From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
According to the Met Office, Worcestershire has just had its wettest February on record:
It was certainly a dull and wet month across the country, but in overall terms it was not unusually wet:
As with all wet weather, the announcement was naturally accompanied by the usual blaming of climate change, with the BBC claiming without any evidence that increased burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil causes heavier rainfall.
But what about Worcestershire?
Data since provided by the Met Office under the Freedom of Information Act has now shown their claim of record rainfall does not stand up to scrutiny.
The Met Office only currently has three official weather stations in Worcestershire – Pershore, Pershore College and Astwood Bank. According to the Met Office data released, rainfall last month was 128mm, 121mm and 146mm respectively. If we discard Pershore as effectively duplicating the College, we get an average of 133.5mm. None of these stations were around in 1836; the College has the longest record, dating back to 1952 and Astwood only goes as far back as 1976.
How do these rainfall totals compare with other Februarys?
February 1923 was certainly exceptionally wet across the country, it is still the second wettest in England overall. It was no exception in Worcestershire either. In those days, the Met Office published detailed weather summaries and data every month. (For some reason, they no longer do this; one might think they don’t want the public to see the actual data behind their public pronouncements!).
Below is the section of the table showing rainfall for Worcestershire:
We can discard Sparkhill, as it is now part of the West Midlands. That leaves us with two stations – Malvern and Tenbury, with 153mm and 164mm.
So we clearly have a very large discrepancy. A range of 121mm to 146mm this year, compared with 153 and 164mm in 1923.
We also have further data for February 1923 from the annual British Rainfall publication that year. Again, we must discard Dudley, as it is also now part of the West Midlands. That leaves us with 121mm at Kempsey, 153mm at Bewdley and 138mm at Alvecurch.
If we average the six stations in 1923, we come to an average of 145.8mm, which is much higher than this year’s figure of 133.5mm. Three of the six were higher in 1923 than this year’s high at Astwood.
As the Met Office no longer have data for Malvern, they suggested I look at nearby Ross-on-Wye, just across the border in Herefordshire. In February 1923, the rainfall total there was 170mm. This year it was 148mm, reinforcing the conclusion that February 1923 was a much wetter month in the region.
All of the evidence points in one direction only – February 1923 was much wetter.
The Met Office pretends it has “comparable data” back to 1836. However, the only stations listed in the British Rainfall publication in the early days were Worcester and Tenbury, both of which closed years ago. As we have seen, the current stations only have short records, making comparison with 1836 a nonsensical concept.
The Met Office’s temperature datasets have already been discredited, following FOI requests which revealed their reliance on junk stations where temperatures are artificially increased by poor siting.
Now there are serious question marks over their rainfall datasets. This is not just a one-off glitch.
Is British weather really getting wetter as they claim. Or is it just a figment of their computer’s imagination?
