Where I live in Surrey, it seems to rained on and off for days now... And there have been really heavy storms (proper flash flood storms). Just wondered what it's been like in other areas...

Rain off and on since last Tuesday, latest round really messed up harvest as days are getting so short and temps too cool for much drying.  A little snow and ice on the grass this morning, and snow forecast for tonight but it shouldn't stick.  Situation for crops left in field very gloomy. 

More wet weather on its way, too, it seems...

I picked this up from the Kansas City Star.

A slow moving storm system could bring the first snow of the season to the Kansas City area this afternoon. The storm system is over central Kansas and is expected to move into central Missouri tonight, according to the National Weather Service in Pleasant Hill, Mo.  As the atmosphere cools, rains will gradually change to snow over northeast Kansas and far northwest Missouri — generally west of Atchison, Kan., to Maryville, Mo, according to the Weather Service. Platte County sheriff dispatchers said some freezing rain started falling in Platte City shortly after 8 a.m. today.

The cooler temperatures might bring snow to the Kansas City area. The highest accumulations of snowfall are expected in the Atchison-St. Joseph area, where 2 to 5 inches of snow might be possible by this evening. Snow accumulations are expected to taper off rapidly for points south and east of those areas, with little to no snow fall accumulation expected east of the Interstate 35 corridor, according to the Weather Service.

Does this mean snow for KF ?

It has snowed continuously for 15 hours, at time heavy, thankfully our ground is too warm for it to stick, I am told Eureka KS, which is south of me about 30 miles has had about 6 inches stick, their ground would be just as warm as ours, so they must have had really heavy snow.  Check out www.kwch.com and www.kvoe.com those two sites will tell the most about my weather.  I am far south of Atchison by the way, probably 150 miles.

kf, how much is still to harvest? is that why the wheat price is rising?

I guess nationwide about half the corn is left in the field, according to USDA, bean harvest is nearly done, in Kansas 80%, in my location the half done with corn is probably right, I would say about 65-70% done on the beans.  I believe winter wheat is about sown, but I don't know if that means all that was going to be sown, or all that will be, because in our area hardly any has been planted, on my farm none, and I am pretty sure we won't plant any.  So we are done with winter wheat, even though we didn't plant any...I don't know how that figures into USDA numbers.  I don't know why the grain market does what it does, I think some has to do with oil, some with the price of the $$, and undoubtedly this late harvest is affecting it, although many elevators are full even with alot of the crop in the field still, leading me to believe if we ever do finish corn at least might get cheaper.  No doubt about it, this will be the latest harvest ever for me.  This was a soaking event, and our fields were already muddy, if the sun comes out 10 minutes from now we won't turn a wheel for a week, and it isn't supposed to come out in 10 minutes.

For the first time in 3 years we can say we are finally dry...an abnormally warm and windy november has the dust flying now but too late as everything was combined wet ....A chance to go into freeze up dry will be a nice change come spring.We've got used to some low diesel bills in recent wet years...not the case this year i fear.

As of this week combining is finnished but much of the wheat was left till last in favour of beans just to get the most valuable crop first just in case we never finnished...Corn started today in some areas but not much...Winter wheat seems to be losing popularity and i only know of a handfull of fields in the area this year and i won't be growing any more spring wheat for a while.Last check today prices were certainly not going up...Glad of those $10 contracts for beans now..

 

bluepaint:

abnormally warm and windy november has the dust flying

 

Over here its "A peck of dust in March is worth a Kings ransome"  does that apply to you in November

 we havent had a great deal of rain here, it is just incredibly windy, i seem to have a constant head wind cycling the 9 miles to college everyday :( our area, (just south of cambridge) is normally quite dry anyway though.

More bad weather's on its way, it seems...forecasters are now talking about gale force winds and heavy rain over the next few days. The Met Office has put out warnings for downpours and strong winds in areas such as Wales, the North West of England and Northern Ireland.

BBC lady has just said up to 250mm - yes 10 inches - of rain in West Scotland over the next 48 hours. Now I know they have hills and the like, but thats a big dollop. Not nice.

fwiw, we had an average Novembers rainfall.....by the 7th. Damned weather.

It was always said by the "old folk" that the weather that they have in America, we will have six weeks later, that seems to be the case in our wet weather now, Kansas was having it six weeks ago They are talking over there that they are having there first snow, so lookout New year.

 

not to bad down yer,Last week Kinsbrompton were going to hold a blind drop last friday but the weather was to bad so it was called off.

 Not too wet (yet) but the wind has been relentless (not personal, you understand!)

It's been blowing with more vigour today, and is really picking up now! 

Things look very bad in Cumbria. It takes a massive effort to clean up and repair the mess from an event like that. Last floods here are still closing roads due to bridge washout damage.

There are some pictures of Cockermouth on the BBC's website... it looks terrible.

 Its been more windy than wet here the last couple of days though it did pour down last week and the fields are getting soggy.

Though haven't seen any more trees down other than the one that tried to squash some of our ewes and the one that we had to clear from the road and off the phone line. Though it did make me feel nevous when the other trees there were swayign like crazy.

        Our annual rainfall is 28 inches so even when it is outrageous elsewhere, we are usually very lucky. This year was reasonably dry and good up to 16th October. It has been very wet since then with some days of up to 2.5 inches (very extreme for here). I believe we had 3" rain one Sunday. Most flooding has been due to the time of year in that the fallen leaves etc. have choked up many drains.

         We have water oozing to the surface in many fields where I have not seen this before. Some of this I put down to the use of ten tonne loads being carted off the tattie harvesters and all the associated equipment now. I still have about 30 acres of wheat to sow, so 'am keeping my fingers crossed for drouthy weather.

Still wet here.  2010 will be the first year in my lifetime there will be no wheat grown on this farm.  There were 3 years in the '90s I didn't plant any wheat but my grandfather and father did.  We had the drill hooked up and had been moving it in and out of the shed everytime it rained to get the combine in, the day before yesterday I asked dad if he figured we might as well unhook it, he said yes as it was too late too plant wheat as far as he was concerned, and said it was the first time in his lifetime(70 years) there would be no wheat on any of the land our family has.  In our immediate area there is practically no wheat sown.  In fact, I can't think of a single field that I know of, but I am certain there are a few.  This will make spring planting all the more hectic. 

....Well kansas this year is certainly a freak but this dry/windy is continuing for us and the corn is almost done in the last few days...Most is written of with mold but yeilds are good so guys are combining anyway hoping there won't be much choice and it will sell somewhere...moisture was down to 17% today..?

.

 

Its absolutely sodden in Cumbria without these one in a thousand downpours but a lot of it could have probably been avoided if the enviroment agency hadn't cut back on cleaning ditches and rivers that enter into the sea some four years ago. Their excuse for this being that all the money was being spent on protecting urban areas ie Manchester being the first quoted not to mention Carlisle. All this was no good to the likes of Cockermuth and Keswick who were only tiddlers compared to the massses of urban voters . Lets hope the next Government might see sense.

Hope things dry out for everybody. We finaly got lucky and gots so dry weather here for a little while. Kansas don't feel bad about the wheat what we got in went under water and is flooded out. So we should have just saved the fuel. Its sad that I am happy that we have floods that are just a little better than last year when we could get anywhere do to almost all roads being shut down. Thing to remember is normaly you don't get the shaft for to long so it should get better.

It is interesting to see how the Cockermouth and Workington floods have got the Eco-warriors back on-message.  We haven't really had a peep out of them for the past few months.  I guess they were all primed up to flood us with dire warnings that the 'barbecue summer', so eagerly predicted by our excellent Meteorological Office, which was expected to result in our hospitals being swamped with the old folks dying in thousands of heat stroke, that is if they hadn't already succumbed to 'swine flu', while the rest of us basked in tropical conditions, was entirely the result of global warming. 

How galling it must have been to find, once again, that traditional British weather was destined to interfere with summer activities.  There weren't even any flash flood events of note that they could hang their banners upon, just wall to wall damp and dreary rain so the standard predictions of "hotter drier summers and wetter milder winters" had to languish in the background. 

But now, with such divine timing in the run up to the next convention of the world's latest religious cult in Copenhagen, there's a sign from above and all's wrong with the world again.  In the past week the old summer/winter weather predictions have surfaced again and the floods of recent years have been trotted out in support of these particular crystal ball gazings.  The floods have been compared to Carlisle in 2005 - which of course was in January, but also to the floods of 2007 in Northern Ireland, Yorkshire, the Severn and Thames valleys and South Wales, but conveniently omitting to mention that these occurred in June and July, thus hardly supporting the dry summers scenario.

In fact if you look back over notable floods since the war, from Lynmouth in 1952 with the exceptions of Carlisle and Cockermouth, they almost all happened in the summer or autumn.  And there would be a very good case to argue that the present floods in Cumbria only reached disaster proportions because of the exceptionally wet summer leaving the ground utterly sodden. 

It's a good thing that the Climate Change religion is firmly founded on faith rather than fact, otherwise you'd think its priests and priestesses would be having serious doubts, but strangely the only doubts they seem to have are on why only 45% of the population believe in their teachings.  They seem to put this down to lack of credibility of the politicians who have taken up the faith.  Perhaps they should rather look at how believable the scientific establishment is.

The general public have become so used to receiving dire warnings of impending doom that never come to pass, they are no longer prepared to believe the scientific establishment on face value.  That this is especially so with climate change is hardly surprising when just 30 years ago we were all being told we were about to be plunged into a mini ice age.  Add to that the predictions of the millions or billions that would be dead from nvCJD; the next pandemic (bird flu, swine flu, whatever); AIDS and many more I'm sure I've forgotten,  

In recent months it seems to me that the predictions of doom relating to climate change are getting wilder and more strident.  I suppose this is in reaction to the global cooling that has occurred in public opinion but if the Eco-warrior cultists have any regard to that public opinion they should temper their enthusiasm with a modicum of reality.  Keeping on with predictions which are patently not coming to pass will not do.  Perhaps delegates to Copenhagen (tens of thousands of them trailing countless carbon across the skies) should be issued with a copy of Aesop's Fables with a bookmark inserted in The Shepherd Boy and The Wolf. 

The National Trust has sent me some pictures of flooding in and around their properties in the north west. They're pretty depressing, but if you want to see them, they're on my blog.

All FW's flood coverage, incidentally, has been brought together here.