins to extend its influence further south. By Thursday, the dry weather will have spread to the majority of the UK,’ she says.
Dale similarly hedges his bets on mid-week, though there is a catch – and its name is Hurricane Issac. Swelling to a Category 2 hurricane on Saturday, Dale says it’s since weakened to a tropical storm and is currently churning across the North Atlantic Ocean.
‘Isaac’s “ashes” will become absorbed into the natural flow of things in the mid-Atlantic,’ he adds, ‘likely to arrive on Sunday following a welcome spell of settled weather.’
Warner adds: ‘It will start to turn unsettled again towards northwest Scotland as the next weather system moves in from the Atlantic. Then the unsettled conditions and further rain is likely to move east through the weekend.’
Will October be just as wet?
Again, weather forecasts can go the other way in days or even hours, but Warner says that it’s likely we’ll have some stereotypical Autnmal weather in October.
‘We expect further bouts of wet and windier weather to reach the country, with settled interludes between weather systems,’ she says.
‘Prolonged dry spells look unlikely through the first half of October and confidence after that reduces as the weather models produce a lot of possible outcomes.
‘Despite the lower confidence later in the month, it is possible that we may end up with some longer dry spells between.’
Is the amount of rainfall something to be worried about?
According to the Met Office, some counties in southern and central England have already had more than 250% of their average September rainfall.
That’s a lot of rain, and Farrow says the problem is how all this rainfall after rainfall is giving the ground next to no time to dry.
‘Torrential sudden downpours can cause flash flooding from surface water runoff,’ she says. ‘Groundwater levels have now risen and there is standing water in the fields and still in some towns where the drains were overwhelmed.’
As human-induced climate change goofs up the Earth’s weather, floodwater is something Britain is increasingly having to get used to.
The UK has become 7% wetter over the last 40 years, while the severity of flooding has been up for five decades, the Met Office says.
Where all the extra water winds up is a concern. Flooding in a warming world is only going to get worse, and concrete cities with drainage systems that can get clogged up by autumnal leaves need to adapt, Farrow says.
Asked if the UK is prepared for the increasing amount of rainfall, Dale said: ‘A big no.’
Could climate change be a reason why it’s been raining so much?
Pretty much. Climate change is very likely whipping up lengthier downpours because as the atmosphere heats up, it can suck up more moisture.
And last year was the warmest year on record. And the summer just gone was the warmest on record.
England has in no way been alone with the growing need to pack an umbrella. Rainfall records were broken this month across Europe, deluges that the World Weather Attribution says were made twice as likely because of climate change.
‘Take a look around the world,’ warns Dale, appointing to a wave of ‘catastrophic floods’ in Nepal, northern Thailand, North Carolina and southern Mexico.
‘We have been relatively lucky compared to many,’ warns Dale. ‘But sooner or later!
‘We can’t avoid the inevitable forever.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
For more stories like this, check our news page.
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