A digital archive of extreme rainfalls in the British Isles from 1866 to 1968 based on British Rainfall

摘要

The 2007 UK summer floods have once again prompted the question whether extreme events are becoming more frequent as a feature of climate change. The flood events were widely reported in the media with unquantified references to the heaviest-ever rainfall and the wettest summer on record. The monitoring data now show that the period May, June and July was the wettest on record (Marsh and Hannaford, 2008), but the individual daily totals are not unusual compared with historical extreme rainfall records. It is often the case that extreme meteorological and hydrological events are quickly forgotten by the general public and when events do occur, they are often described as the worst in living memory. A new digital archive has been compiled as part of acurrent, government-funded research project through the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Flood Riskfrom Extreme Events (FREE) programme. This article describes the original paper archive from which the digital data has been sourced and the types of data extracted; it also provides a preliminary analysis of some of the features of the data.