England & Wales Rainfall Series – Feb 2014
By Paul Homewood
The Met Office have now published the February data for the England & Wales precipitation series. With 135.3mm, last month ranks the 7th wettest February on the record going back to 1766.
February 1833 remains the wettest with 158.6mm, followed by 1923 with 152.7mm. Figure 1 shows the Top 50 wettest Februaries.
Figure 1
As Figure 2 illustrates, there is not much happening with the trends over the last century. This is in contrast to periods in the 18th and 19thC, which swung from wet to dry, and back again.
Figure 2
The numbers also confirm that the winter of 1929/30 had by far the wettest run of months. Over the last four months, we have had 534.3mm, but between October 1929 and January 1930, precipitation totalled 624.3mm.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/monthly/HadEWP_monthly_qc.txt
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
And still they maintain that we just had the wettest winter on record (Countryfile, BBC1, 9/03/14)
Paul,
I know you’ve expressed your opinion on this previously, but the fact is that ‘winter’ is clearly defined meteorologically in the northern hemisphere as December to February. It’s been that way for record keeping purposes for a long time.
So to say things such as “the winter of 1929/30 had by far the wettest run of months” in the England and Wales record, when it clearly doesn’t, is bound to lead to confusion (as indicated by the comment from Filbert Cobb, above).
Dec-Feb 1929/30 (330.2mm) is only the 20th wettest meteorological winter in the England and Wales record. The wettest was 2013/14 (455.1), followed by 1914/15 (423).
So the UK Met Office and BBC Countryfile are strictly speaking correct to say that this “winter” was the wettest on the England and Wales record. It may not have been the wettest Nov-Feb, or Oct-Jan, etc, but that’s not what is being claimed.
Fair enough – I could have worded it better.
But I am curious why the Met Office & BBC are so reluctant to tell us that it was much wetter in 1929/30.
There is a saying that common sense isn’t very common.
Earth has a number of dynamic systems and none pay attention to the dates on a calendar. Some places say “winter” begins with the Solstice. Elsewhere, it begins on the first of the month. “Meteorologically” records are reported as 3 month periods, as is done in this cold temperature report from Marquette, MI.
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=mqt&storyid=100824&source=0
However, a few years back we had about a metre (~3 feet) of snow during the week prior to December 1. The professional record keepers have to report this as meteorologically “fall” snow. When one looks at the record for that Winter season it appears to be missing a metre of snow. A person with common, as contrasted with technical, sense might be confused. Consider, again, the Marquette temperature records. Say the last day of November was the 1st day of bitter cold. Might it make sense to consider that as part of the string of cold days? No, I guess not. It doesn’t fit the calendar.
This report says that flooding occurs when the earth is cooling.
RATHER THAN GLOBAL WARMING, EARTH MAY BE FACING COOLING
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1043&Itemid=1