Extreme Rain Months At Oxford

By Paul Homewood 

 

http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/research/climate/rms/intro.html

 

 

 

The Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford has one of the best sets of climate records in the UK.  

The Radcliffe Meteorological Station is situated in Woodstock Road in the garden of Green Templeton College beside the old observatory building, adjacent to the old Radcliffe Infirmary site. It possesses the longest series of temperature and rainfall records for one site in Britain. These records are continuous from January, 1815. Irregular observations of rainfall, cloud and temperature exist from 1767.

 

The Met Office give us monthly data for the site since 1853, and these give us an interesting insight into extreme rainfall trends.

Below is the distribution of the 50 wettest months:

 

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/stationdata/oxforddata.txt

 

By far the wettest month of all was October 1875 when 192mm fell. November 1940 ranks second.

There is the usual clustering, but absolutely no evidence at all that these sort of extreme rainfall months are getting either wetter or more frequent.

Oxford is, of course, only one site, but it offers high quality, long term records and is a reasonably typical inland site for the central England area. What really comes across is how little things have changed since the 1850’s.