According to the Met Office, we have just had one of the wettest winters on record. Northern Ireland, it says, had its ninth wettest since records began in 1836:
But its claim in this very same report that Worcestershire had its wettest February has already been exposed by the Daily Sceptic as untrue – its own data confirm that February 1923 was much wetter.
The question therefore needs to be asked – can the Met Office claims be trusted?
As far as Northern Ireland is concerned, the answer appears to be no.
The Met Office makes clear that its records for the province date back to 1836. But it has no current weather stations which have been open that long. What it does have, however, is the high-quality meteorological weather station at Armagh Observatory, which has supplied data continuously since 1853.
Far from being one of the wettest winters in Armagh, 2025-26 was only the 20th wettest. Weather, of course, varies from one location to another; some coastal or high-altitude sites tend to be naturally wetter. But Northern Ireland is a relatively small country where you would not expect large differences in trends over winter as a whole.
And it is not just one anomalous winter. If you plot the Armagh data against what the Met Office claims are Northern Ireland rainfall data, the two have diverged by a huge amount over the years.
The Armagh trend has to all intents and purposes been flat throughout. But according to
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Lies, damned lies and the Met Office.
As a matter of principle, I don’t believe any elaborate statistics published by bureaucrats.
First of all, they are built up from masses of data which can be interpreted in any number of ways. The statistics are affected by all sorts of adjustments to the data, underlying assumptions and cherry picking that could lead to a wide range of results. And that’s before you factor in any ideological biases.
But even before that, what started out a long time ago as well intentioned attempts to gather data and understand the world better have morphed into instruments of control. Things like inflation, GDP, these days weather statistics, have been adopted by the ruling establishment and are presented to the world with an importance and significance which bear no relation to reality.
Which is not to say they are unimportant. They are indicators of what the establishment want you to believe and how the behaviour of the crowd is going to shift. But as information about what is really happening in the world? Useless, in my view.
And a cynic might say that it’s normal politics, being selective with the truth, etc.
Great post
My article above is exactly about this, that the data gathered about rainfall over the decades cannot possibly tell us anything useful about the reality of historic rainfall, and that all attempts to make it so are clearly malign in nature (facilitated by a lot of useful idiots).
The confluence of the Severn & Avon is at Tewkesbury in Worcestershire. Driving south along the M5 you will frequently see flooding at this point.
In past years Tewkesbury itself frequently has been inundated. This year not so. Maybe they’ve done a better job opening sluice gates up or down river, who knows, but this winter was a very unexceptional year for flooding.
Likewise, along the length of both the Severn & Avon, flooding was very unexceptional.
I hope one of DS’s writers on this topic is writing a book specifically about the Met Office’s temperature records and claims.
I wrote this, thirteen years ago:
https://public-highway.blogspot.com/2013/01/rainmasterall-since-records-began.html?m=1
They aren’t listening.