August 10th, 2026

Hi All,

One of the (few) advantages of age is that you remember (some) things.

In 1976, I was a mere slip of a lad, just on the cusp of discovering The Jam and becoming an 'angry, young man'. It was also a significant drought year (as was 1995 apparently but I have no recollection at all of that one) and I remember watching my local brook (which I fished) dwindle to a succession of pools no longer interconnected by fast flowing, gravel runs. People said to me it'll take years to recover but the reality was very different. At the end of August (just after the government of the time appointed a Drought Minister), it began raining heavily and within a matter of weeks, the rivers were flowing and nature was bouncing back. Of course back then the rivers were a lot cleaner and weren't a dumping ground for your local water company. Nor was Imidacloprid leaching into our waterways by virtue of a flea and tick treatment for your canine friends (Read about it here ). By September of that year, water levels were returning to normal and ground water levels were recovering. Of course we have a lot more people now, a lot more houses, a lot more demand on a dwindling resources and a glacially-slow planning process to build more reservoirs. How long will it take to recover from this drought I wonder ?

I don't know about you but I would actually like a spell of cooler weather with some rain and some nice blustery westerlies. I am kind of fed up with the sunshine and 'yet another heatwave event' as we are due to have this week. Judging by the dust clouds that engulfed me periodically this morning on a long cycle down the Welland Valley, I think farmers are crying out for some of that rain as well for their autumn crop sowing.

Waiting for this drought to end is a bit like sitting in an airport waiting for your delayed plane to turn up. Everything says it'll happen but every time you look at the screen, that plane just doesn't seem to be getting any closer (Can you tell that I have endured a recent enforced wait for Aer Lingus recently :) ???)

So this afternoon I booted up the ECMWF long-term projection (10 days) and then looked at their Ensemble data as well. Ensembles are becoming a very useful tool for people like me and represent multiple model (50 in this case) runs of various parameters (2m temperature, precipitation, etc). The 'tighter' the results, the more probable the meteorological outcome, the further apart the results, the less probable / confident we are about the outcome, meteorologically-speaking.

Below is an example of an ECMWF ensemble run for precipitation using Leicestershire as a location using Netweather.tv.

ECMWF ESP Ensemble courtesy of netweather.tv

So, what you can see is that around the 16th of August, there is a suggestion of 'some' rainfall from most of the model runs, starting at 1mm (whoopee) right up to an upper outlier of 33.3mm (doubtful).

ECMWF 10-Day projection courtesy of tropicaltidbits.com

If we look at the ECMWF model run, you can see there's a suggestion of a low pressure system pushing in across Ireland, Wales and the southern half of the U.K from the 16th of August onwards. Now that's only 6 days away so it's a reasonably strong signal, but of course how much rain we actually get remains to be seen.

Perhaps as importantly, this low pressure is followed by another later in the month which pushes the hot air plume responsible for our current heatwave this week, further east. So I find this encouraging, it isn't an end to the heat or the commencement of a deluge (like 1976), but just maybe the second half of August will be more tolerable, with some rainfall than the first half ?

In the meantime the heat is due to build this week and peak in the mid-thirties on Thursday for the southern half of the U.K, nudging into the thirties possibly as well for Ireland over the same timeframe and the high twenties for Denmark over Friday / Saturday.

The thing I am wondering is whether the arrival of low pressure from the west will feed in humid air to a very hot atmosphere and spark off a thundery breakdown for the end of the week / weekend ? It is a possibility I'd say....

No agronomic notes this week because by now you know exactly where you are water resource-wise vs. soil moisture vs. your turf and you don't need me to remind you.

Good luck coping with some more 'tropical nights'

All the best.

Mark Hunt