Long spell of dry weather set to continue

The coronavirus has meant four weeks of changed lives, altered routines and adjustment to a new normal.

It has also been accompanied by an uninterrupted run of dry weather and this looks set to continue well into next week.

It is now a full month since Northern Ireland last recorded a single day with more than one centimetre of rain.

There has been almost no rain since St Patrick's Day.

Would be revellers at the cancelled St Patrick’s Day parades on17 March would have been dodging showers as many places across Northern Ireland recorded 10-15mm of rain that day.

Since then, almost nothing.

We had some significant downpours at the start of April but they were short lived, extremely localised and accounted for most of the 7mm of rain that we’ve seen so far in April.

That is just 17% of the rainfall total that we would expect for the first two weeks in April.

A high pressure system is sitting over Scandinavia and building towards Ireland this weekend which means the third week in April looks set to be similarly parched.

For farmers and gardeners it marks a huge change from earlier in the year.

February 2020 was the wettest February since 1862.

Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis helped to give us 267% the average rainfall total.

One weather station at Trassey Slievenaman in County Down saw 50.2mm of rain fall from 12 February to 13 February.

The drier than average March this year is in sharp contrast to March 2019, which was the wettest since 1910.

We may not be able to enjoy the fine weather to the full, but we certainly deserve it.