Rainfall & Flow data is supplied to me by the
kind folks at the Environment Agency, so if you
know anyone at the Blandford office buy them a
drink for me please!
The charts for rainfall and flow show you the long term averages of flow (m3) at Wilton and the rainfall recorded at Winterbourne Stoke. I messed up slightly and lost some of the '06 rainfall data so haven't updated this chart but will keep updating the flow as information comes through.
One slightly frightening piece of information I received as was the Nadder Catchment abstraction licenses. I can't publish exactly who is licensed to extract what, well maybe if I saw some reason to publish this information I would, I just currently see little value in naming them... The licenses for the Nadder catchment allow up to a staggering 16472044m3 of water to be removed from the river each year (53853 m3 a day!) regardless of whether we are experiencing a wet or dry year... Now I know this isn't anywhere near the levels being taken out of rivers like the Wylye but still, I nearly fell off my chair when i tried to visualise what a difference that much water still being in the river in mid-summer would have made.
Perhaps I'm naive about such things but surely abstraction licenses should, and excuse the pun here, be more fluid? showing at least some nod towards how much water is actually in the rivers?
The charts for rainfall and flow show you the long term averages of flow (m3) at Wilton and the rainfall recorded at Winterbourne Stoke. I messed up slightly and lost some of the '06 rainfall data so haven't updated this chart but will keep updating the flow as information comes through.
One slightly frightening piece of information I received as was the Nadder Catchment abstraction licenses. I can't publish exactly who is licensed to extract what, well maybe if I saw some reason to publish this information I would, I just currently see little value in naming them... The licenses for the Nadder catchment allow up to a staggering 16472044m3 of water to be removed from the river each year (53853 m3 a day!) regardless of whether we are experiencing a wet or dry year... Now I know this isn't anywhere near the levels being taken out of rivers like the Wylye but still, I nearly fell off my chair when i tried to visualise what a difference that much water still being in the river in mid-summer would have made.
Perhaps I'm naive about such things but surely abstraction licenses should, and excuse the pun here, be more fluid? showing at least some nod towards how much water is actually in the rivers?
With increasing pressure to deliver new homes under
governments various crackpot housing schemes and
Local Authorities blatant disregard for
infrastructure provision when granting planning
permission for new developments there seems little
hope for many of the lesser loved rivers unless we
all take a little personal responsibility for our
actions. How many of us that fish these rivers and
love them dearly have pro-actively taken steps to
reduce their impact? Bricks in toilets cistern? Not
leaving the tap running when brushing your teeth?
Showers instead of baths? No sprinklers in garden?
Leave the car dirty or take it to a car-wash that
re-uses the water?
The worrying thing is that our water use as individuals pales into insignificance when compared to the volume of water used to produce the products we in the 'developed' world take for granted. If you get chance read when the rivers run dry, by Fred Pearce (linked in the middle ). He tells us that:
It takes around 500 litres of water to grow the wheat to produce a loaf of bread.
11,000 litres to feed enough cows to make a quarter-pound hamburger.
You could take 25 baths in the water it takes to grow the cotton for just one T-shirt.
Holy crap batman... If we keep at it like this my grandchildren seriously won't have chalkstreams to fish on.
The worrying thing is that our water use as individuals pales into insignificance when compared to the volume of water used to produce the products we in the 'developed' world take for granted. If you get chance read when the rivers run dry, by Fred Pearce (linked in the middle ). He tells us that:
It takes around 500 litres of water to grow the wheat to produce a loaf of bread.
11,000 litres to feed enough cows to make a quarter-pound hamburger.
You could take 25 baths in the water it takes to grow the cotton for just one T-shirt.
Holy crap batman... If we keep at it like this my grandchildren seriously won't have chalkstreams to fish on.
