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UK rainfall record extended back to 1836 thanks to Covid Lockdowns


The UK’s official rainfall records now go back to the year before Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, thanks to the efforts of thousands of volunteers, who have been on duty at home during Covid, have been assembled. by their passion for a very British interest: the weather.

It started when Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in the UK, came up with a call for help recorded more than 65,000 handwritten diaries of monthly rainfall, spanning three centuries, from across England and Ireland.

The handwriting in the application is too irregular to be machine read; human eye is needed. More than 16,000 people responded to Dr. Hawkins’ request, and together they pored over the task for more than two weeks.

That was two years ago, during Britain’s first coronavirus containment. Now, the nation’s weather agency, the Met Office, has processed 3.3 million data points from the copied sites and added them to the national precipitation statistics, enriching the official record with More observations and extending it back to 1836. Among the newly digitized information were new details of the strange weather of 1852, when a particularly dry spring was followed by severe flooding important in November and December.

Dr Hawkins said in an interview from Reading: “If the weather was meant to bring us this much rain in 1852, it would probably have brought more rain on our island because We live in a warmer world. Having better information about past extremes can help strengthen our defenses against future extremes, he said.

Dr Hawkins and a team of volunteers and other researchers laid out how they process and clean data in a study published Friday in Geoscience Data Journal.

“We have barely scratched the surface of what to learn from the UK climate archives,” he said. “The United States also has huge archives that, at NOAA, are still as unexplored as they might be,” he added, referring to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Met Office knows the value of data in old rainfall log Catherine Ross, an archivist at the agency and author of the new study, said as it scanned them in 2019. But only because of volunteers during the 2020 closure, Dr. Ross said, that information well-written, sometimes idiosyncratic, news stories created useful for scientific analysis.

Records begin in 1677 with measurements from scattered observers. By 1860, data collection was coordinated by the British Rainfall Foundation, which later became part of the Met Office. More people took part: ordinary citizens, clergy, wealthy landowners, who assigned the duties of gardeners and keepers of the land. This last category seems to include the royals: Among the archives are rainfall measurements from Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace and Sandringham House.

“It was the Victorian Era: People wanted to control, measure, understand statistics in a lot more detail,” said Dr. Ross. “There is a growing understanding of, ‘We can collect observations and do something with them.’”

In the notes they kept with the rainfall log, the scribes revealed the interest they had invested in the task and some of the challenges. Father W. Borlase, of the village of Ludgvan, Cornwall, added this footnote to his reading for October 1770: “The receiver is quite full. May have run over. Do not know. ”

Observers recorded various outrages that occurred on their rain gauges: vandalism by children; obstructions by bird nests; damage by tourists, lawn mowers and ponies. Monks at Belmont Abbey, in Herefordshire, recorded a bullet hole in their gauge in 1948. At a mental hospital, record-keeping was kept on hold for more than two years in the 1950s. because the meter was “hidden by the prisoners”.

As World War II raged, a diary from 1944 recorded that a rain gauge was “destroyed by enemy action”. In the village of West Ayton, the scribe ended the readings in 1949 with the remark “too old to bother now”.

Once the records have been copied, the data must be sorted by the exact location. This presents its own challenges. The notes for a rain gauge in Scotland just describe it as “in a rain among the hills.”

Dr. Hawkins is perhaps best known for creating climate stripes, a visualization of global warming. He is currently involved with another online project to record weather observations made by marines around the globe in the mid-19th century. This was part of a larger initiative, GloSATwhich aims to extend worldwide surface temperature records – on land, ocean and ice – back to the 1780s. Currently, most global temperature records start at the 1850s.

Additional information could help scientists better understand Earth’s climate before the Industrial Revolution and the large-scale carbon emissions that accompanied it from human activity. It could also reveal more about how climate responded to several major volcanic eruptions in the early 19th century, including the eruption at Mount Tambora, in what is now Indonesia, which cooled the planet and causing the so-called “year without a summer. ”

“We haven’t had a really big one since Tambora in 1815,” says Dr. Hawkins. “We may be overdue by one. And so understanding the consequences of such an eruption in advance would probably be quite helpful.”



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