A Century Of UK/NI Rainfall (part 3)
A butcher's at drought and deluge over the last 100 years. Are things getting worse, and what does ‘worse’ even mean?
You’d think by now that I’d be able to get my crayons out and at least draw a chart of mean UK/NI rainfall since the turn of the last century. We’ve got naughty NOAA to thank for that; plus, just when I thought I’d cracked the problem with the wonky rainfall record at Armagh (whose historic data series is significant on a global scale), along comes an eagle-eyed subscriber to point out the minimum daily temperatures were higher than maximum for the early part of February 2009. Let’s just squint at these again…
Fine. Right. Obviously something wacko is going here that is more than getting the decimal point wrong, and my money is on NOAA being sloppy and not the fine crew at Armagh. This nudged me into working my way through the fabulous CEDA Archive to find the actual automated observations, which may be found here.
That sequence of 44,44,44,44,43,43 for minimum temperature in Fahrenheit looked suspicious to me so I searched for the Centigrade equivalent (6.6 etc) and found them under t…