UK Historical Rainfall Dataset
Monthly, seasonal and annual rainfall for the United Kingdom, its four nations and the twelve Met Office climate districts, running from 1836 to the present. One of the longest continuous instrumental rainfall records available anywhere under an open licence.
Methodology
Ingested directly from the Met Office HadUK-Grid areal series, which are computed by the Met Office from the national rain-gauge network interpolated to a 1 km grid and then averaged over each area. Hydrionis parses the published fixed-width series by reading column positions from the header row, so a change in the publisher’s layout fails loudly rather than shifting values between months. Values are stored at the area they were reported for and are never redistributed to administrative units the Met Office did not report.
What this dataset cannot tell you
Coverage
| Subjects | United Kingdom, four nations, twelve Met Office climate districts — 375 held |
|---|---|
| Period | 1836–2026 |
| Units | mm |
| Update cadence | Monthly |
| Identifier | uk-historical-rainfall v1.0.0 |
Fields
Data dictionary →Every metric this dataset carries, with the unit it is stored in and the geography level it is reported at. Full definitions are in the data dictionary.
| Identifier | Field | Unit | Reported at |
|---|---|---|---|
precipitation-annual | Annual precipitation | mm | monitoring-station, grid-cell |
precipitation-monthly | Monthly precipitation | mm | monitoring-station, grid-cell |
precipitation-seasonal | Seasonal precipitation | mm | monitoring-station, grid-cell |
Rights and access
Licence position
Open with attribution. Derivative use true; redistribution true; commercial reuse true.
Attribution required:
- Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- HadUK-Grid is available under the Open Government Licence via the CEDA archive, which requires free registration. Other Met Office products, including forecast and commercial services, are separately licensed and are not open.
Permitted uses
- Public display
- Derived analysis
- API delivery
- Bulk download
- Commercial use
Available to: Public, Developer, Research, Professional, Enterprise. These follow from the rights of the contributing publishers, not from a Hydrionis pricing decision — no access tier can widen what a publisher withheld.
Contributing sources
Suggested citation
Hydrionis (2026), UK Historical Rainfall Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/uk-historical-rainfall/
Cite the version. Hydrionis datasets change as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without a version cannot be checked later.
Changelog
Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-24
First release. Replaces the hand-transcribed rainfall normals carried before automated ingestion.
Corrections
- Reference normals are now computed from the full 1991–2020 series rather than transcribed. The computed England normal is 870 mm against the previously published 838 mm — a 3.8% correction.
Additions
- Full monthly, seasonal and annual series from 1836 for 17 areas.
- Twelve Met Office climate districts added as first-class geographies.
Getting the data
- precipitation observations from SEPA (117,966 rows) (CSV)
- precipitation observations from Met Office (55,369 rows) (CSV)
Machine-readable metadata for this dataset is at /api/v1/datasets/uk-historical-rainfall.json. For bulk extracts, higher-volume access or commercial licensing, see data enquiries.