According to the British Rainfall publication in 1956, this new “record” of 213mm / 8.4 inches is not even a record for the month of June.
In June 1917, 9.56 inches fell at Bruton in Somerset.
The MET have never before published daily rainfall records by month, only by year.
A 2010 paper ‘Extreme rainfall in Cumbria, November 2009 – an assessment of storm rarity’ states:
“A new UK record was established at Seathwaite Farm, Borrowdale recently, when 316.4 mm of rainfall was recorded over the 24-hour period up to 00:00 on 20th November 2009.”
The notorious 1952 Lynmouth flood
(34 deaths) was 229mm of rain.
The record for any UK month is Martinstown, Dorset, which received 279mm in July 1955, a much higher amount.
That figure may have been exceeded
since 1956.
The famous Hampstead Heath event of 1975 might also have been comparable if the rain gauge had not become blocked
with hailstones.
Of course the MET doesn't tell people what the previous record was.
And the unprecedented choice of 10am as the start of a day looks like data mining -- to pick the particular 24 hour period that yielded the biggest rainfall number.
A "day" does not start at 10am, and end at 10am the next morning !
A hill area away from habitation is where this new daily measurement was made.
Hill areas had only monthly read gauges in the past.
The newer automatic recording stations can ‘find’ new records in the hills that were not measured before.
An example of that is the deluge of rain that affected Norfolk in August 1912.
Rain gauges were supposed to be read manually at 9am back then … but the rain doesn’t conveniently fit into that.
So the rain that fell on 25th, and continued into the 26th of August, was recorded on two separate days.
in reality the total rainfall in that event reached 210mm, largely in 24 hours.
Today the Met Office would pick that up as a ’24 hour record’, but in the old system of 9am daily reporting, the rainfall total would be divided between two days.
This fake "new record” is half way up a mountain in the Lake District, at Honister Pass -- same rain gauge which set the 24-hour “record” during Storm Desmond in 2015.
The gauge is about 1,000 feet above sea level.
It is dishonest to compare such high level sites, where rainfall is heavier, with lowland sites, such as Bruton and Martinstown.
Rainfall data only exist at Honister since 1970 -- and at least 15 years since then have incomplete records.
So we don't know whether higher daily rainfalls occurred there in those 15 years.
Taking measurements halfway up a mountain is dishonest.
It may be that lots of old records would exist at such heights, or in other locations where there were no measurements, simply because no people lived nearby who could get to the weather station, and record readings in such locations every day.
The number of people who would voluntarily live in places known to be the wettest, coldest or windiest in the country, would be very small, so the most extreme weather was rarely recorded.
Reports like this ARE misleading because up until automatic weather stations and rain gauges were developed, all rain was measured in manual gauges.
This meant the gauge had to be visited by an observer, the gauge opened up and the rain measured in a glass jar, marked with quantities.
The observer would inspect and judge the quantity of rain that had fallen.
This could only be done on a daily basis in locations where an observer was present – it meant that all daily-read gauges were close to habitations and largely at low altitudes.
There were a lot of gauges also in upland areas, but they were monthly gauges, that were only visited and the rain measured monthly.
It is only in the last decade or so that automatic gauges have become available that mean that even remote and upland areas can have the rain totals for daily (or even hourly or minute units) measured.
This means that simply by this new means of gathering data we have available rain monitoring from much wetter areas than previously.
In the past we would only have known monthly rainfall totals for these locations – now we can have hourly, daily, and 24 hour data, so records can appear to be made more regularly.
Historical daily totals are from lowlands, that are relatively drier.
Measurements were supposed to be 9am but no one double checked when the "meter reader" actually showed up.
Now we can measure rainfall totals from any one hour to another, so new records can be ‘made’ ... or they can be made up lies.
