Giovanni Bricconi

Today it has finally rained, it was a long time since it didn’t happen. Just some minutes, not so much, some thunders, but it is good it finally happened. Some weeks ago I have got a letter from the local water supply company: it is now forbidden to irrigate gardens and grasses. You can irrigate just orchards and vegetable gardens.

My grass is all dead and many plants started dying, it is really a pity seeing all the garden becoming yellow and brown. Mine is not that big, I give water just to strawberries, my 2 cherry trees, and the olive.

It is summer, it is always a bit like this, the strange thing was that also during the spring I had to start irrigating the garden. I feel this very strange: I come from a rainy place, and giving water in winter or spring is really weird for me. This is the reason I started reading more about climate change: it is real, and I can see it clearly in my backyard.

I have found this site: Observation météorologique historiques France (SYNOP). It gives many data about the weather in France, where I live. I did not play much with it online, I just dared download the full historical archive with the plan of playing a bit with it later.

It has been a mistake, as the file is huge and my time is little, and I don’t have at home the right tools. In the end I just checked the nearest place next to my home and extracted the data of 2022, 2017, and 2012. A couple of awk and grep commands to get Nice data, and I imported all in open office, no funny tools like spark, jupyter or R (but maybe one day…). Some weird numbers here and there (did a cat go to drink in the tool that measures rain? -0.1 mm rain I don’t understand how it is possible).

This is the result, just a pivot table in open office.

I do not know how the yellow line will become during the rest of the year, but you see the difference in autumn and in April is something that made me wow.

Let me know if it is the same next to you…or if it is the opposite: it would be good to discover a place where to go when the south of France will become an arid desert.