October was a real washout!

Rainfall and flooding has continued from October into November

OCTOBER 2019 was my wettest October in my 20 years of weather records in Mountsorrel in Leicestershire.

A staggering 144mm of rain fell or nearly 6 inches. There were 23 rain days in the month with particular heavy deluges on the 1st 32mm, 14th 22mm and the 26th 23mm.

The jet stream settled over the centre of the country and a seemingly never ending amount of low pressure areas provided what seemed an almost constant deluge.

The last week of September had also seen 100mm fall so in just a 5 week period nearly 250mm had fallen or very nearly five months average rainfall in just five weeks!

The effect of the flooding was severe. The Soar usually floods four or five times a year but in October it flooded five times in as many weeks.

The usual roads affected were impassible for many days in this period as the rain poured down with almost no break with only the last four days giving us a temporary lull.

Not surprisingly temperatures were lower in this period with afternoon maximums averaging just 13c 1c below normal with the overall max just 15.7c. Many Octobers recently have seen temperatures rise to 25c but areas of High pressure and warm balmy days were completely absent this month.

Night time temperatures averaged 7c which was normal as all the cloud and rain prevented temperatures dropping too low with our lowest temp on the 27th being 0.7c so a frost was avoided in October now a quite common occurrence.

Not surprisingly sunshine totals were well down for the month with just 78 hours logged instead of the usual 105 hours with just 1 day the second giving us double figure totals at 10.2 hours but many days were mostly dull with seven completely sunless days.

So we have experienced one of the wettest periods I have ever recorded and as we have entered November still the rain keeps falling. Lets hope for a change soon!