ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the trends and changes in the temperature and rainfall record of the observatory. Durham University Observatory has provided a long record of observations of weather conditions in the north-east of England. Durham has the advantage that its site has been relatively unchanged since the building of the observatory in the middle of the last century, and is essentially a rural one. The temporal dependencies of precipitation at Durham were analysed by examining autocorrelation functions of annual and monthly rainfall. Meteorological series often show cyclical or quasi-cyclical change. The rainfall record for Durham shows few dependencies and little cyclical change. It appears to be a stationary series with a wide range of annual totals about the mean. The correlogram and spectral density analyses show that no statistically significant cycles emerge from the rainfall and temperature data, although the relative peaks are useful indications of trends.
