St Swithin's Day today.

Yes, we have just had some rain here in Essex. Not much and for only around 5 minutes. It doesn't look too well for the next 40 days.

This weather forecast is possibly a lot more accurate than the one on my smart phone app which is so inaccurate that it's better just to look out of the nearest window.

I don't bother with a weather forecast as such, but find rain radar quite useful. I use

We used to have a piece of seaweed hanging up out side and if it became limp, it was going to rain.

Its usually the sign of the male men-o--paws

-- The biggest threat to humanity comes from socialism, which has utterly diverted our attention away from what really matters to our existential survival, to indulging in navel gazing and faux moral investigations into what the world ought to be, whilst we fail utterly to deal with what it actually is.

I had a small rock on a piece of string, if it got wet it was raining.

Is that better than the Met Office's rainfall radar?

I think so, though they probably both use the same data. I used to use the Met one, but they went through a dodgy patch when they switched to the current system, only working some of the time. I found Netweather, and found it better, and just stayed with it. It zooms in a bit closer than the Met does.

The Met office one moves seamlessly from observations to predictions as you move the time ahead, and the sudden enormous jump in rain pattern when this happens does not offer any confidence in the predictions. It also needs cookie acceptance and then selection of rainfall, despite being invoked as 'rainfall'.

Yes, I've noticed that too, five minute earlier actual observations absolutely nothing like the forecast. I suspect that the forecast is done once (or maybe a couple of times) per day and isn't updated very frequently.

I often look at the last 'observation' to get a more accurate prediction (by me) of whether it's going to rain soon.

That's what I use. Handy for taking the dog out between showers. However I get the blame if we get caught & it invariably disagrees with the wife's phone app.

St. Swithin's day is my birthday, I've never noticed any truth to the 40 days ... unsurprisingly.

On 16 Jul 2024, Andy Burns wrote

Same here, and I've also never noticed any truth to it.

Looking some years ago at the "today's birthdays" list on my/our birthday, I made a note that the date is shared with Linda Ronstadt (a favourite singer), who's 6 years older than me, and Celia Imrie, who was born on exactly the same day and year as I was, which stupidly pleases me....

Cheers, Harvey

Rest easy, round our region in West Yorkshire not a drop fell till after midnight

The Sky+ box lost signal during the heavier part of last night's rainfall here.

Not fine-grained enough for our use. Often it can be raining heavily on the opposite slope of the valley (less than a mile away) and dry here.