Version: 1.0 | Published: 8 May 2026 | Updated: 7 days ago
Precipitation per MSOA in 2020
Dataset
Summary
Description:
This dataset provides comprehensive precipitation indicators aggregated to MSOA-equivalent geographies for the United Kingdom for 2020. The data is created from the HadUK-Grid dataset, a quality controlled gridded climate product produced by the Met Office at 1km spatial resolution (v1.3.1.ceda, 1836-2024). The dataset includes mean annual rainfall depth in mm, seasonal mean rainfall depth (winter, spring, summer, and autumn), annual precipitation anomalies, both absolute (mm difference from historical baseline) and standardised (divided by historical standard deviation), extreme rainfall indicators, including the number of days exceeding 4 standard deviations above the historical daily mean. Annual and seasonal values were aggregated from raster to MSOA using an area weighted mean. Extreme event indicators were first calculated at the pixel level using daily data and then aggregated to MSOA level.
Contact Point:
Documentation
Documentation:
The dataset contains the following variables: 'dt_zn_c' (MSOA zone code identifier); 'dt_zn_n' (MSOA zone name); 'rainfall_annual_mm' (mean annual rainfall depth in mm, area-weighted mean across pixels); 'winter_rainfall' (mean winter season rainfall depth in mm); 'spring_rainfall' (mean spring season rainfall depth in mm); 'summer_rainfall' (mean summer season rainfall depth in mm); 'autumn_rainfall' (mean autumn season rainfall depth in mm); 'annual_anomaly_abs' (absolute annual precipitation anomaly from historical baseline in mm); 'annual_anomaly_std' (standardised annual precipitation anomaly); 'extreme_days_4sd' (number of days where daily rainfall exceeded 4 standard deviations above historical mean); 'year' (reference year).
Coverage
Spatial
Spatial Coverage:
United Kingdom
Geographical Levels:
MSOA
Temporal
Start Date:
Annual: 01-01-2020:31-12-2020; Summer: 01-06-2020:31-08-2020; Winter:
01-12-2020:28-02-2021; Baseline: 01-01-1899:31-12-1900
Frequency:
1.6MB, 93.1MB
Date of Latest Release:
08 May 2026
Date of First Release:
01 May 2026
Provenance
Origin
Purpose:
Wales, and Scotland depending on ground-station coverage, with slightly lower
station density in Northern Ireland and remote areas. Temporal standard
deviations capture seasonal precipitation variation. It is important to note
that the underlying input data has a spatial resolution of 1km x 1km, which
should be considered when interpreting results for administrative areas finer
than this scale. Further technical details are available in the HadUK-Grid
documentation at:
https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/f02cc6ddd92f45b18b9ab6ab544df7d9
Source:
The underlying data source is the HadUK-Grid dataset, a comprehensive collection of gridded climate observations produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Science and Services. HadUK-Grid combines quality-controlled observations from the UK Met Office's weather station observations and uses natural neighbour interpolation to generate a regular 1km grid. The dataset is described in: Hollis, D., McCarthy, M., Kendon, M., Legg, T., Simpson, I. (2019): HadUK-Grid—A new UK dataset of gridded climate observations. Geoscience data journal, 6(2), 151-159. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/gdj3.78. Precipitation anomalies were calculated by comparing 2020 annual mean precipitation against the 1899-1900 baseline period mean and standard deviation for each pixel and then aggregate to the MSOA. The aggregation was performed using the MSOA-equivalent boundaries (2021) by calculating the weighted mean of all grid cells falling within each Middle Super Output Area (MSOA) geography.
Collection Status:
1.0
Author 1
Name Organisation:
Imago: Data Service for Imagery
Family Name Person:
Martina Pardy
Access and Governance
Usage
Data Use Requirements:
None
Access
Access Rights:
CC-BY-4.0
Licence:
CC-BY-4.0
Format and Standards
Estimated Dataset Size:
1.6MB, 93.1MB
Vocabulary Encoding Scheme:
EPSG:27700, OSGB36/British National Grid