'Change in the month - change in the weather' runs the adage..
..in the UK at least, this may be true - temperatures plummeted yesterday at the end of what is believed to have been the third warmest March since records began in the 17th century - frosts, and even snow, may be on their way.
Vila Real's cumulative rainfall for March came in at just 33% of the monthly average. This was concentrated on two brief wet spells, the first of which does not appear to have delivered much of note in the Cima Corgo - we shall have to wait for the next Douro Insider to get the full detail.
Looking at the forecasts I am minded of the soliloquy in Macbeth:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
Til the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yesterdays light fools the way to dusty death
Dusty - certainly, death - hopefully not!
But the promises of rain do persistantly creep back day by day, and promises of a soaking reduce to the odd shower.
The rain currently forecast over the next few days is in the nature of home grown stormy weather moving up from the south, rather than a well laden atlantic system; and given the extreme aridity of the Iberian peninsular at present, I do wonder where the atmospheric moisture necessary for such rain is expected to come from - we shall see..
What is really needed is for the large high pressure system that has been blocking and deflecting atlantic weather systems from western europe to disperse, and allow a succession of fat rainy weather systems to sweep in off the sea.
So far, this is still not on the radar..
