Awful weather

This week: Awful weather; A very wet Friday;

With two fine days this week, once again, I have not done much in the garden or orchards.

As the rain teemed down, I felt very sorry for my newly emerged Crocus flowers. They remained as tightly closed buds until Saturday lunchtime, when some sunshine encouraged them to open a little.

In one foray into the Top Orchard to plant a Lantana in the new shrubbery I created, I saw that the first Daffodil flowers of the year were open, alongside the polytunnel.

Daffodils area always a welcome sight in spring, and the date was entered into my Springwatch calendar. There was even a solitary Honey bee foraging for nectar.

I have another group of Daffodil in a colder area on the edge of the citrus orchard, which are nowhere near the flowering stage. Once again this highlights the effect of the different microclimes I have in the different parts of my property.

With 270mm of rain since January 1st, or 270 litres per square metre, we have had a lot of rain. However, this is only the amount that parts of Portugal and Spain received in 36 hours on Wednesday and Thursday though.

We are well above the average for this point in our rainy season.

When everything is soaking wet, there is no point in trying to do anything of any significance outside.

Waking to rain again on Saturday, when it stopped around 10:30, every branch and twig had a row of raindrops hanging from the underside. As the sun came out, every droplet became a tiny prism, refracting the light into a kaleidoscope of colour.

I need several fine and dry days so I can do some outside work.

There are several projects which I want to get on with, however each one needs dry weather and a little bit of warmth from the sun.

The weather is not especially cold, today the temperature briefly touched 15°C, it is just the constant damp and gloom which makes me want to remain inside!

Awful weather

I often start the blog early in the week, making notes, thinking about themes and writing my initial thoughts.

As I write this on Wednesday, it is already our second wet day of the week. Outside the rain is hammering down, “beating the retreat” on the roof of my storm porch.

The rain started at 02:00 and has been mostly constant during the day.

The wind is gusting 30 knots and blowing a constant 20 knots. Just going between my buildings is a challenge. The felines are less than impressed and a slightly damp member of the clowder is on my knee, gently drying and transferring his dampness to me!

The bad news is that this pattern of cool, damp, grey, miserable weather is going to continue for much of February.

The Jet Stream which controls the extreme Arctic cold is breaking down as I write this. The breakdown will allow the cold to continue to spill south and as this bitterly cold air covers an expanse of Europe from Norway to Ukraine, it will affect us here in Dol.

This cold is forcing mild, moist Atlantic air much further south than in a usual winter. This in turn is keeping this mild air moving along the length of the Mediterranean, causing flooding from Spain to Greece.

I have to say that I am fed up of winter this year. It just seems to have been endless: one fine day followed by five or more wet, windy and miserable days.

Sadly, there is a lot more to come… And at bed time, it is still raining!

A very wet Friday

I was woken up by rain beating on the roof and until mid afternoon, it rained. Sometimes heavily, sometimes just light rain, but very wetting, none the less.

So it was definitely an “inside” day. This means doing things on the computer.

I did my usual Friday weather forecast for my part of the island, then spent some time looking at what the rest of February and early March will look like.

Climate breakdown has taken hold and we are seeing this with the weather around the world. Nothing is as it used to be!

For the northern hemisphere the Jetstream has broken down into two rotating areas of high level wind. This is going to continue for the next few weeks, but the weather super-computers cannot agree on how it will affect our weather. However it seems as though it is going to be more of the same – cool, wet, windy, cloudy and generally not very pleasant!

Updating my weather station spreadsheet, I was looking for patterns in the wet weather, especially when the precipitation tally for 2026 is 270mm / 270 litres/Sq meter.

That got me thinking about the Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet I have developed, which produces these charts.

It has been the same spreadsheet since I moved to Dol in 2014, with just the odd minor change to the way that data is presented.

My weather forecasts are about putting something back into the local community and I know they are used by local growers.

This is because they are just for my part of the island. Unlike the national forecasts which are for thousands of square kilometers.

However it is about presenting data in an easily understandable way, no matter what your first language is. Humans are “visual” animals, so an easily understood graph or chart “paints a thousand words”.

I realised that I enter data into a single location on one of the 13 annual worksheets, one for each year. From this single data entry point, a calculations worksheet draws out the data and crunches the numbers.

Then a “summary” worksheet draws on the aggregated data and creates the pretty graphs and charts.

It was at this point that an internet wormhole appeared and drew me inside….

I was looking at how I might simplify all the worksheets. However after a lot of reading, I think that I have already got a relatively simple system which works well.

That dreadful Americanism came to mind: “If it aint broke, don’t fix it!”.

Trying to find an innovative way to show the climate breakdown, I looked at different year’s winter precipitation.

Local people say they don’t remember such a wet winter. Taking data from my weather station and looking at 2014 – 2018, then 2018 – 2025, you can see how significant the change in winter precipitation has been. Meteorologists say this pattern of significant winter storms is likely to be our “new normal”.

And that dear reader, is all I have done this week…. NCG