Unusual weather 2012.

Soil moisture deficit (SMD) is the amount of water needed to bring the soil moisture content back to the maximum amount of water the soil can hold. For example, if you had a potted plant and you watered it too much and water leaked out the bottom of the pot, this would be a negative SMD. If you poured in too little water, you would have a positive SMD (the potted plant needs more water). Just enough and the SMD = 0

From: www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19995084 UK experiences 'weirdest' weather by Roger Harrabin, Environment analyst - 18 Oct 2012 The UK has experienced its "weirdest" weather on record in the past few months, scientists say. The driest spring for over a century gave way to the wettest recorded April to June in a dramatic turnaround never documented before. The scientists said there was no evidence that the weather changes were a result of Man-made climate change. But experts from three bodies warned the UK must plan for periodic swings of drought conditions and flooding. The warning came from the Environment Agency, Met Office and Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH) at a joint briefing in London. Terry Marsh, from the CEH, said there was no close modern precedent for the extraordinary switch in river flows. The nearest comparison was 1903 but this year was, he said, truly remarkable. What was also remarkable - and also fortunate - was that more people did not suffer from flooding. Indeed, one major message of the briefing was that society has been steadily increasing its resilience to floods. Paul Mustow, head of flood management at the Environment Agency, told BBC News that 4,500 properties had been flooded this year. "But if you look back to 2007 when over 55,000 properties were flooded, we were relatively lucky - if lucky is the right word - for the impacts we saw this summer," he said. "The rainfall patterns affected different areas - and also there were periods of respite between the rain which lessened the impact." Fast moving He said 53,000 properties would have been flooded this year without flood defences. In total, he said, 190,000 properties had received flood protection in recent years. Mr Mustow claimed that flood defences repaid their investment by a factor of 8-1 but admitted that continuing to invest would be a "challenge", after government cuts to planned projects. But he said that new streams of joint funding from local authorities and private developers had allowed 60 schemes to happen that otherwise would not have gone ahead. He said: "We have to get our heads round the possibility now that we're going to have to move very quickly from drought to flood - with river levels very high and very low over a short period of time. "We used to say we had a traditional flood season in winter - now often it's in summer. This is an integrated problem - there's no one thing that's going to solve it. The situation is changing all the time." But scientists present from the Met Office and CEH said not much could be read into the weird weather. Terry Marsh from CEH said: "Rainfall charts show no compelling long-term trend - the annual precipitation table shows lots of variability." Sarah Jackson from the Met Office confirmed that it did not discern any pattern that suggested Man-made climate change was at play in UK rainfall - although if temperatures rise as projected in future, that would lead to warmer air being able to carry more moisture to fall as rain. She said that this year's conditions were partly caused by a move to a negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation which would be likely to lead to more frequent cold, drier winters - like the 1960s - and also wetter summers for 10-20 years. "Longer term we will see a trend to drier summers but superimposed on that we will always see natural variability," she said. Whatever happens with the weather, the Environment Agency expects that more and more people will be protected from floods and droughts thanks to water sharing between farmers, water transfer between water companies, and better management of leaks and demand. But Mr Mustow admitted that much more needed to be done to ensure that farmers did not increase flood risk with land drainage schemes and that developers and builders ensured that new developments allowed water to drain into the soil rather than flushing into the sewers.

From: www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21651067 UK must adapt for weather extremes, says Environment Agency by Roger Harrabin, Environment analyst - 4 Mar 2013 Britain must become more resilient to both drought and flooding, Environment Agency chairman Chris Smith has said. New figures from the agency show that one in every five days saw flooding in 2012, but one in four days saw drought. Rivers such as the Tyne, Ouse and Tone fell to their lowest and rose to their highest flows since records began, within a four-month period of the year. Lord Smith said urgent action was vital to help "prepare and adapt" many aspects of Britain for such extremes. Meteorologists fear that extremes of weather may increase as global temperatures slowly rise. Met Office analysis has suggested that the UK could experience a severe short-term drought, similar to the drought experienced in 1976, once a decade. Transferring water With the population of the water-stressed south-east of England projected to grow by almost a quarter by 2035, Lord Smith argued that the number of smaller reservoirs needed to be increased immediately and that new ways of transferring water from areas where it is plentiful to areas where it is scarce must be established. Lord Smith, whose agency covers England and Wales, insisted the reservoirs would be needed not just by farmers, but also by commercial turf growers, golf clubs, sport stadiums and race courses. There are currently about 1,700 small-scale storage reservoirs across England and Wales, supplying 30% of total irrigation needs. He also said more homes would need to be protected from flooding. Lord Smith said: "The extremes of weather that we saw last year highlight the urgent need to plan for a changing climate. "In 2012 we saw environmental damage caused by rivers with significantly reduced flows, hosepipe bans affecting millions and farmers and businesses left unable to take water from rivers. "But we also saw the wettest year on record in England, with around 8,000 homes flooded. Interestingly 2007, which saw some of the most severe flooding in recent memory, also started the year with hosepipe bans. "More of this extreme weather will exacerbate many of the problems that we already deal with including flooding and water scarcity, so taking action today to prepare and adapt homes, businesses, agricultural practices and infrastructure is vital." Boggy land He pointed out that modelling suggests that a changing climate could reduce some river flows by up to 80% during the summer in the next 40 years. Part of the UK’s flooding problem is due to previous policies. For decades, farmers were paid to drain boggy land in order to improve it for grazing. This caused water to rush off the fields into rivers, whereas previously it would have been held in the bogs to smooth out the flow into rivers throughout the year. In addition, many flood plains have been built on.

From: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22050874 06 Apr 2013 Britain 'running out of wheat' owing to bad weather Britain will become a net importer of wheat for the first time in a decade this year because of bad weather, the National Farmers' Union has said. NFU president Peter Kendall said more than two million tonnes of wheat had been lost because of last year's poor summer. The prolonged cold weather would also hit this autumn's harvest, he said. But he said the shortage was unlikely to affect the price of bread because of the global nature of the market. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Kendall said the average yield fell from 7.8 tonnes a hectare to 6.7 tonnes last summer. Looking ahead to the 2013 harvest, he said farmers had only managed to get three quarters of the planned wheat planted this year, so the UK was already 25% down on potential production. "I've been walking crops yesterday on the farm in Bedfordshire and they look pretty thin. We would normally say you should hide a hare in a crop of wheat in March. You'd struggle to cover a mouse in some of mine. "If we got three quarters of the area planted, and the same yield as last year, we could be looking at a crop of only 11m tonnes of wheat when we actually need 14.5m tonnes of wheat for our own domestic use here in the UK," he said. 'Written off 2013' Andrew Watts, a wheat farmer and the NFU combinable crops board chairman, said farmers had been hoping for a kind autumn after a poor harvest in 2012, but this had not happened. "It seems many farmers have written 2013 off and are trying to do what they can with the crops in the ground. Everyone is focussing on 2014 and making sure the land is in a good condition to get good crops then. "This is what producing food is all about - the weather." He added: "We have got to put it in context, this is only the first time since the late 1970s that we have been net importers, Over the past five or six years we have been in surplus." The crop damage is dealing a further blow to Britain's farming industry, which is already reeling from a spate of recent livestock deaths due to the cold weather. But Mr Kendall said only about 10% of the cost of a loaf of was attributable to wheat. The rest was due to processing, transport, and packaging, he said. "We could see wheat double and the impact on a loaf of bread would not be enormous. "But we need to make sure, in the UK, we are producing raw materials for what has been - despite the weather - a fantastically successful sector," he said.

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