UK Met Office Found To Be Inventing N Ireland Rainfall Stats
According to the Met Office, we have just had one of the wettest winters on record
Northern Ireland, they say, had its ninth wettest since records began in 1836:
Source: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk
But their claim in this very same report that Worcestershire had its wettest February has already been exposed by the Daily Sceptic as untrue – their own data confirms that February 1929 was much wetter, as was February 1878 in Northern Ireland.
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 make clear that their records for the province date back to 1836. But they have no current weather stations which have been open that long. What they do 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 claim is 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 the Met Office, Northern Ireland winters overall have been getting considerably wetter.
The massive discrepancy between Armagh and the country as a whole cannot be satisfactorily explained by local variability. There is no reason why long-term rainfall trends in Armagh should be much different to the rest of the province.
Instead, the discrepancy is, it seems, due to the Met Office’s ‘homogenisation’ process.
As the chart below shows, until the 1960s, Northern Ireland rainfall was typically about 100mm higher than Armagh’s. After 1970, the difference has consistently been higher than 100mm. This latest winter has a difference of 123mm.
Of the 29 stations currently operational, 25 have only been open since 1960. Most of these were set up between the 1960s and 80s, the time when the Armagh and NI graphs began to significantly diverge:
Armagh is in a fairly central position inland and therefore tends to be drier than the coastal and hill locations. However, most of the more recently opened stations have wetter micro-climates and higher average rainfall, as the chart below shows:
Take Ballypatrick Forest, for example, which opened in 1961. It’s situated on a 500ft windswept hill, just three miles from the exposed north coast. Unsurprisingly it is one of the wettest places in Northern Ireland.
In the early days, the Northern Ireland average was largely based on Armagh data and other drier sites around Belfast. When much wetter sites were introduced from 1960 onwards, the country-wide average rainfall increased – not because of heavier rainfall, but because of the Met Office’s computer modelling practice.
The facts are clear.
The Met Office have only ONE long term meteorological site in Northern Ireland, Armagh, and there has been no upward trend in winter rainfall there since 1853. (Edenfel, by the way, which opened in 1865, only has sparse data).
They have no actual data from ANY SITES, which support their “ninth wettest since 1836 claim”.
And yet, we are expected to believe what they tell us and treat it as factual truth.
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