Climatological Returns

Most records typically include the following weather elements:

• Air temperature at 1.25m above the ground
• Air temperature over a grass surface or its artificial equivalent
• Air temperature over a concrete surface
• Soil temperature at 0.1m, 0.3m and 1.0m below the ground level
• Relative humidity at 1.25m above the ground
• Amount of rainfall
• Depth of lying snow
• Mean wind speed, mean wind direction and maximum gust at 10m above the ground
• Atmospheris pressure at the station level and reduced to mean sea level
• Surface barometric pressure
• Visibility
• Amount and type of cloud
• Height of cloud base
• Duration of sunshine
• Descriptive weather diary

Throughout the UK there is a network of official climate stations at which regular daily observations are made. These stations are on average located just 40 km apart from each other thus ensuring that the weather typically associated with low pressure and frontal systems are recorded. The numerous records produced by these station observations are stored here at the archive in paper format from the nineteenth century right up to 2010 for some sites and they offer a tremendous resource for research.