Friday, February 03, 2012

January's rainfall in Cyprus

As I have been saying - probably rather too frequently! - we have had a lot of rain in Cyprus during the past month. It's been cold, too, and rather grey. Rather than the typical Cyprus rain - a torrential pouring down for about an hour, followed by sunshine - we've had drizzle, light rain, heavy rain, downpours... and pretty much every other kind of rain, followed by grey skies and yet more rain. Oh, we've had some days of sunshine, or at least a few hours of sunshine on most days, but apparently this past January was the fourth wettest in the past 110 years.

For some reason my camera was set to something strange when I walked to the Post Office recently - however, despite the colours being very weird, these do show the kind of puddles we were seeing on waste ground which is normally dry:


- and on patches of grass where there's rarely any water showing at all:


Usually rain soaks into the ground, but the water table must be high enough that it's simply sitting there in large puddles, providing breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

It's great news for Cyprus that we've had so much rain. Some of the reservoirs in Paphos have started overflowing for the first time in many years, and island-wide we have a good amount of water, even before the snow on the mountains starts to melt.

But although I don't look forward to the heat of summer, I must admit that I've been pleased to see some sunshine and a little more warmth in the past couple of days.

1 comment:

Anvilcloud said...

We're having some rain and freezing rain this winter but not enough to wash away all of the snow in our little corner of the province ... although much of the province is pretty bare from what I gather.