A total of 223.1mm of rain had fallen by 9am on Thursday, beating the previous record for the month with three days to spare.
The previous wettest October came in 2004, when 218.99mm of rain fell.
The wettest month on record is December 1999, when 279.8mm of rain hit the Island.
Adrienne Le Maistre, duty forecaster for Jersey Met, said that the position of the jet stream – a fast-flowing narrow air current around five to seven miles above the earth’s surface – was responsible for this month’s high figure.
‘The position of the jet stream has been in the right place, so all the [weather] systems from the North Atlantic have come in across the UK and us and there have been some fairly active fronts which have brought a lot of rain. If the jet stream had been a bit further north it is likely that some of those systems might have missed us, but it has been just in the right place,’ the duty forecaster said.
‘There is a suggestion that we might see high pressure for a few days in the middle of next week to provide us with a bit of respite from the rain, but it [the high pressure] is not something that is likely to settle in for a long time.
‘The last four wettest months of the year in the last four years have either been in December or November, so this does tend to happen around autumn.’
A spokesperson for Jersey Water said that their reservoirs were currently 80.4% full – with Val de la Mare being 89.1% full and Queen’s Valley 62% full.
‘This storage currently provides the Island with about 100 days of supply and when we reach “full”, this increases to 120 days of supply. Once we are full, then the reservoirs spill over and the water is lost to the sea, and last year we were spilling to the sea in November,’ the spokesperson said.
‘We are currently supplying just over 18 million litres per day, which is down from the summer high of 23 million litres per day. We aim to be 100% full in April, which puts us in a great position for the spring and summer drier months. However, we expect that we will reach capacity in the next six to eight weeks.’
