Is Extreme Daily Rainfall Getting Worse In England?

By Paul Homewood

As expected, the media has been full of claims that This week’s floods in S Yorkshire were due to global warming. I even has my old neighbour saying we “never used to have rain like this” and how it was “tropical”.

There is an easy way, however, to check if daily rainfall is getting more extreme in England. KNMI’s Climate Explorer produces graphs of daily rainfall, and below are all of the long running sites in England, with at least 80 years data. (Data for most stations goes up to 2017):

https://climexp.knmi.nl/getstations.cgi

Inevitably it is a mixed bag, but ironically Sheffield is the only station where the data shows a noticeable upward trend. Other northern sites such as Bradford and Durham don’t offer evidence of any such trend.

Southern stations, such as Oxford and Rothamsted, seem to show extreme daily rainfall on the decrease.

The most extreme events are, of course, still only weather events, so we should not read too much into any of the charts.

But they do seem to give the lie to the claim that global warming is making heavy rainfall worse.