Precipitation in Britain: An analysis of area‐average data updated to 1989

Abstract

The present work is a geographical extension and update of our previous analysis of spatial and temporal variations in precipitation over England and Wales. In this study the UK is divided into nine regions of coherent precipitation variability on the basis of our earlier principal components analysis. Daily and monthly time‐series are assembled for seven sites within each region, and area‐average series and statistics are computed. We investigate correlations among the sites within each region, among regions on daily to annual time‐scales. Monthly time‐series spanning the period 1931–1989 for England and Wales, for Scotland and for Northern Ireland are calculated by further combining the nine regions. No long‐term trends are apparent.