Updated: 2026-09-27
The longest run of dry months ever measured at Leeds Weather Centre lasted 2 months running across 10.9 mm of total rainfall, a spell that began in February 1993 and only released its grip in March 1993. For a city that normally lives under Atlantic fronts, two back-to-back months that between them delivered less rain than a single wet afternoon is the standout dryness signal in the record.
2 consecutive dry months — February 1993 to March 1993, with 10.9 mm of accumulated rainfall across the entire spell.
Meteorologists draw a line between the slow, soil-deep drought that builds over a whole season and the short, sharp dry spells that show up in monthly rainfall totals. This page deals with the second kind: runs of consecutive calendar months that each finished exceptionally dry at Leeds Weather Centre, the Met Office station that anchors the city's long-term rainfall series.
Measured that way, Leeds has one clear headline event. February and March 1993 link together into 2 consecutive dry months, and the rain gauge recorded just 10.9 mm across both of them combined. That is the longest such run in the archive, and it has not been matched since.
The table below lists every multi-month dry spell that surfaces in the Leeds record, ordered by length. Two entries appear — one a two-month run, the other a single very dry month that stands out on its own for how little fell.
| Start month | End month | Consecutive dry months | Accumulated rainfall (mm) |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 1993 | March 1993 | 2 | 10.9 |
| August 1995 | August 1995 | 1 | 7.9 |
The winter of 1993 is the benchmark. Two months in a row came in dry enough to qualify, and the combined rainfall across February 1993 and March 1993 reached only 10.9 mm. Anyone who lived through that stretch in Leeds will remember the hard, bright, ridged-up weather: frost on the ground, roads staying dry, and a sky that refused to deliver. In a city whose weather is defined by moist westerly air, a two-month block that dry is the sort of thing that gets written down.
What makes the 1993 event the record is not just how little rain fell, but that the dryness was sustained. February 1993 was dry; the following month stayed dry too. That linkage — one dry month handing the baton to the next — is exactly what turns a dry spell into a documented drought run.
The other entry in the record is different in character. August 1995 produced just 7.9 mm, which is a lower monthly total than either month inside the 1993 run. But it stands alone: the dryness did not extend into the surrounding months, so it counts as 1 consecutive dry month rather than a sequence. Had July or September 1995 also turned dry, the summer of 1995 would have topped the table; instead it is remembered as one remarkably parched August.
It helps to keep two questions separate. How long was the dry spell? And how little rain fell in a single month?
Those two facts pull in slightly different directions, which is typical of British rainfall records. A single month can be astonishingly dry without extending into a spell, and a spell can hold the "longest" title even when neither of its individual months is the absolute driest on the books. In Leeds, both things are true at once, and they happened two years apart.
Leeds sits low in the landscape, in a basin that is shielded from some of the heaviest rain-bearing winds by higher ground to the west. That positioning means the city does not catch the full force of every Atlantic front funneled across northern England. When the prevailing westerly flow weakens and high pressure settles over the country instead, the rain simply stops arriving. Persistent blocking patterns — a stubborn area of high pressure parked nearby — are the classic ingredient behind runs like February and March 1993.
Under that setup, day after day passes without significant rainfall. Individually, none of those days is remarkable. Cumulatively, they add up to a month — or in the 1993 case, to two months — of near-absent rain. That is how a drought run gets its start in a city that most people associate with grey skies rather than dry ones.
For a two-month run to be broken, Leeds would need three consecutive dry months, or a fresh two-month run that undercuts the 10.9 mm total. Both are tough asks. The monthly rainfall pattern in the region is variable but rarely tends toward long unbroken dry sequences, because moist air off the Atlantic tends to reassert itself within weeks. That is why February and March 1993 still stand at the top — the months linked together, and the rain held off across the whole stretch.
All figures on this page come from the Met Office station at Leeds Weather Centre, a site at 64 m above sea level whose records feed into the national MIDAS archive. Daily rainfall observations from the station have been consolidated into monthly totals and run through the full series to flag every spell of consecutive dry months, so the two entries above are read directly from the record rather than estimated.
Source: Met Office — Leeds Weather Centre station, 1986–2002.
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