As a result of extensive work on the construction of long rainfall records in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Jones, 1980, 1981, 1983 and Tabony, 1980) numerous long-term and homogenous records of monthly precipitation totals have been developed within the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and also the Met Office, principally for the UK but additionally for a number of locations in the Republic of Ireland. Many sites were developed by Dick Tabony at the Met Office in the late 1970s. A copy available within CRU of the report of this work (Tabony, 1980) has been scanned and made available in the references below. Using these series as a base, more extensive networks were developed within CRU in order to reconstruct monthly riverflow values back to at least 1865 for 15 catchments across England and Wales. These riverflow reconstructions are available at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/riverflow/ together with the areal catchment precipitation totals, also back to 1865.
The riverflow reconstruction work has been documented in a number of reports to the Environment Agency (and one of its predecessors the National Rivers Authority) which together with the Natural Environment Research Council have funded these studies (Jones, 1984; Jones and Lister, 1995, 1997, 1998; Jones et al., 2004, 2006). These papers and reports give the number of rain gauges used through time for each catchment, and also extensively illustrate the effectiveness of this approach to riverflow reconstruction. Only the longest precipitation series are given on this page. Considerably more series were digitized in these projects from the 10-year rainfall books which are available within the Met Office Archives in Exeter. More details about the 10-year rainfall books and their use are given in Appendix F of von Christierson et al. (2009).
The homogenized precipitation series have also been extensively used in the development of ‘national’ precipitation series for the ‘countries’ within the UK (Wigley et al., 1984; Wigley and Jones, 1987; Gregory et al., 1991; Jones and Conway, 1997; Jones et al., 1997 and Alexander and Jones, 2001).
Documentation about the construction of many of the individual series is included in some of the publications, particularly Tabony (1980) and Jones (1983) and scanned copies of these two publications are reproduced here. Four of the long Irish series are discussed in Briffa (1984). As the data have come from a number of different projects, the formats and background information vary a little. Two data files are the same format and include long monthly precipitation series for the UK and long monthly precipitation series for the Republic of Ireland. The third file contains additional series for the UK, some of which are repeated from the first file.
| Filename | Description | Format |
|---|---|---|
| UK and Ireland Rainfall Data | ||
| UK_precip_subset_long_sites.dat | long monthly precipitation series for the UK | Header line giving:
After the header, the monthly totals for each month of each year follow in units of mm*10 with -10 being a missing code value. In these files the annual total has not been calculated |
| Ireland_precip_long_sites.dat | long monthly precipitation series for the Republic of Ireland | |
| rainfall_monthly_series_uk.dat | additional series for the UK, some of which are repeated from UK_precip_subset_long_sites.dat | To use stations in this file an additional file
giving the name of each station in sequence is needed. In this additional file, the
station name is followed by either (a) the latest Met Office rain gauge number for the site
followed by the grid reference and elevation (m) of the last location of the site, or (b)
followed by an approximate WMO number followed by the latitude and longitude in degrees and
the elevation in m. In the data file, the first and last year of each record is given. After this header, the monthly totals for each month of each year follow in units of mm*10 with -10 being a missing code value. Annual totals are given for some sites followed by a repeat of the year number but not for every site. |
These datasets are made available under the Open Database License. Any rights in individual contents of the datasets are licensed under the Database Contents License under the conditions of Attribution and Share-Alike.
Last updated: July 2014, Phil Jones & Colin Harpham