"Paul C" wrote in message
...
Why do weather records only begin in 1914?

Emine Saner
Monday September 3, 2007
The Guardian

Actually, they didn't. While the Met Office seems keen on saying
"since records began in 1914" to describe any kind of record-busting
weather (such as 2007's "wettest summer"), it has records that go back
much further.

The England and Wales Precipitation series, which measures rainfall
and snow, goes back to 1766, and the Central England Temperature
series, which covers the temperature from the south Midlands to
Lancashire, is the longest-running record in the world, dating from
1659.

"They were kept on a personal basis by amateur meteorologists," says
Sancha Lancaster, a spokeswoman for the Met Office. "We have an
archive here of thousands of people's weather diaries. Many don't just
record the weather, they also record the effects on wildlife and
plants. It takes years to quality-control them and put the data on to
a computer."

Statisticians work out whether the entries are reliable, which is why
the record going back to 1914 - when observation stations became more
uniform in the way they collected data - is almost always the one
used. The Met Office says this is the only reliable one (and it gives
a picture of the UK as a whole).

But if records go back less than 100 years, can we really set much
store by so-called freak events such as the floods this summer? The
fact that we do irritates Philip Eden, a weather historian. "Saying it
is 'unprecedented' allows the people who look after our infrastructure
a ready-made excuse for not being able to deal with [extreme weather].
It is not unprecedented."

Eden uses records going back to 1727 and says there have been 15
summers wetter than this one. "The 16th wettest summer on record
doesn't make such a good headline, does it?"


I don't usually care much for the Guardian. But they are quite right on this
point.