Was It Really The Wettest Day?
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | November 5, 2020
Saturday 3 October was the wettest day for UK-wide rainfall since records began in 1891, Met Office researchers have said.
The downpour followed in the wake of Storm Alex and saw an average of 31.7mm (1.24ins) of rain across the entire UK.
The deluge was enough to exceed the capacity of Loch Ness – the largest lake in the UK by volume – the researchers added.
The previous record wettest day was 29 August 1986.
No doubt this will be wheeled out at the end of the year by the Met Office to bolster its “extreme weather” propaganda. But was it really the wettest day? How do we know?
Quite simply, we don’t, because the Met Office have never published a database of UK daily rainfall. Instead we are expected to take their word for it. Would you trust a company claiming that it had just made record profits, when it had never published any accounts? Of course not.
We also know that the Met Office has recently included several high altitude sites in its rainfall database, which have inevitably skewed upwards rainfall totals.
However, although they do not publish UK daily rainfall data, we do have daily data from the England & Wales Precipitation Series back to 1931. This series categorically shows that October 3rd was not a record, nor anywhere close.
Rainfall totalled 28.48mm on that day, well below the record of 43.23mm which fell in August 1986. Last month’s “record” was in fact only the tenth wettest day.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/daily/HadEWP_daily_qc.txt
Even the England & Wales series is of limited value, as it still only has 90 years of data. There will undoubtedly have been many other extremely wet days earlier.
In fact, as the Met Office admits, the rainfall on 3rd October was not particularly intense anywhere, simply widespread across the whole country.
For instance, Oxfordshire was one of the wettest spots in England, and they had about 60mm that day:
https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2020/10/16/rainfall-on-uks-wettest-day-on-record-could-have-more-than-filled-loch-ness/
However, even at Oxford, such a total was far from being unprecedented:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2020/11/03/bbcs-oxford-soggy-month-claims-undermined-by-the-actual-data/
To be fair, Scotland got a real drenching that day, which may have tilted the UK figures up from the England & Wales ones. However, as I have frequently pointed out, Scotland has become wetter in recent decades, but that does not mean that the rest of the UK has.
The Met Office’s Mark McCarthy gives us the usual weasel words:
“We can’t make any definitive statements specifically about the attribution of this particular event on October 3,” said Dr McCarthy.
“There’s a general expectation that under our warming climate, we would expect to see increases in some types of extreme rainfall and rainfall events and we’re expecting to have wetter winters overall, we could expect increases in these types of extremes.”
If what he says is true, we would expect to see a pattern of increasingly extreme wet weather in England & Wales, and not just Scotland. The fact is that there is no such pattern, either in these intense daily events, or for that matter monthly totals.
Clearly therefore his theory holds no water.
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Sam Husseini is a senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy, independent journalist and contributor to The Nation and FAIR.
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