I was surprised & not a little disappointed that the rainfall records against which the wetness of 2012 is being judged date back only about a century to 1910: surely we have records which go back much further?
Paul Simons came to my aid in his Weather Eye column in Monday’s Times.
There is indeed an archive going all the way back to 1766, which is held by the Met Office, but it has not been digitised – which I take to mean has not been put on to a computer database. Which makes one wonder why not – it does not sound as though it can be all that large, since it is based on fewer weather stations, though that of course presents problems of comparability with the wider coverage of the more modern archive. There may also be a major challenge with digitising in the sense I was first introduced to the word, in the context of computer mapping, that is giving an accurate location based on Ordnance Survey co-ordinates.
However this older archive deprives 2012 (in England & Wales as opposed to the UK), of its record as the wettest ever.
1872 was our wettest year, in fact the whole period around the 1870s was ‘drenched’ according to Simons.
This chimes with my impression gained when reading all those contemporary newspapers of that period – reports of awful rainstorms figured quite regularly, often accompanied by scary thunder & lightning, something which we were largely spared last year.
Heavy rain could cause much more disruption back then, given the lack of protection for travellers.
With modern windscreen wipers, tyres, & generally leak-proof vehicles we have it easy.
At least the mid-Victorians had the Macintosh to protect them, patented in the 1820s & manufactured in Manchester. Strangely however the Dictionary of National Biography says that sales declined after the coming of the railways left passengers less exposed than they had been on the stagecoach.
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