Rainfall Rescue

The British love talking about the weather. They also love measuring it.

In the 1970s there were around 5500 rain gauges in the UK - that means you would not have been more than a couple of miles from one! Nowadays there are around 2500 which is still enough to map out variations in rainfall from month to month.

But, when we look at the number of rainfall records, it seems as though there were only a few hundred rain gauges before 1961. So what's going on?

The problem is that before 1961 there were actually thousands of rain gauges but the data has not been transferred from the original hand-written paper records to something digital so that we can use it.

This is where we need your help!

This project aims to fill in the gaps in our historical rainfall observation network. You will be shown images of rainfall data that have not yet been digitised and asked to transcribe the values and locations.

The aim is to better understand wet, dry and normal periods in our history and help water companies plan for every eventuality. For example, October 1903 was wet. Very wet. Wetter than any month we know about.

We think that October 1903 was much wetter overall than February 2020, which caused so much flooding in the UK. But it was not wetter everywhere and our existing observations are far fewer. More data will help us map out the variations with much greater precision. Other years such as 1921 and periods in the 1880s and 1890s were very dry and we need to understand why.

You can help us answer important questions about the British weather!