rain today

It rained for most of the morning.  I didn't mind this as much as I might have, as I was making the second batch of marmalade.  I'm confident that with only a few brief breaks it is going to rain all afternoon, so I'm not changing into my gardening overalls.  This prediction is not based on the Met Office's five day forecast.  I still look at that, in a hopeless way, but it changes so often that it isn't really much use.  If information is defined as that which reduces uncertainty then a forecast that predicts that sometimes during the next five days in England during January, it is going to rain, has informational value of approximately nil.  Much more use, at least for deciding whether to head out into the garden, is the rain radar site.  This does what it says on the tin, which is lets you see a radar shot of rain in your chosen area.  The rainfall of the past few hours is shown, with rain clouds colour coded for the intensity of the rain sweeping across the screen, and then the projected passage of the rain over the next few hours.  Access to the basic service is free, or if you want to be able to zoom in on smaller areas you pay a modest annual fee.  The predictions don't always work, but they are pretty good, and it's helpful being able to see whether you are dealing with just one lump of rain, in which case it might be worth hanging around in your gardening clothes for half an hour until it's gone, or whether there are numerous bands of precipitation coming across and you might as well give up and make alternative plans for the rest of the day.  The snow did slightly fox it, because that only formed as the wind from the north sea hit the coast, so the snow clouds that were sweeping down across East Anglia kept materialising out of thin air just off Lowestoft.