How we talk about the weather / Explained: How bad British weather really is

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Wet, cold, windy. Just how bad is British weather? Let's ask an expert.

And I have found someone who knows all about the weather, meteorologist and BBC weather presenter, Simon King.

Hello.

Welcome.

Thank you.

So, I have a question for you, which is, does it really rain that much in Britain? Because that's what everyone thinks.

And that's a very good myth. It is seen as quite a cloudy, rainy sort of country. Let me explain why, first of all, because we've got a big ocean to the west of us, the Atlantic, there's lots of moisture. And so, when you get weather systems coming across the Atlantic, it picks up all that moisture and it rains, particularly in northern and western parts of the UK. so that's quite rainy but as these weather systems move to the south-east it tends to get a bit drier so south-eastern areas of the UK aren't actually all that wet, and it doesn't get as much rainfall as you might think. You might be surprised to know that London actually gets less rainfall per year than Paris, Tokyo, New York, Sydney.

Sydney?

Absolutely.