The Crazy Weather of Ynyslas
The weather has been fairly unusual across the UK these last few weeks. No rain and wall-to-wall sunshine is quite strange at any time of year for the UK. Ynyslas has been no exception in this regard. The weather station here has had notifications such as this for days.
It hasn’t rained at all since May 14th and it has been extremely dry. The front lawn and the golf course have been brown for a while now. As I write this it’s been almost a month without rain here. Which as I’m sure you’ll agree doesn’t sound like Wales which is known for its rain!
Windy With It
On top of that are the usual winds that we get at Ynyslas. It’s known for being the windest place around. As a windsurfer that’s the reason we built a house here. It’s right by the sea and the estuary and it’s often windy. The presence of the sea and the estuary mean that I can windsurf in most wind directions and there aren’t many weeks where the wind isn’t strong enough for me to get out at least a couple of times.
The winds during this dry spell have been mad though. Every single day for the past 3 weeks it’s been blowing a hoolie. The winds have all been from the NE so they funnel down through the valley and are exacerbated by the local katabatic wind effect to create the wind known to a few locally as ‘Ivor’. It starts at first light, which is before 4:30 am at the moment and then blows incessantly throughout the day, only to ease off around 8 pm for a few hours. Even when it’s ‘eased off’ it’s quite windy, but during the day it’s crazy.
You can see how consistent it’s been over the past few days in the graphs below (taken from the historic data page of the Borth and Ynyslas Weather Station.). The weather has followed the same pattern day after day.
Looking at the weather station as I write this on Friday morning, it’s 34.5 knots, gusting to 43 knots and the maximum so far today was just shy of a massive 50 knots at 49.9 knots!
That’s windy in anyone’s books, but the fact that it’s been doing that all day every day for a few weeks is just crazy!
There are loads of things I need to do in the garden and around the outside of the house, but it’s just been too windy to do them. The garden plants don’t fare too well under such an onslaught either. Even the water feature struggles as the water just gets blown out of it!
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to make the most of it as my infected finger has prevented me from getting in the water. Probably a good thing as I think I’d be broken by now with so many windy days one after another.
Elsewhere it’s been breezy on occasion but nowhere seems to be as windy as it is here. We’ve been into Aberystwyth quite a lot and even just a mile or so inland and there’s barely any wind at all, meanwhile, it’s still blowing a hoolie here. 30+ knots in Ynyslas, 13 knots elsewhere!!
You’ve got to love localised weather phenomena.
