On Wednesday, August 17, Hannah Cloke—a hydrologist at the University of Reading—was sitting in her home office when the rain started coming down. It was a welcome sight. Much of southern England had been baked bone dry during successive heat waves and the worst period of drought in almost 50 years—satellite images showed the country’s green and pleasant land turned a sickly yellow.
But as she watched with her expert eye, Cloke noticed things that others might not: how the water was pooling on the lawn rather than soaking into the ground, how the areas with the best drainage were under a tree in her garden. The prolonged period of
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