How Much Rain Have You Had?

The difference between rain in the UK and rain in Australia is that in Australia typically you never have enough of it, unless you live in the tropics and have wet seasons! Every drop of rain in Australia seems precious and as a result its reported every time there is one! Every weather forecast I can remember, in Australia, told you the amount or rain that had fallen in various locations around the country. Better than that, they told you how much rain had fallen in different locations around the city you were in. For some reason this became important to me as a kid growing up. It might have had something to do with the fact that I spent 3 years living through at the time was one of the worst droughts on record in a tiny country town that rarely saw water unless it was muddy and gurgled up from a bore hole!

Contrast this to the UK, where apart from the odd summer where it doesn't rain often (with this year thankfully being one of those) it does rain far more often than it does in most parts of Australia. OK so that is stating the bleeding obvious I guess. That being said though the quantity of rain is very rarely reported on the weather. It seems to be enough to say that it will rain at some time in the next 24 hours, but very rarely do they ever say how much it will rain, and even rarer will they tell you how much it did rain in the past 24 hours. Sure if there has been some torrential rain they might mention that it rained 50 mm's in some random place in the past day but rarely will they say this.

I guess it all comes down to the frequency with which rain events happen in the two different countries. It's a given that it will rain on several to seven days on any given week in the UK, however in most places in Australia if it rained on two consecutive days sales of Arc building supplies sky rockets. It's just not as common a phenomenon.

So for the past 10 years I have been stumbling around in the rainfall measuring wilderness, not knowing if I should head to my local DIY store in order to refresh the Arc building supplies, as I simply have never known how much has been raining! Sure I know that something has fallen from the sky but not whether I will have to swim to work the next day!

Finally though I have done something about it. The wilderness has been cleared and I am back in the realms of rainfall civilization as last Monday I was given my very own rain gauge! Tidy! Very Tidy indeed! The above picture shows the top of my shiney new rainfall gauge! You know what though? For the week after I got it it didn't bleeding well rain! I was unable to test it! Typical. Get a rain gauge and it doesn't rain. I think I could start controlling the weather you know. If I bring that rain gauge in over night I bet you it would start to chuck it down!

Finally though last night we got a dousing of the wet stuff, and I am happy to report that in W5 over the course of the evening and night of the 6th of September, we had 11mm of rain. Today (the 7th) we had 1mm further rain until 5pm ;-)

Have fun

m