Why is the UK facing water shortages despite record rainfall?

[Brendan110_0]

Not increasing infrastructure with population increase. Simple really, more people = more need for clean water. 

[debtlessmanc]

27 minutes ago, Stewy said:

That 40C was powered by jet exhausts overwhelming airport thermometers just metres away, and Urban Heat Islands. 

The previous high (39.5) was set the year before in a park in Cambridge. What the hell was a jet plane doing landing there ?

[Stewy]

20 minutes ago, debtlessmanc said:

The previous high (39.5) was set the year before in a park in Cambridge. What the hell was a jet plane doing landing there ?

I'd probably suspect dodginess in the siting of that Cambridge thermometer too. Encroaching buildings, concrete pathways, UHI... We're not comparing like-with-like from decades ago. 

The USA is even worse. 

[14stFlyer]

4 minutes ago, Stewy said:

I'd probably suspect dodginess in the siting of that Cambridge thermometer too. Encroaching buildings, concrete pathways, UHI... We're not comparing like-with-like from decades ago. 

Blimey.  Fabulous mixture of misinformation!  Who is paying / programming you?

[Stewy]

1 minute ago, 14stFlyer said:

Blimey.  Fabulous mixture of misinformation!  Who is paying / programming you?

Poorly sited station:

 

As the arrow indicates, close to the runway, a building and two seemingly concrete adjacent areas.

Looking at the Google scale, the runway is about 20m away, and those two areas to the left and right are closer still.

WMO rules are quite clear. Class 1 sites must be at least 100m away from concrete surfaces, and even Class 2 ones must be 30m away, which seems to rule out Coningsby. It only qualifies as a poor quality Class 3 site, which the WMO say may overstate temperatures by 1C.

This clearly means that the so-called record of 40.3C should not have been accepted by the Met Office

 

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/06/25/coningsbys-record-temperature-should-be-struck-off-due-to-poor-siting/

 

 

[kzb]

59 minutes ago, 14stFlyer said:

Blimey.  Fabulous mixture of misinformation!  Who is paying / programming you?

There's clearly massive problems with urban heat island effects.  They are not being corrected for properly.

Someone has done a global temperature plot using ONLY rural sites, and the temperature increase is a lot lower.

Back on topic, if anything, the UK has got a little wetter on average over the past decades.  They can't use that as an excuse for water shortage.

[zugzwang]

1 hour ago, Brendan110_0 said:

Not increasing infrastructure with population increase. Simple really, more people = more need for clean water. 

The 12 million migrants that the Brexit globalists let into the UK from all points of the compass. Bastards.

[debtlessmanc]

1 hour ago, Stewy said:

I'd probably suspect dodginess in the siting of that Cambridge thermometer too. Encroaching buildings, concrete pathways, UHI... We're not comparing like-with-like from decades ago. 

The USA is even worse. 

I have never known heat like that year and I remember 1976. Even rural East Yorkshire was hitting 38 degrees.

[TheChangeIsCast]

3 hours ago, onlooker said:

I thought Welsh water was not owned by a private company, but is a cooperative owned by the Welsh people?

It's Hafren Dyfrdwy around this neck of the woods, which is just the Welsh arm of Severn Trent. So they're crap. It covers the area that was previously supplied by Dee Valley Water.

Welsh Water cover other areas of Wales (and also areas of England such as places in the Wirral, Cheshire, Hertfordshire, and Gloucestershire).

Welsh Water I don't think is owned by the Welsh people, it's a private not-for-profit company with no shareholders, owned by Glas Cymru. All profits are re-invested back into the company and it's infrastructure.

Glas Cymru | Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water (dwrcymru.com)

From reading above, as far as I can tell, it's kinda like a halfway house between nationalisation and privatisation.

Seems like a good way to go for the rest of the UK water industry perhaps. Below is another link looking at the performance of Welsh water versus other companies over the past 20 years:

Case Study: Welsh Water (ox.ac.uk)

Edited April 2 by TheChangeIsCast

[kzb]

1 hour ago, zugzwang said:

The 12 million migrants that the Brexit globalists let into the UK from all points of the compass. Bastards.

Then again do we know that total water consumption has increased ?  Have not seen the figures for that.

I do recall reading some years back, that overall consumption of water had decreased in the NW region.  Although domestic consumption had increased, the loss of heavy industry more than compensated for that, leading to a small decrease.

[kzb]

1 hour ago, debtlessmanc said:

I have never known heat like that year and I remember 1976. Even rural East Yorkshire was hitting 38 degrees.

It depends on how you play with the figures of course, like always.

I believe if you take the mean summer temperature (June, July and August) over the whole GB, 1976 still has not been beat.

[Depressedpedro]

13 hours ago, kzb said:

I think you meant 1976?  Although I dimly recall 1977 summer was pretty good as well, it just gets forgotten after 1976.

However I am not sure with your overall thesis, that droughts were an aberration.  Droughts have always happened, in a high fraction of years.  Summer 1959 was a drought for example.

What they have done is fill in a lot of smaller reservoirs and sold the land for a quick buck.  I can't find how our total reservoir capacity has changed over the decades, but I do wonder if it could have actually fallen.

There isn't any real evidence that summer droughts are increasing, the only real clearcut evidence is an increase in winter rainfall and generally more extreme rainfall totals over the course of the year (2000-2024 take up a very disproportionate amount of the top 20 wettest years)

By the way the summer your thinking of is 1975, not 77 which wasn't all that great. 75 however had a warm July and an.exceptionally hot August (identical mean temperature to August 22 interestingly) 

Of course 76 is to this day probably still the most consistently intense summer, though both 18 and 22 aren't drastically far behind. But 75 was no slouch either, just hugely overshadowed.

Edit - 76 is the warmest in the CET zone, across both England and the UK I think 2018 beats it, 22 also I think just edges it out but all three are close.

76 has by far the biggest anomaly however. should we see another summer like that in upcoming summers it will destroy all previous records.

Edited April 2 by Depressedpedro

[Nick Cash]

13 hours ago, kzb said:

I think you meant 1976?  Although I dimly recall 1977 summer was pretty good as well, it just gets forgotten after 1976.

However I am not sure with your overall thesis, that droughts were an aberration.  Droughts have always happened, in a high fraction of years.  Summer 1959 was a drought for example.

What they have done is fill in a lot of smaller reservoirs and sold the land for a quick buck.  I can't find how our total reservoir capacity has changed over the decades, but I do wonder if it could have actually fallen.

Yes, typo. Clearly 76. The late 70s were a combination of dry winters and hot summers. Hence the summer droughts.

 

Historically the UK has never really needed to store water except for the SE as sufficient rain falls across most of the larger population areas. How much of the rain that falls in the Lake District is captured? Not much I don’t think. Similarly North Wales. Clearly Wales has some huge reservoirs but most of the rainfall feeds straight back into the sea. The Dee and the Severn are the main reservoir catchment areas. The rivers leading to the Conwy estuary are barely used. Or indeed those West of the Wye (source of the Severn).

I live, in South Midlands, fairly close to a reservoir, fed from The Trent I think (via pipes). Most of the capacity is moved further on. Don’t even think our water comes from it. Not sure whether Severn Trent water is used to fill reservoirs for Thames Water. It would make sense. I assume that was the rationale behind the proposed reservoir at Didcot.

[kzb]

10 minutes ago, Depressedpedro said:

There isn't any real evidence that summer droughts are increasing, the only real clearcut evidence is an increase in winter rainfall

For this thread, these are the things we need to know.  So no strong evidence of more severe droughts, but clear evidence of increasing winter rainfall.  So why are they on about climate change as an excuse for water shortage in the UK?

14 minutes ago, Depressedpedro said:

By the way the summer your thinking of is 1975, not 77 which wasn't all that great. 75 however had a warm July and an.exceptionally hot August (identical mean temperature to August 22 interestingly) 

Of course 76 is to this day probably still the most consistently intense summer, though both 18 and 22 aren't drastically far behind. But 75 was no slouch either, just hugely overshadowed.

OK, funny how memory can get these things mixed up.  On whether 76 has been overshadowed, something that is relevant to our memories is that the heatwave happened July-August, i.e. when we were off school and college.  These more recent summers have been over with by the time the kids break up for summer.   Last year June was fantastic, but July and August were rotten.

[Depressedpedro]

33 minutes ago, kzb said:

For this thread, these are the things we need to know.  So no strong evidence of more severe droughts, but clear evidence of increasing winter rainfall.  So why are they on about climate change as an excuse for water shortage in the UK?

OK, funny how memory can get these things mixed up.  On whether 76 has been overshadowed, something that is relevant to our memories is that the heatwave happened July-August, i.e. when we were off school and college.  These more recent summers have been over with by the time the kids break up for summer.   Last year June was fantastic, but July and August were rotten.

Flooding will probably be a more constant problem going forwards, at least in winter.

My guess for summer would be a hotter summer period on average will produce faster evaporation. In a wetter year tgats not going to be a problem, but in any drier year we are going to be at higher risk of rapid drying out due to the faster evaporation amounts.

Last summer was a classic front loaded summer. 2022 if anything did peak over the summer holidays (August as said was very hot overall). Even 1976 was very much more front loaded, with the main thrust through 2nd half of June and 1st half of July. It was still decent afterwards but that was the exceptional period of that summer.

 

[debtlessmanc]

4 hours ago, kzb said:

For this thread, these are the things we need to know.  So no strong evidence of more severe droughts, but clear evidence of increasing winter rainfall.  So why are they on about climate change as an excuse for water shortage in the UK?

OK, funny how memory can get these things mixed up.  On whether 76 has been overshadowed, something that is relevant to our memories is that the heatwave happened July-August, i.e. when we were off school and college.  These more recent summers have been over with by the time the kids break up for summer.   Last year June was fantastic, but July and August were rotten.

I remember playing 5 a side at school in 1976 and the ground was burnt brown and cracked, we were sweating buckets, so must have started early July.

Edited April 2 by debtlessmanc

[zugzwang]

6 hours ago, kzb said:

Then again do we know that total water consumption has increased ?  Have not seen the figures for that.

I do recall reading some years back, that overall consumption of water had decreased in the NW region.  Although domestic consumption had increased, the loss of heavy industry more than compensated for that, leading to a small decrease.

 

It's a reasonable assumption. Heavy industry disappeared from the UK decades ago. Thatcher's monetarist experiment did for most of it.

[kzb]

12 minutes ago, zugzwang said:

 

It's a reasonable assumption. Heavy industry disappeared from the UK decades ago. Thatcher's monetarist experiment did for most of it.

So what we need to know is if consumption has increased or not.  Have 12 million immigrants increased the water consumption beyond what it was pre-Thatcher ?  We still don't know this.

[kzb]

1 hour ago, debtlessmanc said:

I remember playing 5 a side at school in 1976 and the ground was burnt brown and cracked, we were sweating buckets, so must have started early July.

Yes but the point is it continued until the last week of August (when the heavens opened).  Most of our recent summers were over with by the time the schools finished for summer.

[zugzwang]

Just now, kzb said:

So what we need to know is if consumption has increased or not.  Have 12 million immigrants increased the water consumption beyond what it was pre-Thatcher ?  We still don't know this.

It's a reasonable assumption. They all bathe and use the lavatory.

[zugzwang]

1 minute ago, kzb said:

Yes but the point is it continued until the last week of August (when the heavens opened).  Most of our recent summers were over with by the time the schools finished for summer.

 

September was glorious last year. Magnificent cycling.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/10/seven-days-of-30c-heat-in-september-is-new-uk-record-but-storms-on-the-way

[kzb]

1 hour ago, debtlessmanc said:

I remember playing 5 a side at school in 1976 and the ground was burnt brown and cracked, we were sweating buckets, so must have started early July.

 

 

 

[kzb]

9 minutes ago, zugzwang said:

It's a reasonable assumption. They all bathe and use the lavatory.

But I don't know if it is a reasonable assumption.  The loss of heavy industry (plus greater efficiency of usage) may have more than compensated.

[debtlessmanc]

6 minutes ago, kzb said:

 

 

 

Average temperature is one thing max is another,

max tells us what could happen- imagine 30 days at 38-40 degrees in the U.K.? Would kill thousands.

[kzb]

4 minutes ago, debtlessmanc said:

Average temperature is one thing max is another,

max tells us what could happen- imagine 30 days at 38-40 degrees in the U.K.? Would kill thousands.

Thousands if not millions of us queue up to experience those temperatures abroad every year.

Cold produces more excess deaths than heat in the UK.