Not of fine wine and frothing beer, but of mood souring rain. The groundwater levels have hit an all-time high, almost beating 2021's gigantic summer rainfall that resulted in the local waterways overflowing, and an hour drive away even transforming complete cities into brown floaty drab. Hey dude, where's my car? Perhaps it's Tthat pointy thing with the blue metallic roof floating past that tree stump there?

How about a bit of data to back this all up? Meteo Vista monthly overviews of the weather in Belgium:

• January 2024: big differences and quite sunny (aha, the exception to the rule!);
• Feburary 2024: record temperature, soaking wet and very gloomy;
• March 2024: mild, wet, and gloomy;
• April 2024: wet, gloomy, and quite mild.

Wet wet wet? KMI Meteo: the last three months of 2023 have been exceptionally wet: 150% more rainfall than the average. So last year ended well and we're off to a great 2024! Weeronline: 2023 was the second wettest year ever recorded!

A preliminary climatological overview from KMI Meteo of this spring:

• Much hotter (7.7 °C vs avg. 6.2)
• Much wetter (238.8 mm total rain vs avg. 165.6)---the increase of about x1.4 is confirmed by measurements of another local weather station.
• More rainy days (53 days vs avg. 43.5)
• More stormy days (31 days vs avg. 24.8)
• Less sunshine (333.16 hours vs avg. 495:19)

Spring isn't over yet, but winter is, and judging from the following graph from KMI of the average rainfall, the results are the same:

I really really really don't like where this is going. All that grayness in the sky makes it difficult for my own gray matter to perform well thanks to a persistent and ever-growing presence of moodiness that should ideally be combated with bright colors and sunshine rays.

Why is it raining that much in 2024? KMI points to global warming which causes the air to contain more water vapor, about 6 to 7 percent per degree. The Atlantic Ocean is apparently also warmer than usually, causing more condensation of water drops. More subtropical (hence warm and humid) air also makes its way to Belgium that can increase rainfall. Our towns are starting to look like Hollow Knight's City of Tears... I'm not sure how much longer we humans can keep on pretending we have nothing to do with all this.

In 2021 I found a public API for accessing data of local waterways, where I downloaded and displayed information for station L09_136. Here's that same graph for period 01/2024-05/2024:

Back then it hit an all-time high of 32 m, resulting in a complete blockage and global overflow of nearly everything. Luckily, that's not (yet) the case, but by comparing both graphs, you can easily see that the frequency of peaks have dramatically increased, hinting at regular (and quite) rainy days. Yet at the same time, the water level still manages to consistently drop below 30.5 m, which wasn't the case in the summer of 2021.

That means I wasn't able to take a dramatic photo where the water level hits the concrete of the bridge itself (as you can see in the photo of 2021). I changed the viewpoint to the other side of the bridge this time:

That shot was taken in-between several sessions of equally depressing rainfall. The groundwater level is starting to cause us trouble in and around the house as well: parquet planks are curling up and starting to squeek, mold is seeking refuge behind the cupboard and next to cold and poorly isolated walls, the lawn now is turned into a pool, the chickens saw their patch converted into a muddy pigsty, and the garage floor suddenly started leaking too.

Here's to a sunny but not too hot summer...