Modelling monthly patterns in regional rainfall for the United Kingdom: a time series analysis of the Rainfall Rescue data

AbstractIn March 2020 the Rainfall Rescue project was launched on the Zooniverse platform with the aim of transcribing 66,000 sheets of rainfall observations into digital form. The associated website, RainfallRescue.org, received widespread media interest and, within 16 days, the complete set of sheets had been digitised by over 16,000 volunteer ‘citizen scientists’. The project has led to new monthly rainfall estimates for the U.K. and its ten regions being made available to download and time series analyses of these new rainfall data are reported in this paper. Using a seasonal linear trends model fitted to power transformed rainfall data, it is found that over the period 1836 to 2021 winters have become progressively wetter and fluctuations in monthly rainfall more pronounced the further west and north you move in the U.K., with little or no change in summer rainfall.