Which is the rainiest city in the UK?

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So, we had some er... feedback from our last post regarding rainwater harvesting in the North West, but as awesome as the analysis was it didn't answer the question on everyone's lips:

Which is the rainiest city in the UK, is it Manchester?

So back to the drawing board it seems. This actually would be straightforward, but the wording "rainiest" is not entirely helpful.

Do we mean in which city is the most precipitation recorded? Or in which city is rainfall most frequent? Or a mixture of the two?

Again we took a look at the information out there and there are a number of articles by tabloids and broadsheets all published in October 2014. The articles appear to focus on total recorded rainfall (mm) as a measure of "rainyness" although the the MEN does include total number of rain days.

We decided to use the Met Office data to obtain rainfall statistics for each city to understand where they ranked against each other.

In the process we learnt (Wiki Alert!) that there are currently a total of 69 such cities in the United Kingdom: 51 in England, 7 in Scotland, 6 in Wales, and 5 in Northern Ireland. We've tried to include most UK cities and apologise in advance if your city is not on the list! Please don't be offended!

We decided to introduce a new measure.. wait for it the "freeflush factor" - yes! A unitless metric for the measure of "rainyness". This is simply a product of total rainfall and rain days normalised to the median (Dundee) which should provide a measure of how "rainy" a place is! Greater than 1 represents being rainier than the median whilst less than 1 less rainy -simplez!

The table below can be sorted by total rainfall, days of rainfall or the freeflush factor!

City	Rainfall(mm)	Days of rainfall >1 mm	freeflush factor f³
Glasgow	1124	170	2.14
St David	1138	151	1.92
Cardiff	1152	149	1.91
Newry	1019	167	1.89
Bangor	1100	151	1.85
Truro	1061	151	1.79
Preston	1034	153	1.77
Bradford	1024	152	1.74
Leeds	1024	152	1.74
Swansea	999	148	1.65
Belfast	944	156	1.64
Plymouth	1007	142	1.60
Lisburn	902	155	1.56
Newport	910	147	1.49
Manchester	867	152	1.47
Salford	867	152	1.47
Gloucester	843	146	1.37
Liverpool	837	144	1.35
St Asaph	814	146	1.32
Stoke on Trent	806	144	1.29
Aberdeen	815	139	1.26
Sheffield	835	132	1.23
Stirling	748	146	1.22
Perth	811	134	1.21
Bath	814	132	1.19
Birmingham	805	131	1.18
Inverness	733	143	1.17
Bristol	802	126	1.13
Chester	726	136	1.10
Exeter	785	121	1.06
Salisbury	749	122	1.02
Dundee	722	124	1.00
Southampton	779	115	1.00
Derby	709	124	0.98
Nottingham	709	124	0.98
Edinburgh	704	124	0.98
Winchester	747	116	0.97
Wells	709	122	0.97
Coventry	700	124	0.96
Lichfield	681	125	0.95
Wolverhamton	681	125	0.95
St Albans	712	119	0.94
Kingston upon Hull	680	123	0.93
Portsmouth	727	115	0.93
Norwich	674	123	0.92
Leicester	675	121	0.91
Durham	651	122	0.89
Hereford	665	115	0.85
Oxford	660	116	0.85
Ripon	643	118	0.85
York	626	117	0.82
Canterbury	646	110	0.79
Lincoln	615	115	0.79
Worcester	606	114	0.77
Wakefield	603	114	0.77
Peterborough	609	113	0.77
Newcastle upon Tyne	597	110	0.73
Sunderland	597	110	0.73
Chelmsford	592	108	0.71
Derry	571	109	0.69
Ely	574	108	0.69
Cambridge	568	108	0.68
London	557	109	0.68

It turns out Manchester is not the rainiest city! In fact, it's 15th or 8th depending on which measure is used.

Of the major cities Glasgow, Cardiff and Leeds all sit above Manchester in "rainyness". Glasgow appears to be the UK's rainest city since it appears 1st in two of the three measures considered (days of rainfall and freeflush factor).

London and Cambridge appear to be the least rainiest cities.

So there you have it, based on the Met Office data and this analysis considering both magnitude and frequency of rainfall Glasgow is the UK's rainiest city and Manchester is not!

Regardless of whether you're in a wet or dry city there's always benefits to rainwater harvesting, check out some of our products here.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for future posts please leave a note below or contact us.

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