No Complainin' About The Rainin'

There are a number of benefits to be had from netweather.tv. They leave nice chocolates on our pillows, the range of, ahem, 'extras' provided by their Thai masseurs is truly mindblowing (we hope to find out what the lady masseurs are like soon too), AND we continue to get access to a huge range of forecasting tools, charts and records.

For the past week, in between passion fruit daiquiris and pedicures, we have been poring over the long range forecast charts to try & see if the rather dismal & unpromising forecast last time out will change. By and large it hasn't. What the data are suggesting is still unsettled rather cool conditions with some rain. The only thing that seemed to change is which day we would get with no rain & which with relatively heavy rain. What it was heading for was a particularly moist Thursday, with rain fall of up to 8 or 9 mm, a mostly dry day over the weekend, with the rest of the time having some rain at some point.

That sounds pretty grim, but to put it in context, data from Yeovilton show that in the mudfest years of '97 & '98 we had around 70 & 90 mm of rain in the month of June (compared to more normal figure of around 35mm). 2005's epic thunderstorm dumped anything between 100 and 150mm of rain in 6 hours on to the festival site. The kind of rainfall the forecasts are showing will give nothing like that. It would be a wetter than average June, but not on the grand scale of Glastonbury's mudfests & floodfests.

Temperatures again vary depending on which forecast the computers are showing. At least one day would be warm (in the low to mid 20s), but the rest of the time it would struggle to get to 18 Celsius at best. All the weather systems would be trudging over the festival site from the west, and any signs of high pressure that would give us some hope of decent weather fended off by any number of small low pressure systems battling it out over the north Atlantic and the continent. In summary: unsettled, cool, breezy, make the most of any sunshine that appears, it will probably rain at some point on any given day.

At least that's how it was looking until this morning - there do seem to be changes afoot. After wiping the rose petals from the netweather.tv computers and shooing away the eunuchs waving incense burners, there has been a definite shift in the trends. The low pressure systems over Europe are much larger & much more stable looking, and there is a hint of decent looking high pressure systems pushing in from the south & west. Things look, on the face of it, to be stabilising. On the downside, this stability and the predicted position of the weather systems is plonking a fairly persistent belt of light rain over the festival site that doesn't shift much over the whole festival period. Temperatures are no great shakes either - still struggling to get to the 20 Celsius mark.

So, on the upside the models are shifting, the weather patterns are different to those given before. On the downside there hasn't been much actual change in what we will experience on the ground. Don't be too despondent though, there is still plenty of time for things to improve and this new direction from the forecasting models is promising.

We'll be back at netweather.tv every day to look at their charts and to play Halo3 on their 60" plasma, and in just a few days we'll be able to take advantage of the greater details their 16 day forecasts will offer. Keep watching this space!