Very, very, occasionally, when it rains in Austria, an Austrian friend will say to me “Englisches Wetter, ha ha!” I smile politely. The UK is famously rainy, correct? We’ve all read Sherlock Holmes stories where it seems to be raining and foggy all the time. In “Asterix in Britain”, Asterix asks the Briton, Anticlimax, as they arrive in a thick fog: ‘Do you often get fog like that?’ Anticlimax replies ‘Goodness, no, old chap!… only when it isn’t raining.’
Wonderful stuff.
The other day, however, an Austrian friend told me that actually, Austria is just as rainy as the UK. “Aha!” I thought. So I did a bit of digging.
It actually proved harder than I imagined to find consistent data on this subject. But the site “Weather Averages” advertises that you can “compare average climate between two cities”. So I entered Vienna and London. The results for “average rainfall for Vienna, Austria vs London, UK” were:
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vienna, Austria | 37 mm | 39 mm | 46 mm | 52 mm | 62 mm | 70 mm | 68 mm | 58 mm | 54 mm | 40 mm | 50 mm | 44 mm | 620 mm |
| London, UK | 42 mm | 36 mm | 40 mm | 40 mm | 45 mm | 47 mm | 35 mm | 54 mm | 51 mm | 61 mm | 58 mm | 48 mm | 558 mm |
So: around 11% more rain in Vienna (dry-ish winters) than London (dry-ish summers). I also looked at “average rainy days” for the two cities. Results:
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vienna, Austria | 7 days | 8 days | 8 days | 8 days | 8 days | 9 days | 9 days | 8 days | 7 days | 6 days | 8 days | 8 days | 95 days |
| London, UK | 11 days | 8 days | 10 days | 9 days | 9 days | 7 days | 6 days | 8 days | 9 days | 11 days | 11 days | 10 days | 110 days |
So: 16% more rainy days in London than Vienna.
Then I looked at this map:
image: European Environment Agency (EEA)
The map reminded me that London and Vienna are not the wettest cities in either the UK or Austria. What about two cities which are rainier? I wanted to compare Manchester (my home town) with Salzburg (a place I visit often, and where, I note, filming of “The Sound of Music” in 1964 was extended from 6 weeks to 11 due to rain) but the latter wasn’t on the web-site so I tried Innsbruck. Results for average rainfall:
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innsbruck, Austria | 44 mm | 41 mm | 56 mm | 58 mm | 87 mm | 110 mm | 137 mm | 111 mm | 78 mm | 57 mm | 63 mm | 53 mm | 896 mm |
| Manchester, UK | 82 mm | 52 mm | 59 mm | 61 mm | 55 mm | 64 mm | 67 mm | 79 mm | 80 mm | 99 mm | 80 mm | 90 mm | 867 mm |
Both cities are wetter than London or Vienna, and receive similar amounts of precipitation. Innsbruck is slightly wetter, with a damper summer and a drier winter. But Manchester has more “average rainy days”:
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innsbruck, Austria | 7 days | 7 days | 9 days | 10 days | 11 days | 13 days | 14 days | 13 days | 9 days | 8 days | 9 days | 9 days | 118 days |
| Manchester, UK | 16 days | 11 days | 13 days | 12 days | 11 days | 10 days | 12 days | 13 days | 12 days | 14 days | 14 days | 14 days | 152 days |
As for the countries as a whole, data from the World Bank puts Austria and the UK in the same category, with slightly higher annual precipitation in the UK (1220mm) than Austria (1110mm). The fact these figures are both so much higher than the figures for cities above, meanwhile, raises its own set of questions about averages and rain-swept mountains.
What conclusions can we draw from all this? I think my main conclusion is that making comparisons is difficult (indeed, Oscar Wilde remarked, “Comparisons are odious”). Next time someone makes a remark about “Englisches Wetter” I shall be well-equipped to open a discussion, but will probably still just smile and nod politely.
Two other thoughts. First, frequent fog in the UK’s large cities – the so-called “pea-soupers” – was the result of air pollution caused by large-scale burning of coal in fireplaces following the industrial revolution. After the “Great smog of 1952”, the Clean Air Act 1956 introduced numerous measures to reduce air pollution; and by the 1970s, when I moved to London, fog had disappeared. Asterix in Britain was published in 1965.
Finally, which of the following cities has the most rain: London, Vienna, or Rome? In fact, Rome receives far more rainfall than either Vienna or London. But it is also warmer, and far sunnier. Take your pick.