The Truth About British Rain

Rain, rain, rain. Us Brits endure it on 199 days of every year. That's 4 sodden days a week. It just doesn't seem fair. So I've come to the Lake District to find out why the Great British weather is amongst the wettest in Europe. This is the ideal vantage point to understand our weather. We're nearly a thousand feet up, in one of Britain's rainiest regions. Over there is the Irish sea, and beyond, the Atlantic Ocean, and that's where all our rain comes from. Incredibly, much of the rain which ruins our summers began life four thousand miles away, in the Atlantic. Air collects moisture from the ocean, which in turn forms weather systems, which bring rain to the UK. Warm damp air travels thousands of miles across the ocean, and it hits our hills, and as the air is forced up it cools down, forming clouds. Clouds are born when invisible water vapour in the atmosphere condenses into tiny drop bits, which then falls to the Earth as rain. And it's this rain that forms these mountain streams, which then feed the glorious lakes. The Ancient Greeks had a theory that all of our rivers and lakes were fed by vast underground seas and when you see all this water Huh, that's fresh you can't really blame them. But in truth, every drop of our fresh water comes from the oceans.