Tag Archives: Met Office

Olympics and the British Weather

Of course with the Olympics right around the corner and the British weather not getting any better there is a wonder are we going to get poured on while watching the events?

As everyone who has ever planned an event in the summer in England will know, the very likely possibility of rain needs to be considered. Not only do organisers need to make sure the entire Olympics run smoothly, they also need to make sure there are extra plans in place in case it rains. This means considering millions of spectators, 70,000 volunteers and 10,500 world class athletes.

There have been 250,000 red white a blue ponchos have been added to the stock lists inside the shops at the venues just in case. There will also be Olympic branded umbrellas for sale making sure everyone will stay dry. Although there has been no mention of how many air conditioning units are being fitted!

The Met Office has created a five person team, dedicated to predicting weather conditions while the Olympics are on. However it has been reported that it is far too early to make any accurate predictions for when the games kick off on July 27th.

The organisers of the Olympics are confident that if it does rain it won’t affect any plans. Debbie Jevans who is the director of sport for the LOCOG has said, “By definition, being British you have no choice but to prepare for the weather.

“Clearly if you gave me the choice of rain or no rain, you’d rather have no rain and that’s for the spectators as much as anything else.

“We’ve known from day one what we looked across the sports that they will happen whether it is raining or not, and so the plans have always included that.”

Flash Flooding Disrupts Most of the Country

Most of the country has experience serious and continuous downpours over the last 36 hours and they are expected to continue to threaten many homes as rivers break their banks.

The Met Office issued another weather warning this morning as there was 60 mm of rain falling on already saturated ground across Wales and South West England.

Due to the severe weather, Thames Water, Anglian Water and Southern Water will lift their hosepipe bans tomorrow which have been in place since April. The bans were put in place after two consecutive dry winters. A spokesman for Thames Water said, “We have had two-and-a-half times the average rainfall for April, we have had steady showers in May and the monsoon downpours in June. That’s changed things.”

There have been four flood warnings put in place by The Environment Agency on rivers in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and West Sussex. Emergency services in these areas had to help 250 people and rescue centres have been set up where flood water has risen to 6ft.

Many roads resemble rivers now due to the torrential rain and have left cars floating away. The A259, which is near Bognor Regis, and parts of the M3 in Hampshire have been effected which means many closures.

As England has been in drought for the last two years, all this rain has meant that only average levels have actually been reached. This is helping to build up water stock as we experienced the driest March for 70 years this year. Just when we thought summer had come early and we all started to switch our air conditioning units on; we had to turn them off just as quickly.

Today there is predicted to be even more, slow moving, showers across the country although it does seem to be moving north. The chief forecaster at the Met Office, Andy Page said, “Due to the nature of showers, some areas will miss them altogether, but where they do occur, large amounts of rainfall are possible in a short space of time which has the potential to cause flooding.”