Rain

Trying to draw rain on a dry day! This was for todays #bandofsketchers prompt ‘rain’, I drew Westport Lake and then added strokes of pen to indicate rain and dark clouds above. It was a black and white drawing but I decided to add watercolours to it when I got home. Beyond the front line of trees is the A500 and the main railway line. Above that the hill leading to Newcastle under Lyme.

It’s humid!

Image from blitzortung.org

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to use this image of last night’s big thunderstorms. Blitzortung.org shows the movement of thunderstorms across the world with almost live graphics of lightning strikes. I looked a while ago and there is another group of storms coming up from the southwest tonight. I guess we really need the rain, I’m not complaining. I just feel hot and my glasses keep steaming up!

It’s interesting to watch other parts of the world but I wish I could also see rainfall radar at the same time as the thunderstorms may just be showers with rain covering only small areas, like microbursts.

Cat like a weather vane

If the cat comes in wet, it’s raining, dry and hot, it’s sunny. If he’s white coloured and cold fur it’s snowing, frosty or hailing. If you can’t see him it’s foggy. If he’s got muddy paws, then there’s a flood. Cats can be weather vanes. If his tail is fluffed up there’s lightning. If his tail is stuck out backwards it’s a force nine gale.

Thankfully he’s never been caught in a hurricane or a tornado. I would not wish that on him. Goodness knows what he would look like then! ❤️

Lightning

I’ve been keeping an eye out for thunderstorms and lightning after they were forecast for us for the weekend, but apart from some heavy-ish rain tonight, which caused one of the cats to come in looking like a bedraggled wet otter, there hasn’t been much in the way of storms or anything else.

I do check the weather forecast online and noticed as each day came and went the rain symbols dwindled. But I also look at a website called blitzortung.org which shows real time thunderstorms and tracks them with detectors so you can virtually see lightning strikes within seconds of them happening. The strikes are also colour coded so you can see strikes from two hours ago in red, changing to orange and yellow for more recent ones and finally white for the last twenty minutes. So you can actually track where they have been and what direction they are heading in. I think it’s interesting.

I just looked at the UK which was blank. Then Europe where there seems to be a big storm over the toe of Italy. Then I looked at the overview map of the whole world and saw many storms scattered across North America. I hope they are providing much needed rain and are not as severe as the ones that caused major flooding recently.

Drought?

It might rain today, but most of England is parched. The south east, south midlands, and eastern counties look dry and brown from satellite images. We are in the same heatwave that has affected the rest of western Europe. Forecasts say the weather is due to break soon. But with thundery showers due there is not the persistent rain for many days that would replenish the ground water and because the soil is so hard and dry it is compacted and heavy rain could cause flash flooding…. Oh well, Brits always discuss the weather!