By Paul Homewood
It’s worth taking a closer look at daily rainfall in Oxford, as it has such a long database, back to 1827. It tells us a lot about the weather in recent years, things that the Met Office want to hide from us.
Although we keep being told by the Met Office that our weather has been so wet in recent years because a “a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture”, the principal factor is, and always has been, the number of days when it rains. In other words a meteorological phenomenon, not a climatic one.
The general definition of a rainday is when rainfall exceeds 1mm. The chart below plots these at Oxford. Data is from KNMI:
https://climexp.knmi.nl/data/pgdcnUK000056225.dat
Last year was 5th wettest and also featured high in the number of raindays. The years 2000, 2012 and 2014 also feature highly, as well as earlier ones such as 1872, 1916, 1927, 1951, 1958 and 1960.
Some periods have plenty of raindays, others much less. But there is no apparent trend in either direction.
But we can also analyse the average rainfall intensity, that is rainfall per rainday:
Last year had one of the highest intensities, in large part because spring and early summer was so dry. These are the times of year when daily rainfall is low, with mainly showery weather, so the overall average is bound to be exaggerated. But 2023 was by no means unusual, as there have been other years with similar rainfall intensity, such as 1915, 1949 and 1960.
More notable though is the occurrence of those years in the 1830s, when rainfall was clearly much more intense. Hardly evidence for the Met Office’s theory!
All of this is, of course, weather. I defy anybody to find a pattern or trend towards rainfall becoming more intense in Oxford in the above chart.
Again the overall trend suggests that rainfall intensity has been declining over the period of record.
Maybe the Met Office would like to explain.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
May 9, 2024 at 01:10PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 