What’s special about the Isle of Wight that makes it immune to rainfall?

by pufballcat

39 comments
  1. I’m going there for Easter. It’s pissing down all weekend! 😩

  2. Having been to the Isle of Wight on numerous occasions, I can tell you it is most certainly **not** immune to rainfall!

  3. Rain Accumulation colour bar helps- Wight=No rainfall.

  4. It all just runs off and goes back into the ocean, like those adverts for hydrophobic furniture covers.

  5. They have a huge brolly on a spike that they can pull up

  6. 10 years ago, we had a camping holiday there. In August. We had torrential rain half of the time, and winds strong enough to bend the frame of our trailer tent.

  7. The two times I’ve been, saw torrential rain for a while day. 2nd time, blazing sun all day. Luck of the draw at the end of the day.

  8. Highest sunshine hours lowest rainfall in the country, it’s bless-ed.

  9. Iow is often a rain shield , so it rains on iow and the mainland in its rain shadow stays dry

  10. Going by this chart you could also assume that Ireland, one of the wettest places on the planet, has low rainfall.

    This is not representative data.

  11. Why is the colour for 0mm and 100mm of rainfall the same

  12. The authorities are/were thinking of a TT style race on the island,(I wish)
    If it has too much,it won’t be as successful

  13. The rain usually arrives the day the Isle of Wight festival starts.

  14. This Isle of Wightian has looked out of the window and can state it’s wet as an otters pocket at the moment.

  15. It’s further away from the North Pole and gets the effects of the Gulf Stream. While it’s not immune to rainfall (visited there for my birthday a few years ago and got SOAKED), Ventnor on the SE coast has its own microclimate. Temps there are on average 5° higher than the mainland

  16. Not sure about this question, but the IoW acts as some sort of meteorological barrier for Southampton.

    We rarely get any form of extreme weather; rain, wind, Snow, lightning etc because it sort of gets blocked by the IoW

  17. Isle of Portland can escape the rain the mainland gets, occasionally. Not immune though, clouds can form overland, so occasionally along the coast you may be CAVOK. Take a look at time-lapse of cloud formations where there’s some land and open sea.

  18. When the Met Office sent someone to install rain gauges it ended up like The Wicker Man.

  19. All the convicted paedos we store there put the clouds off visiting

  20. At least the absorbant chalk soil means that the ground rarely gets really muddy.

  21. Born and raised on the island, and I can assure you it rains a lot. We like it because it’s why we have webbed fingers and toes.
    I moved away, and now it acts like some kind of bad weather shield. Good thunderstorm coming from France…No chance of anything with the Islands defence shield operating.

  22. Rain doesn’t want to go near the collective moaning of retired people

  23. As a hydrometrist that covers the IoW I can assure you this is not the case.

    As with all things rainfall it depends on where the weather front is coming from.

    It’s actually more likely to take the brunt of the rain before it hits the mainland.

    The fact is we are having a very dry start to spring so nowhere is getting much rain.

  24. Who came up with that colour scale? It’s just terrible! White (or close to) at 0 and 100? Different shades of blue that don’t go in any particular order, then a tiny bit of green and yellow that isn’t used? My god it’s awful.

  25. Wrong end of the graph. Both ends are white – thus this is 100+mm of rain.

  26. IT does rain there, but that was 50 years ago .. like everything on the Isle of Wight

Comments are closed.