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This article reviews the historical development of statistical weather models, from simple analyses of runs of consecutive rainy and dry days at single sites, through to multisite models of daily precipitation. Weather generators have been used extensively in water engineering design and in agricultural, ecosystem and hydrological impact studies as a means of in-filling missing data or for producing indefinitely long synthetic weather series from finite station records. We begin by describing the statistical properties of the rainfall occurrence and amount processes which are necessary precursors to the simulation of other (dependent) meteorological variables. The relationship between these daily weather models and lower-frequency variations in climate statistics is considered next, noting that conventional weather generator techniques often fail to capture wholly interannual variability. Possible solutions to this …