The unsettled weather was very much the pattern for the weather on Saturday they gave us a cloudy and damp morning, with brief, light rain at 11.50, before it brightened up late morning with a slow increase in temperature resulting in a maximum of 24.9C at 15.07 being 2.2C above average. The forecast rain arrived in the early hours with the automatic rain gauge triggered at 03.15 with modest, intermittent rain until 05.30 that amounted to 4.2mm. The additional precipitation took the monthly total to 16.4mm against the 41-year average of 59.8mm. The thick cloud cover overnight meant another mild night with a minimum of 15.9C logged at 04.03 being exactly 4C above average.
The arrival of Sunday revealed the low cloud cover with slight, brief drizzle observed starting again just before 08.00. The rest of the day will bring limited sunshine with occasional showers.
The overnight rain radar showed a 10 mile wide band of heavy rain moving northwards between Marlborough and Hungerford with a narrower band to the west with a short period of heavy rain over Devizes. The rain in the early hours was useful in partly refilling two of my water buts but carefully removing the top layer of the soil revealed that the rain had only reached a depth of less than 2cm of top soil, which will quickly evaporate in any sunshine later today. At least I have a limited supply of rain water to use in my watering cans when the hosepipe band starts on Tuesday!
The reason for the unsettled weather can be laid at the door of two small depressions close to the UK, today one is over Brittany and the other just off the coast of west Wales that are producing the thick, low cloud and bands of rain. The barometric pressure reading at 08.00 was 998.8mm, the lowest pressure since 15th April.
The picture is of a Cydalima perspectalis or the box tree moth, first described by Francis Walker, the English entomologist, in 1859. Native to Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea and India it invaded Europe being first recorded in Germany in 2006 , then Switzerland and Netherlands in 2007 and Great Britain in 2008.