April – the wettest for years ?

We are only three weeks in the month of April but already people are talking about the it being the wettest April in memory. Now memory is a strange thing – sometimes it can be almost a creative exercise with some events taking a larger position in the collective memory than they actually should occupy. So how about some hard solid facts ? Is it the wettest April in years?

Very difficult to say as weather data for this area is almost impossible to get hold of but what we can say is yes, April 2008 is the wettest since the bargaweather station has been collecting data.

The weather station situated here in Barga Vecchia has been sending data up on the internet every two minutes since it first went on line at the start of 2006. All that data can be seen by clicking on “wunderground.com link on the front page of the site.

The weather station is a Davis Vantage Pro2 station which has been working without a hitch for over three years … apart from one small tiny glitch … which sometimes causes raised eyebrows and one or two emails sent backwards and forwards as people check that all is OK in the city – if it rains on a windy day … the wind speed monitor goes into tilt and registers an eyewatering 156.1 km/hr wind battering Barga Vecchia.

Back to some figures: so far in just the first three weeks of April nearly 12 centimetres of rain has fallen on Barga. Last year it was a very dry April with only 4 millimetres. In 2006 there was over 4.5 centimetres- the bulk of which only fell in the last week of the month.

The bargaweather.com site is here

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