Big J

Hot as fook today. Out with a friend for a leisurely bike ride this afternoon and it got up to 24c in one sheltered spot. More typically 19-22c. Hotter tomorrow. I expect that I'll be in the lake again (jumped in this morning after getting sweaty felling and processing a couple of trees in the garden). The water was only 12c this morning, but will likely be over 14c by the end of the tomorrow.

Summer has finally arrived. It's currently 21c, sunny and with a fairly decent breeze. I was up on the ski slope earlier working on the MTB trails and it felt quite ridiculously hot. Our forecast going forward is very pleasant:

It's been a chilly week or two here. We've had frosts every morning this week, and the occasional dusting of snow. It's to markedly warm up from tomorrow though, and next week is 15-19c with the long term prospects looking warmer still. Finally!

It's been quite nice here this week. A dusting of snow on a few mornings (really only a few flakes) combined with some decent frosts. I've been taking the gravel routes to work on my bike and the wildlife count has been through the roof - the cranes are back in great numbers now, and yesterday I saw 22 deer on my way into work and 25 on the way back. The gravel tracks are still a little damp, but they'll dry out soon enough. It's funny to note that some of my colleagues at work follow English football and they've all remarked on the fact that it always seems to be raining when they watch matches! The climate here is so dry by comparison - especially in the cooler months.

Winter is still trying to cling on. Cold for the last couple of days, a decent easterly and a dusting of snow this morning and yesterday morning. To be up to 11c by next weekend though. Spring will be welcome when it takes hold

Lovely weather here at the moment. Every night a few degrees below freezing (no frost though as too dry) and every day sunny and 4-8c. A little greyer, windier and colder at the weekend, but back to more of the same next week. Feels like spring is coming.

Yep, crack on! Josh has a wealth of knowledge too, having been here much longer than me.

Where abouts are you? As an adult, I've lived in Scotland and Devon, so not the driest places!

That's honestly how I felt after the winter 19/20. Trying to run harvesting sites through constant rain on Devon red clay and Somerset green clay was almost impossible. It started raining on (if memory serves) the 7th or 8th of September and didn't stop until the third week of March 2020. Longest dry period in that time was 3 days and my fairly crude measurements at the house indicated an average of nearly 200mm a month. We had to shut our site down for three weeks in February due to waves of liquid mud sloshing around the site. People complain about the rain here sometimes, but they've got no idea! 😄 All I can suggest is either find another line of work where the weather doesn't play such a large part or emigrate to somewhere with a better climate. No doubt it'll just stop raining at some point in March and by the end of May the farmers will be crying out for rain. Interestingly, a great many fields here are irrigated as a matter of course. There is just the assumption that there will be the need for watering, and infrastructure is in place in the fields to provide it. I don't recall it being commonplace in the UK

Fairly accurate, with the usual drifts in timescales and severity. Being more of a continental climate, it's a lot less changeable and extreme. We genuinely haven't had a single storm over the whole of the winter season, and no wind speeds over 8 m/s sustained. Precipitation is much lower over winter than summer (56mm last month, as opposed to 182.6mm in Cullompton, where we used to live) and even though it can be quite cold (down to minus 22c this winter), it doesn't generally get in the way of getting outside. Total annual precipitation is 480-550mm, with about 100-125mm of that over winter falling as snow. Summer rain is usually short lived and heavy. Still looking forward to spring though. I really love the routine of cycling to work and stopping for a swim 1200m before I get there at the lake. The lake only lost it's ice this week. I might start next week - there are changing rooms and a nice jetty.

Drizzling here this morning. 4c. Due to return to daily frosts on Monday. No precipitation forecast for a couple of weeks at least. Should be quite pleasant.

At least they're doing something proactively. I agree with you though - drainage is the way to go. The geology and landscape is totally different here. Quite a few bits of forest are flooded at the moment with the snow melt (usually planted with alder and birch in those areas) but the sandy soil means there is almost no mud. I went for a 6km walk up the ski slope and back through forest tracks with my wife this morning and the shoes were just as clean when we got back as when we left. It was about 4c and thick mist/light drizzle. It's not just the UK though. I've got friends who cycle in Germany, and their photos on Strava look pretty similar to that footpath.