Radcliffe Meteorological Station Oxford

Online monthly precipitation dataset - updated to Dec 2023

This file contains monthly, annual and seasonal totals of precipitation (mostly rainfall including drizzle, fog etc but also melted snowfall), from January 1767 to date.

The file format is CSV (comma separated variable), without Copyright restrictions.

Please let us know < email to rms@ouce.ox.ac.uk > should you find any errors in these datasets.

Periods of record
Monthly rainfall totals are available for sites in Oxford from 1767, including partial records from the Radcliffe Observatory site from 1772; daily records are available from 1827. For source information see Burt & Burt 2019, Oxford Weather and Climate since 1767, Appendix 1. From January 1827, the monthly totals are the sum of the daily values. Estimates have been made to cover very minor periods of missing data.

Records may differ slightly from previously published data owing to inclusion of new information or corrections.

Records prior to 1972 have been converted to millimetres (rounded to one decimal place) from inches: there may be minor differences between the sum of daily values and the monthly total owing to cumulative rounding errors.

Full details on the source and derivation of the records, raingauge exposures, times of observations etc are given in Oxford Weather and Climate since 1767, Appendix 1. 

Dataset may be subject to changes, and will be updated periodically with current data.

If you use these datasets in publications, please cite the source as:

Oxford Weather and Climate since 1767 by Stephen Burt and Tim Burt, published by Oxford University Press, 2019.

Please let us know < email to rms@ouce.ox.ac.uk > should you find any errors in these datasets.

DATASET DOCUMENTATION
YYYY - Year (four digits). First record 1767
Jan   Monthly total precipitation at the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford. Units millimetres and tenths.
Feb, Mar etc   similarly for each month of the year
Annual   Total annual precipitation at the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford (sum of 12 monthly values). Units millimetres and tenths.
% 1981-2010 average   Annual total as a percentage of the 1981-2010 average, calculated to 1 decimal place.
YYYY - Year (four digits) repeated. First record 1767
Winter - Seasonal total precipitation at the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford. Units millimetres and tenths. Winter is the sum of Dec, Jan, Feb monthly totals, dated to the January year. Units millimetres and tenths. (Winter 1767 is missing as there is no monthly precipitation total for December 1766)
Spring   ditto, for March-April-May
Summer   ditto, June-July-August
Autumn   ditto, Sept, Oct, Nov