Is Britain Getting Wetter?

By Paul Homewood 

 

 

Is it getting wetter in Britain?

We have certainly had some wet weather in the last year or so, but it is easy to confuse short term weather with long term trends.

People’s memories are notoriously short, made worse by overhyped media coverage. Add in the lack of any proper history being taught, and it is no wonder that most of the public fall for apocalyptic claims.

Moreover, we are continually warned that rainfall and flooding will increase.

 

So what exactly does the data tell us?

 

 

Fortunately, we have the long running England & Wales Precipitation Series, which goes back to 1766, to give us some proper perspective. Using this, the graph below shows average annual precipitation for each decade, along with the latest ten years for comparison.

 

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/monthly/HadEWP_monthly_qc.txt

 

As can be seen, the wettest decade by far was 1871-80. Whilst there are runs of drier years, the latest coming in the 1970’s, the most recent decade was by no means unusually wet, ranking only the 7th wettest.

The 1910’s and 20’s were a similarly wet period to that of the last two decades. The climate turned drier after that for a while, and there is no reason to suppose that it will not do again.

Unfortunately, this is not a message we will be likely to hear from the Met Office.