From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

I published this graph the other day. It showed that January 2026 was nowhere near as wet as a lot of other months in Northern Ireland, despite the BBC’s claim otherwise.

But the graph also indicated that wet months have become more common since the 1960s. It is a step change, and I am always deeply suspicious of step changes.

It turns out that before 1960, there were just six weather stations which are still in use in Northern Ireland, ones that are used for climate purposes. Then came a splurge:

It is not an exaggeration to say that the dataset since 1960 bears no resemblance at all to what went before. No matter how much you homogenise, no matter what sophisticated computer models you run, rainfall trends since 1960 cannot be compared with those before. The station mix is completely different.

The four oldest stations, Armagh (1836), Edenfel (1865), Aldergrove (1926) and Hillsborough (1930) are all still in use and offer good, long term rainfall data. So why not simply use these for long term trends?

The Met Office is obsessed with calculating the “average” temperature or rainfall for an entire country. In reality, there is no such thing. It is a mirage, a chimera. And in doing so, they introduce all sorts of anomalies, arising from station changes, UHI, poor siting and simply comparing sites that are radically different.

Ballypatrick, for instance, was opened in 1961. It is a high altitude, coastal site, prone to heavy rain, which often features at the top of rainfall lists, as does Katesbridge, opened in 1983, which is near the coast.

How can sites like these be compared with the older sites, which are in much different geographical, often drier locations?

So, let’s look at the wettest months at Armagh, and compare with our Northern Ireland graph at the top:

You will see straightaway that Armagh plots months with 140mm or more, rather than 190mm. This is deliberate – rainfall last month in Armagh was 140mm, compared to the national total of 195.6mm. This should tell us that many of the newer sites are intrinsically wetter than Armagh, which of course should automatically invalidate long term trends.

But the Armagh graph also shows no evidence of that step change in the 1970s, which appears to be simply an artifact of changing station mix.

So, let’s finish by looking at the annual rainfall trends:

There is no comparison!

According to the Met Office, rainfall in Northern Ireland has been steadily increasing throughout the record. Yet the Armagh Observatory data confirms there is no long-term trend whatsoever.

We know that the Met Office’s long term temperature record is massively corrupted by poor siting and UHI. It seems that their rainfall datasets are also equally corrupted and worthless.