Wet, wetter and wettest....

It's been a wet and windy few month, and the Christmas period saw some more heavy rainfall and flooding problems. I was grateful to have finished the year's travelling, and spent Christmas at home, going nowhere much for two weeks.

During that time, came the announcement that 2012, after a period of prolonged drought was the wettest since records began in England, and also in my region: the East of England.

The summer was also the wettest for over a century.
It seems the flooding also cost the UK around 13 billion pounds...

There were some good images online and via Twitter of various defences.

The landscape around my village is currently  more water than land in many places. There's a road leading to the nearby village of Beeston called Watery Lane which certainly lived up to its name when I last drove along it.
The result of the prolonged rainfall on saturated ground has been many flood warnings and hundreds of flooded properties, which stayed in place for weeks at a time.

Plenty of news coverage of the flooding

This is all useful for updating the High and Dry presentation which I will be talking about at various places in 2013.
There were plenty of flooding stories out there. Do you have one to share ? Do your students have one to share ?

Just before Christmas, there was yet more rainfall in the SW, with further flooding in Devon and Cornwall. People were evacuated from their homes, and some hand to spend Christmas away from their home, or had presents damaged.
What will 2013 bring in terms of weather extremes ?

One possible sign of the additional extremeness of the weather is that a bridge which  has stood for 1000 years was damaged this year.
There are also problems along the Jurassic coastline with saturated cliffs leading to warnings of landslides and safety fears for fossil hunters in the area.

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