PalQ

News report have southeast England suffering one of the worst droughts on record - water restrictions have gone into effect as though the UK gets a fair amount of rain it has limited watersheds. And apparently it doesn't get a whole lot volume wise and statistics say that Rome has more inches of annual rainfall than London! Yet London is 'rainier' because it rains a lot more there - often a drizzle whereas Rome gets downpours.

CotswoldScouser

We get less rain than practically any inhabited place you can think of.

Proof of how useless annual rainfall statistics are. Till today, it's hardly rained for eight weeks. But it's felt damp almost all the time, the ground's extraordinarily muddy and practically everything made of stone or terracotta in my garden's falling apart because of the persistent fluctuations between temps just above and just below freezing.

The storage problem (it's not to do with watersheds: it's that we haven't got any lakes, and rivers in a long thin island are inevitably short) makes the water availability problem worse.

But we've never had lakes or rivers. The real problem is that, in the close to 100 years of government ownership of water distribution, there was no investment in new pipes, so evaporation is at preposterous levels. Since we saw sense under Maggie and stopped the government screwing things up, the private companies have started to plough back the century of State-sponsored resource abuse and invest in infrastructure. But it'll still take a few years to kill the legacy of trusting the government.

alanRow

London is normally drier than Barcelona and there is less water per capita than in Israel

Underhill

When you say "no lakes," are you excluding such things as Rutland Water, Windermere, and so on? Or do you just mean in the south?

CotswoldScouser

I mean that a smaller proportion of Britain's surface consists of freshwater lakes and rivers than practically any other country in Europe.

The entire Lake District adds up to a medium-sized inlet on Lake Como or Lake Geneva.

alanRow

The problem is specific to London & the SE of England - ie the areas of the UK with the highest population densities where water supply is dependent on artesian wells or river water.

Not only are there too many people for the water supply but the amount of building work (houses, shops, roads, etc) required to support that population means that large areas of the SE are concreted over reducing the amount of water that can return to the aquifers - if it wasn't for Thames Water's leaky pipes that would be even worse

GreenDragon

Hey, south Florida has the same problem, and they get LOTS of rain -- and have a huge lake (Lake Okeechobee) in the center fo the state to draw from. They've been on drought conditions for about a decade, as the aquifer (water under ground in the coral rock) was always low. The hurricanes of the last couple seasons finally brought it up, but they are still trying to pass legislation to get water resources from north central Florida to handle their needs.

PalQ

Yes indeed it's the number of rainy days that's important to the traveler, not annual rainfall:
London 23.8 inches/yr vs Rome's 25.7 inches but Rome has a whole lot more rain-free days, especially in summer.
Zurich, however, at 43.9 inches promises to be very wet at any time of year. Prague at 19.3 inches is one of Europe's driest cities.

GreenDragon

And Miami's average is 46.8 annually... yet it is 'sunny south Florida'

BTilke

The IP camera we have facing our front garden showed it raining quite hard in Maidenhead for a while this morning. But it's stopped now (we're in Brussels where it's quite sunny at the moment).
This winter in our corner of the UK southeast, many days it looked like it was *about* to rain but then it never quite happened. Or just a brief spritzing. Could definitely use several days of steady moderate rainfall (as opposed to sudden downpours).