Millions of archived rainfall records dating back nearly 200 years which were digitised by volunteers during the pandemic have broken UK weather records and provided researchers with decades more data on weather trends.
The University of Reading’s Rainfall Rescue project involved the transcription of 130 years worth of handwritten rainfall records – more than five million individual observations – across the UK and Ireland. The results revealed the UK’s driest ever year on record is 1855, the third wettest month is December 1852 in Cumbria, and November of the same year the wettest month on record for many parts of southern England.
But the project produced more than just new records. According to Catherine Ross, an archivist at the Met Office, it has “broken the definition of an archive”.
