Rain and Snow in Leipzig, 2021

After the extreme drought of 2018, Leipzig swung hard in the other direction. 2021 felt relentlessly wet — but was it really? The following charts explore 54 years of daily precipitation data from Leipzig-Holzhausen to find out.

Cumulative precipitation vs the long-term average

Each line traces one year’s cumulative rainfall, shown as the deviation from the long-term average. Lines above zero mean a wetter-than-normal year; lines below mean drier. The five wettest and five driest years are highlighted.

2021 was the third-wettest year on record — and 2018, the infamous drought year, received barely half the normal amount. Some years start wet and flatten out (front-loaded rain in spring); others catch up late in summer.

Quarterly deviations since 2000

The heatmap below shows how each quarter compared to its long-term average. Blue cells are wetter than normal, red cells are drier. What made 2021 unusual wasn’t any single extreme quarter — it was consistently above average across the entire year.

The standout cell is Q2 2013: more than double the average precipitation, driven by the June floods that devastated central Europe.

Rain days vs total precipitation

Not all wet years are alike. Some accumulate their totals through many rainy days; others get there through fewer but heavier downpours. The scatter plot below maps total annual precipitation against the number of rain days (≥ 0.1 mm). Color encodes the number of heavy rain days (≥ 10 mm).

The dashed line marks the halfway point: above it, a year had more rainy days than dry ones. The two record years — 2010 and 1981 — reached their totals very differently: 2010 through many intense storms, 1981 through relentless drizzle across 219 rain days.

Snow’s shrinking share

Each bar shows the year’s precipitation split by form: rain (gray), sleet (blue), and snow (green), as classified by the DWD.

In the 1970s and early 1990s, snow made up a noticeable share of winter precipitation. That share has been declining steadily — by the 2020s, most of what used to fall as snow now arrives as sleet or rain. Faded bars mark years with unreliable precipitation-form records from the automated station.

All data from DWD Open Data, station 02928 (Leipzig-Holzhausen), daily records since 1973.