do-it-yourself weather

If you are in the UK, and if you use THIS, in conjunction with THIS, you can have a stab at your own weather predictions. Click the arrow above each picture to get an animation of past/current rainfall and cloud cover.

Met Office Radar

In case you don’t know about it, click on this link and then the ‘play’ arrow to see where it is raining / snowing, and the way the ‘weather’ is moving. If you have time, click on the ‘Satellite Imagery’ in the menu on the left of the page and click the play button here as well to get the cloud movements. It’s good stuff. Not rocket science… although presumably they used rocket science to get those weather satellites up there.

It is only for the UK, so apologies to my US readers. I’m sure you have something similar.

Nice weather for ducks

We have just had over THREE inches of rain in twenty-four hours. That, according to the meteorological office (try saying that after a few glasses) is more than we would normally get here in the whole of September. ‘Nice weather for ducks’ is an expression I was brought up with. I know ducks like water, but I had assumed that they like sitting in the stuff and floating around, not have it falling on them from the sky. I was wrong. During the heavy rain I called in at Whitmuir. Their ducks were going crazy. They had discovered the (normally gently flowing) feeder that leads to their pond and they were all there, swimming against the flow like kids in a waterpark.

I know the graph on the left shows less than 2.5″, but I took the pic 24 hours after the rain started the previous day, so add both columns. And yes… I really do need to get out more. More ducks here.