And the Weather Forecast for 2012...Wet!

The British have an obsession for discussing the weather it's true. This year, 2012, has given us more than enough ammunition with which to continue a discourse on the vagaries of our temperate climate. The way people go on about it, though, you'd think the country has never suffered a downpour or any other form of precipitation before. This year has been unusual admittedly, but the clue is in the term temperate. A dictionary definition for temperate is:

• moderate in respect to temperature; not subject to prolonged extremes of hot or cold weather

This doesn't preclude the UK from bouts of wet weather and 2012 has seen us have more than our fair share of downpours since late spring/early summer. The end result of all this water falling is the inevitable flooding as the water courses fill up, the ground gets sodden and there is just nowhere for the excess water to go. The thing about this is that we're supposed to be surprised whenever it happens. We don't have the monsoons and the tragic flooding that occurs in countries in tropical climes, such as Bangladesh, but the UK is a damp place in which to live. 

Syr Dar'ya River Floodplain, Kazakhstan (NASA, International Space Station Science, 09/30/10) (Photo credit: NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center)

But, if people were to cast their minds back to their first geography lessons, they will remember, as I do, "The Life Cycle of Rivers" (and I don't mean my kith and kin!). Downstream from their sources, rivers tend to swell and in the middle course have floodplains which get swamped occasionally during wet spells in spring and winter. This is good for the land as silt and nutrients are spread across the nearby land making it productive in respect to growing crops, etc. Unfortunately, these areas are generally where human populations have settled and grown over the centuries. And, as the towns and cities have increased in size, the rivers are engineered such that the floodplains are protected from flooding by banks and walls and the problem is pushed upstream and further downstream. Concreting over the land reduces the area over which the land can absorb excess water and the surrounding areas get sodden. Lo and behold, we have floods. 

With December, January and February around the corner, the next thing we're going to suffer from is a couple of days of snow; the weather has to be bad for Swindon to get any of the white stuff, though. The country will grind to a halt, flights will be cancelled and our Scandinavian cousins will look across the North Sea, cast their eyes to the snow and ice covering everything, which is the norm in that part of the world, get on with life and mutter that the British are a strange breed!

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