Is this miserable London weather for real?!

Hi, this is Elliot. I work as a developer on Datawrapper’s data visualization code. Today I’m making some light conversation about the weather.

The U.K. was never known for its sunny climate, but my American wife — a frequent source of inspiration for my past Weekly Charts — has been appalled by the miserable weather since she moved here two years ago.

Ever the optimist in our relationship, I was convinced that these years were surely worse than usual and things would look up soon. So I pulled the historical weather datasets freely accessible from the Met Office’s website, and indeed: In London, the majority of months over the past two years have been unusually wet and cloudy.

Can we expect better conditions to return soon? The good news for my wife (and me, and everyone else living in London) is that there doesn’t appear to be any medium-term trend towards rainier and cloudier weather:

However, much like the rest of the world, the U.K.’s climate is expected to shift over the coming decades as the result of human activity, making our notoriously bleak weather even more miserable. The Met Office projects that increased global temperatures will result in higher total rainfall each year; winters are expected to become wetter, and summers will see less frequent but heavier rain. And that’s far from the worst of the effects: Flooding, forest fires, and other extreme weather events are already occurring more frequently in Britain as around the world.

All of this, of course, is under the assumption that we aren’t able to make big reductions in our fossil fuel emissions. Today at least, it is cold but sunny in London. I’ll take advantage of it while I still can.

Well that sure was a depressing conclusion. Come back next week for what will hopefully be a more uplifting chart from Michi.