A British garden's rainfall data 1988-2022 using copper rain gauge, notepad, pen

https://www.weatherbook.org/dash/3/averages

by DoreenMichele • 4 years ago

146 65 4 years ago

rvba• 4 years ago

Why there isnt some "not sexy" statup that provides technology to build artificial lakes / water reservoirs? Just patch them in random places to collect water, plant some trees and it should help. Make it in a way that it just requires a small plot of land, so a group of people can acquire the plot, or even better - force the muncipiality to provide one.

I am nit sure if such small reservoirs can help much, but it is always something.

Last statup I heard was some company that put rubber balls on big water reservoirs in California (?) to try to limit evaporation. I wonder if this helped and if the decaying plastic didnt polute the water.

kevinbowman• 4 years ago

“Shade balls”, there are 96M of them in (on?) a big Los Angeles reservoir : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shade_balls

They are made from HDPE, with an additive to prevent UV-accelerated breakdown into bromates (which is what they are there to stop forming in the water, as well as to stop evaporation).

vesinisa• 4 years ago

Help with what? This data is from the UK. They traditionally have to deal mostly with too much rain as far as I know.

seanhandley• 4 years ago

Yes… But think about, say, farming. Too much rain (or not enough) at the wrong time of year can devastate crops. Seeing variations on rainfall month by month show how seasonal patterns in the UK are changing.

Droughts and floods are the real issue here.

smcl• 4 years ago

You'd think so, but parts of England institute a "hosepipe ban" in dryer summers to reduce water usage - effectively saying "you can't water your garden or clean your car for 1 month" or something. I imagine they're just being overly cautious though because, as you said, it does rain pretty frequently in the UK overall.

tobylane• 4 years ago

Too much for an area is often more to do with excess tarmac or compacted soil.

https://metofficenews.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/uk-rainfal... White is 40-45 inches. That or greater is rare, the only dark blue in England is a national park famous for its lakes and rain. The third element of too much rain is that we like to complain about trivialities.

throwawaylinux• 4 years ago

Why there isnt some "not sexy" statup that provides technology to build artificial lakes / water reservoirs?

The technology already exists. Bulldozer, excavator, concrete, explosives. Not not-sexy enough for you?

Just patch them in random places to collect water,

Not sure what "patch" means here, but water is becoming increasingly regulated, and in a lot of places you can't just randomly build lakes and dam water even on property you own.

plant some trees and it should help. Make it in a way that it just requires a small plot of land, so a group of people can acquire the plot, or even better - force the muncipiality to provide one.

Should help with what? I feel I'm missing the context you're replying to.

bell-cot• 4 years ago

THIS. And it's regulated (though often under-regulated) for damn good reasons. Properly designing even a "little" dam is far more difficult that most people appreciate. And both construction and upkeep (which is necessary, forever) are really expensive. Maybe start reading here: https://practical.engineering/blog/2021/10/14/what-really-ha...

trhway• 4 years ago

You can't do this today. Laws. The private ponds that you see are grandfathered.

gorgoiler2• 4 years ago

I have a standard rain gauge. It always bothers me that I don't have two. Then I'd be able to measure my cumulative error properly.

Meteorologists, as I learned the other day, were some of the early pioneers of a universal metric system.

kzrdude• 4 years ago

Is there a data download? Not saying there has to be, but if there is I'm sure it's fun.

Anyone browsing (if there are multiple datasets eventually) probably wants to have some metadata about approximate location and climate of the location.

2b3a51• 4 years ago

The first thing I looked for on the link was a download. Apparently not provided. I may (politely) email the author and ask if one is planned in the future.

dna_polymerase• 4 years ago

Are they back to pen after going the classic Excel -> Evernote -> Notion -> Roam route or has it been pen & paper all the time? /s

mseepgood• 4 years ago

What's the point in doing this? Don't environmental authorities and weather services record this already?

swayvil5• 4 years ago

Maybe it's an epistemological issue. Firshand perception is realer than secondhand abstraction.

Or maybe he just doesn't trust the government.

b112• 4 years ago

Rainfall is very, very site specific. So is temperature.

If I drive 1km down the road, the temp goes up 3C in the summer, when it is 35C in the city, and 32C here.

Why? I am close to a river, there are hills around me. Terrain makes a difference.

Sometimes, I can see it rain an few km away, but not here. And the reverse is true, too.

And beyond that, rain is not consistent. It's not as of someone turned on a faucet, and rain is coming from a perfect shower head, all perfectly distributed.

It varies, fluctuates, terrain, makes a difference, for terrain effects wind patterns, causes air to rise or fall, etc etc.

wiz21c• 4 years ago

They do but sometimes the data are behind walls...

dylan604• 4 years ago

What's the point of reading HN, isn't there reddit already?

ianai4• 4 years ago

This started in 1988, too. Data was way more obscure in those days. Probably not really available like now until the 2010s.

ianai4• 4 years ago

Gardening. You can look up stuff for an area, but you might have plants locally with specific needs. Or people with rain catchments.

Our local monsoon season was weeks of great thunderstorms twenty years ago and is now a period of humidity. Stuff like this makes it “real.” Aka resistant to gaslighting.

swayvil5• 4 years ago

I think these people are missing the broader implication.

huhtenberg• 4 years ago

The "backstory" was on the Reddit post - the data came from OP's father who was recording daily rainfall just because, probably as an odd-ball hobby or a routine. The OP merely packaged it up in a form of a website.

https://www.reddit.com/user/saulhudson80

ellisv• 4 years ago

Weather is hyper local. In the US precipitation data are generally available at 1km grid resolution through combination of radar, satellite, and ground truth gauges — these are good areal estimates but pretty much always very bad point estimates. There can be problems in data availability, and quality due to all sorts of things like bird migrations, clouds, and gauge malfunctions. Collecting your own data is cheap and easy.

colechristensen• 4 years ago

As farmers, my family has always been interested in the weather for good reason. We have a few rain gauges about a mile apart and the difference between them is significant. You might get a tenth of an inch in one place and a half an inch a mile away.

The synthetic precipitation data might be useful on a large, average scale, but it usually doesn't actually provide a particularly accurate measure of what actually happened on your land.

gorgoiler2• 4 years ago

I do it mainly because it is a tradition of the scientific gentry to take measurements and build almanacs. Think Reed’s (nautical) or Wisden (cricket) but on a much more local scale. It’s probably why the article references the fact that their gauge is made of copper — taking pride in a sense of tradition and solidity by using a brassy looking scientific instrument made of metal. My own gauge is plastic but I mounted it on a solid oak stave. We try to follow in the footsteps of Kelvin, hiking to his waterfall with a hardwood case of glass thermometers etc.

I would probably be into steampunk as an aesthetic if it were more hard scifi and less makebelieve. Compared to steampunk bric-à-brac, a copper rain gauge is steam punk science that is actually scientific, as opposed to an iPhone case with brass cogs glued to it.

It serves a practical purpose too — when you have a privet hedge and a lawn to care for and your climate provides rainfall on an intermittent basis, it’s important to know when the soil needs some artificial millimetres on it to keep the foliage going.

dubcanada• 4 years ago

What is the point in doing anything? Why cook, isn't there already cooks that do that? Why program? Isn't there already programmers who program? Why do woodworking? Walmart sells chairs and other wood products? Why do pottery? I can go to Etsy and buy it? Why own a fish tank? There is an ocean with plenty of fish in it? Why garden? There are huge farms that do that?

What a silly question.

easytiger2• 4 years ago

I used to help record weather measurements from a "weather station" in the UK growing up. It's a cultural thing. Lots of cultures don't have the same long term cooperative investments. Their lack of toil evident by their negative impact on society

Nitramp• 4 years ago

There was some debate three years ago on whether insect populations were declining, with the prime suspect being modern pesticides.

The most solid data source they found in Germany was a local club of enthusiast entomologists who had been collecting bugs using the same traps, locations, and methodology over the past 80+ years.

The answer btw was yes, there was a marked reduction over that time frame.

hestefisk• 4 years ago

A.k.a. IoH - Internet of Humans

dorfsmay• 4 years ago

The person who created the site, whose father is the one who collected the data, posted and answers question on Reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/v92fu6/my_...

Yuioup• 4 years ago

Started gardening 5 years ago. Before that I never realized how messed up the climate was. Long period of drought mixed with intetmittent torrents. Last year was also a disaster year due to unusual temperature fluctuations.

lettergram• 4 years ago

“Naturally occurring fluctuations” != “messed up climate”

There’s a reason prior to irrigation (and Hunter gathering) only a few regions in the world supported long-term human habitation.

LoveGracePeace2• 4 years ago

The Earth, who knew. Family moves from temperate climate to the desert, wonders why it's always so hot, must be climate change. The seas are rising, man checks web cams for sea side resorts around the world and photos from the past several decades, no change in sea levels, doesn't fit the narrative, must be wrong.

kqr• 4 years ago

That's also the reason back in the 19th century you'd find hydrologists on every important project, no matter what it was about. Hydrologists just had to be really good (and among the first) statisticians.

easytiger2• 4 years ago

And so it has been for 5000 years of recorded history

coffeeblack• 4 years ago

That’s called weather, not climate.

thehappypm• 4 years ago

This sounds like a kind of confirmation bias—before you started paying attention to the climate, you didn’t notice its detail.

w0mbat• 4 years ago

If you like this, I have a great episode of Ripping Yarns for you, starring Michael Palin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYpsz2eAKOs

A British garden's rainfall data 1988-2022 using copper rain gauge, notepad, pen

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