A new driest year in British history has been found after a massive project in which thousands of volunteer citizen scientists helped unearth Victorian climate data.
Millions of archived handwritten rainfall records dating back 130 years have now been transcribed and analysed, thanks to the work of volunteers during the first coronavirus lockdown.
That work has resulted in new findings, including that 1855 is now the driest year on record, with just 786.5mm of rain. It was previously thought to be 1887.
Many noticed that May 2020 was particularly dry, and it was indeed believed to be the driest month on record for many regions and England as a whole. But the new data shifts the record back to May 1844, when only 8.3mm of rain fell in England.
The project, led by the University of Reading, gave 16,000 people on furlough, or who could not work for other reasons, something important to do with their time. The volunteers diligently digitised 5.2m observations in just 16 days, and these have now been made available in the official Met Office record, both expanding the data they had for existing years and extending the dataset by 26 years, to 1836.
Jacqui Huntley, a volunteer based near Stranraer in Dumfries and Galloway, said: “I got involved because I’m British and therefore a fanatic about the weather, especially rain. And it rains a lot where I live in Scotland. The data are obviously valuable to scientists, but I have also loved learning about the rainfall observers who were so dedicated in measuring the weather day after day. It has been fun, and a true team effort, from start to finish.”
The records also revealed how many people became involved in volunteer meteorology during the particularly damp winter of 1852. December 1852 was found to be the third wettest month on record for Cumbria, with 364.9mm of rainfall, and November 1852 was the wettest month on record for large parts of southern England. Floods are known to have occurred in a number of locations at this time, and were called the Duke of Wellington floods, as they started around the time of his state funeral in London.
Norfolk aristocrat Lady Bayning was so interested by the wet weather that she took her rainfall gauge to London for the social season, and also recorded rainfall in Norfolk between 1835 and 1887.
A vast number of locations with rain gauges across the country were discovered, including one next door to Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top farm in the Lake District, where she wrote many of her most famous books.
Dr Mark McCarthy, the head of the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre, said: “The UK rainfall record is notoriously variable, with extremes of weather presenting us with drought and flood. The more we can shine a light into the earlier chapters and extremes within the rainfall record, the better we are able to understand the risks presented to us by climate change and future extreme weather events.”
What was life like in 1855?
A pint of draught ale cost about two pence.
At the beginning of the year, George Hamilton Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen, was prime minister, but resigned for failing to manage the Crimean war efficiently. He was replaced by Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston.
Florence Nightingale was treating patients in Crimea.
In the news was the Great Gold Robbery, carried out on a train between London Bridge and Folkestone.
The Panama railway was built, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
The Daily Telegraph began publication …
… but for more discerning readers, the Guardian went from twice-weekly to daily, charging two pence an issue, and published a poem celebrating the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers. What a year to be alive!
This article was amended on 25 March 2022. The year previously recorded as driest was 1887, not 1933 as an earlier version said.
