Rainfall In South West England & Wales (part 1)

The Somerset Rivers Authority has spoken… so I decided to get the kettle on and check a few of their facts

Let us start out with a screenshot of a FB post that recently caught my eye:

And let us declare the link to the report at the centre of all this, being the Environmental Agency’s Monthly water situation report: Wessex Area.

The Rub

But here’s the rub. Being a mere mortal I don’t have access to the fancy data that the Environmental Agency sit on so I am required to sweat and toil by the bread of my brow to hunt for anything remotely useful. As it so happens data that might be jolly useful are observations gathered by the Met Office Hadley Centre, this being the HadUKP precipitation dataset that can be found here.

If we flip to the download page we discover South West England & Wales (SWEP) is one of the regions for which we can obtain monthly precipitation records dating back to 1873. Now that sounds terribly and terrifically tasty to me, and what is even more tasty is the effort the Hadley crew have put in to ensure the 152-year time series isn’t past its sell by date:

Please note, the las…