2nd June, 2025

Hi All,

Well, I have been over in my beloved Meyrueis, located in The Cevenne, France for over a week now and the weather has finally broken, with beaucoup d'orage (lightning) after a week of steadily increasing temperatures peaking in the low thirties. It is a simply beautiful place to be if, like me, you love all things birds, butterflies and flowers, plus loads of walks and the odd run or two chucked into the mix. There are very few places in England where you can just stop and all you hear is the sound of nature without people / dogs barking or other associated sounds and to me that is such a life tonic.

As you would expect I have managed to work in something to do with baking on this trip with a visit to a restored flour mill. It is high enough in altitude for the local farmers here to grow Rye and so I picked up a couple of bags of locally-grown Rye Flour for my Danish baking and promptly walked around with them for the rest of the day ! Heaven knows how I am going to get them past the unscrupulous mob at Ryanair though 😂

I have also been using the Merlin birdsong app for the 1st time. My brother has been using it for awhile now and I have been sceptical because it definitely doesn't get it right all the time. For me I want to understand the bird song I am hearing and then potentially to try and watch / photograph said bird to know it is correct. So when I hear something I think is different, I give Merlin a spin. Like I heard a similar but different song to a Goldcrest whilst descending Mont Aigoual and I surmised it might be a Firecrest and Merlin duly confirmed it was. I guess it is powered by AI-learning. It did demonstrate to me how using AI technology can enhance one's knowledge rather than replace the need to understand / know something because AI does it for you. I guess it boils down to your attitude to technology.

General Weather Situation

So over here now the weather is changeable and across the U.K / Ireland and Denmark it is likewise, since the rain duly arrived as predicted following week's of dry weather.

That rain is a double-edged sword because for some it arrived as a deluge (western Scotland for example), brought with it, elevated humidity from a disease perspective, but on a positive note, crucially gave our water supplies a break with less need to irrigate and lower E.T. Not switched on enough on the farming front to know if the moisture may / will help with grain filling as we look forward towards grain quality at harvest ?

Courtesy of tropicaltidbits.com

So what have we got coming up weather-wise for the coming week or so ?

Well, it is a case of sunshine and showers this week as low pressure sits above the U.K and pulls in a fresh south westerly wind and shower mix. A wet Monday / Tuesday for Ireland and the U.K I think before that rain moves eastwards towards Scandinavia. Followed on by showers and heavier bursts of rain for the middle of the week for all areas, though perhaps more across the west of Ireland, the U.K and Denmark maybe.

As we approach the end of the week, another low pressure system swings in from The Atlantic and this one has a more southerly position, so we will see a heavy rain front push into the south west and south of England on Thursday and then track north and east across The North Sea before vectoring into Denmark for the beginning of Friday. This front may feature some heavy-localised rainfall. All areas will see more showers and heavier bursts of rain through Friday and continuing I think through the weekend, accompanied by some strong south westerly / westerly winds.

As that low pressure tracks north east towards Norway on Sunday, it's trailing edge will pull down cooler, northerly winds and keep the temperatures pretty much where they will have been all week, 16-17°C during the day and 9-10°C at night. Not really great for the official start of summer but great growing weather for grass.

Now the outlook for next week is a little better as a high pressure peak introduces a bit of warmth into that south westerly wind from Monday next, so the temperatures will pick up into the high teens / low twenties from Monday I think. This weak high pressure ridge will push most of the rain at the start of next week more north and north west across Northern Ireland, the north west of England and Scotland. Bearing in mind the newly-announced drought status for The North West, this rain will no doubt be welcome. As we get to mid-week, next week, a weak low pressure system is projected to push across the south of Ireland and England and this will pull rain more southwards, so it wouldn't surprise me to see more rain mid-week across the south of England. That rain may well vector across The North Sea into Denmark for the end of next week. At the end of next week, those temperatures will drop a little as the low pressure pulls down a NW wind trajectory and then......

And then looking a long way ahead with a bit of caveat-laden Mystic Megging (and therefore subject to change), I can see high pressure pushing in from the middle of June (15th onwards) to bring warm (maybe hot), dry and settled weather, particularly for Ireland and the western side of the U.K. The east and Denmark may not be as hot, but will still see a weather / temperature uplift.

Now meteorologically-speaking, that's a long way off yet but high pressure weather signals are generally more reliable than low pressure signals, so maybe that's when summer will recommence.

Agronomic Notes

Well the arrival of rainfall has certainly given the grass plant some relief after the 8-10 weeks of dry weather that preceded it.

Looking on my wildlife camera at home I can see that the fertiliser I applied to my lawn prior to the holiday has stimulated the growth so much that the resident Blackbird population are struggling to hop across it 😂

Cripes it is going to take some cutting....

I am sure many of you will have seen some good recovery and growth over the last week or so, despite the short-lived heatwave last weekend that pushed up E.T rates again after a brief hiatus.

Daily E.T - May 2025 - Sevenoaks, Kent - Total moisture loss = 100.43mm

Now let's just consider that E.T figure for a moment.

1mm of moisture across a hectare equates to 10,000L over the same area, so the estimated moisture loss through May was just over a million litres of water (1,004,300L to be exact) per hectare. Now of course we don't replace all of that E.T moisture loss when we are irrigating a hectare of greens for example. A ballpark figure might be that 60% of E.T is replaced by irrigation across a hectare, so that's 600,000L or 600m3. That is a good quantity of water and of course we have also endured a dry April as well, sp that's more irrigation water demand (for this location April represented a total E.T loss of 77.83mm)

My point is that water has to come from somewhere, be that mains, borehole and / or reservoir and water is of course in the news following the dry spring. Last week there were headlines in the news that The South East and East Anglia may run out of drinking water in the next decade unless we critically speed up the creation of new reservoirs to increase our storage capacity.

Where do you think the amenity market is in the pecking order when it comes to the requirement to irrigate grass ?

I'd say we are somewhere a long way down the list headed up by industry, homeowners, agriculture for food production, etc wouldn't you ?

There's also the question of economics.

If you utilise mains water and therefore have to pay per m3, the price is likely to increase is it not ?

As a commodity becomes scarce, the cost increases, it's a standard law of economics.

Reproduced courtesy of https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/coffee-price

Just look at another commodity close to my heart, coffee or more specifically, the price of coffee lately. With failing harvests in Vietnam and Brazil, dove-tailed in with an increasing demand for the drink as China wakes up to this form of caffeine, that Flat White at Starchucks is now triple the price it was not that many years ago. The chart above shows the trend as supplies become scarce and demand increases.

The same will undoubtedly happen with water. How are you as a facility or we as an industry geared up to this future challenge ?

I mentioned the increased humidity that has not surprisingly accompanied the recent rainfall (it would be difficult for it not to eh !) and you can see how May 2025 has until recently run along with a pretty low level of Smith Kerns (for the same Sevenoaks location). That said, the uplift in temperatures over the last few days of the month combined with high humidity have pushed that probability above the minimum warning threshold of 20%.

I am interested as always to know if you are seeing symptoms at these type of levels or not, so please drop me a message if you wouldn't mind at markh@weatherstations.co.uk

Lot's more to talk about on this and other matters turf-related but since I am on my hols, I think un Café au Lait is in order and a walk along the river to spot the elusive Dipper and his / her family.

All the best.

Mark Hunt