A Century Of UK/NI Rainfall (part 5)

A butcher's at drought and deluge over the last 100 years. Are things getting worse, and what does ‘worse’ even mean?

In part 4 of this series I promised to check NOAA’s data records for the venerable observatory at Oxford. After a somewhat sobering Turkish coffee of some strength and a plate of freshly plucked figs I decided, in my sugar-laden hyper-state, to abandon NOAA’s miserable attempts and look at the UK Met Office’s records for the UK. That sure made more sense!

The prospect of pulling down records one year at a time for one station at a time from the MIDAS database then building a comprehensive time series for UK rainfall didn’t seem like much fun so I decided to rely on what may be squeezed from the Met’s Historic Station Data mini-series, which may be found here. In a jiffy I was sitting on monthly records for 37 stations dating back to 1853 (Armagh and Oxford).

Holes In Buckets

The first checkpoint was to consider whether stations had diligently collected data for their entire span of operation of whether some had holes in their buckets. I am rather pleased to report that 28 of the 37 stati…