This rainfall event was major by any standards. Apart from a 24 hour
total of 82.1mm, the intensity of the rain in the evening caused the
river in Bone valley, a few yards from me, to rise to record levels,
washing mud through houses. Yet in the world according to the MetO it
doesn't exist. The wettest place in the 24hours to 18:00 yesterday had
18mm, Around 59mm of my total would have fallen in this period. So far
emails to certain weather presenters have gone unanswered, no even a
mention on Spotlight (no NT properties involved?)

I think this is all a reflection on modern weather
forecasting/recording. You can excuse localised extreme weather events
in largely rural areas going largely unrecorded by the MetO, but when
the collation of data is so bad that a major event over a medium sized
town is ignored hasn't somethjing gone wrong? After all, to the casual
observer searching CEEFAX or the BBC/MetO websites the wettest place
was Harwarden with 18mm. As Chris said in the earlier thread about the
storm, the rainfall radar showed an extremely localised area affected -
essentially Penzance.

The other 2 big rainfall events in west Cornwall this century, St Ives
2002 (only newsworthy because of the extreme flooding in such a well
known resort) St Merryn storm of 2005, also missed any official
stations (both had similar in totals of around 80mm or so). There may
well be others, who knows?

Penzance is about to restart it's official station, with all local
money, but this is only happening because it's a tourist resort and
there are benefits from doing so. Apparently the MetO can see no
benefits in spending relatively small sums of money in a improved
network of automatic stations. If they did so, not only might they
actually record some of these extreme events, but they might learn from
it & be able to predict them more accurately.

Graham
Penzance