Updated: 2026-09-27
August 1947. The gauges at the Paisley weather station, the nearest official measurement point to Glasgow, recorded a rainfall total of 0.0 mm for the entire calendar month.
Total monthly rainfall — the driest month in the station's record
The point of measurement closest to Glasgow is the Paisley station in Renfrewshire, sitting at 32 m above sea level, about 11.4 km from the city. The records below are its records — not a direct measurement of Glasgow itself. The city's own rainfall can differ from Paisley's depending on local factors such as differences in elevation, proximity to the Firth of Clyde, and the sheltering effect of the surrounding hills, so treat these figures as the best available reference rather than an exact reading for Glasgow.
The Met Office record for Paisley begins on 2 January 1914 and runs through 31 December 2010 for the purposes of this analysis. Over those years, the single driest month was August 1947, which ended with 0.0 mm of precipitation. A completely rainless calendar month in a part of the country usually associated with wet, changeable Atlantic weather is an unusual outcome, and it has not been matched at this station in the decades since.
The table below ranks the five driest calendar months in the Paisley series, with each month's accumulated rainfall. Every month shown is a single month — there is no case of two or more consecutive dry months appearing in this top-five list, so the "drought" in this record is measured month by month, not as a multi-month dry spell.
| Rank | Month | Consecutive dry months | Rainfall total (mm) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | August 1947 | 1 | 0.0 |
| 2 | February 1932 | 1 | 1.1 |
| 3 | April 1974 | 1 | 4.8 |
| 4 | May 1978 | 1 | 7.0 |
| 5 | May 1991 | 1 | 9.1 |
The gap between the first and second entries is striking in context: August 1947 recorded 0.0 mm, while February 1932 — the next driest month — recorded 1.1 mm. Both months sit far below the 4.8 mm recorded in April 1974, the third entry on the list. The remaining two months, May 1978 at 7.0 mm and May 1991 at 9.1 mm, complete the set.
What stands out across these five months is their spread through the calendar. Two fall in May, one in February, one in April and one in August. This is not a simple picture of a single dry season: the station's driest months have occurred in spring, in late winter and in high summer across different decades of the twentieth century.
August 1947 stands alone at the top of the list. A reading of 0.0 mm means the precipitation gauge registered nothing across the whole month. For a station in the west of central Scotland, where Atlantic weather systems normally deliver frequent rain-bearing fronts, a rainless August is the kind of event that gets remembered locally and shows up in the record books long after it happens.
The month has not been beaten in the years since. The closest any other month has come is February 1932, at 1.1 mm, and that was more than a decade and a half earlier. In the decades that followed August 1947, no calendar month at Paisley recorded less rainfall than that 0.0 mm total.
It is worth being clear about what this ranking does and does not show. Each entry in the table is an individual dry month, with a value of 1 for consecutive dry months. There is no run of two, three or more back-to-back dry months anywhere in this top-five list. So when people ask about the "longest drought" at this station, the honest answer from the data is that the most extreme dry period is a single calendar month — August 1947 — rather than a long stretch of consecutive dry months.
Across the full record from 1914 to 2010, these five months represent the driest points in the series. The bulk of the station's history sits in the wetter, more typical range for this part of Scotland, which makes the August 1947 reading stand out all the more sharply. A single month with 0.0 mm of rain is a rare outcome even in a record stretching across most of a century.
For anyone planning outdoor events, travel or fieldwork in the Glasgow area, the practical takeaway from the Met Office numbers is this: extreme dryness at Paisley is a rarity, not a pattern. If you are looking at this station's archive for evidence of long, multi-month dry spells, the data does not supply one in the five driest months listed here. It supplies one remarkable month — August 1947 — and four other notably dry months scattered across the decades.
Source: Met Office MIDAS archive. Station: Paisley, Renfrewshire, at 32 m elevation. Period covered: 1914–2010. The figures above describe the nearest official measurement point to Glasgow, not the city itself.
HistoClima Tools: discover the weather on the day you were born, your wedding day, or your birthday-week statistics.
AI-assisted content from official Met Office data, automatically verified. 🤖 IA-assisted content · Art. 50 EU AI Act
© 2026 HistoClima · data: Met Office (OGL v3.0) · not affiliated with Met Office · citation permitted with source.