Met Office & Porthmadog
By Paul Homewood
It’s not often I am lost for words!
Porthmadog Weather Station
You will recall my post a few weeks ago, querying the siting of the Met Office’s weather station at Porthmadog, which often appears in the “hottest of the day” listings. As Ray Sanders pointed out, the Stevenson Screen is extremely close to that line of trees/bushes, which are located to the north and east, creating a very nice sun trap.
The Met Office’s own rules are quite clear – that there should be no trees nearby that might influence the measurements.
I FOI’d the Met Office asking them what they knew about Porthmadog, and was astonished by their reply:
In short, they are happy to use a Class 4 site for climatological purposes, even though that class is next to junk status.
Class 4 makes no restrictions over vegetation, unlike the first three Classes; Class 1 for instance stipulates that vegetation should not exceed 10 cm:
https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=11612
According to the station notes the Met Office also sent me, 20% of the surface area within 10m exceeded 30 cm in height.
Class 4 sites certainly are not acceptable sites for climatology, nor for that matter are Class 3 ones. As the WMO notes, they can have up to 2C of uncertainty.
It is bad enough that the Met Office is using this site. But it is even worse that they know about the issues, but still plan to carry on doing so.
How many other weather stations are of such poor quality?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Great work as always, how about putting it all in a newspaper?
Although I doubt it would happen I believe that when the MO issues its temperature reports it should be made to include the station classification with the readings. That way the public – and us – would get a better idea of the validity of the readings.
And, based on this admission from them I wonder in which class they put Coningsby?
“And, based on this admission from them I wonder in which class they put Coningsby?” They so far refuse to answer that very question I put to them
N. Stokes will have an obtuse answer you – as he might do for Northolt and Heathrow and……
I know I’ve bested Stokes when his only response is a downtick.
Mid-Level Bureaucrats (MLBs) doing their jobs.
If the government didn’t waste so much money chasing CO2 around it could have better weather stations. But, the problem and solution (Net 0) are known, so why bother? 😌
That is almost verbatim the response I got when querying that site. The Met Office have lost all credibility. I am giving them one more week to respond to a more detailed query I made over a number of their sites. If they fail to respond I intend to take the issue to the Minister responsible – Grant Shapps.
The most damning report I have come across concerning the MO was from the Royal Meteorlogical Society who seemed to distrust the MO even more than I do!
https://web.archive.org/web/20191210053116/https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1256/wea.10.04B
Thank god for the wayback machine.
Global warming, the me me me, now now now affliction.
Those with their own agenda will tell you anything that appears to support it. Truth and Honesty do not form part of the blob and power elites today.
I think that for many people some attempt at a balance of “truth” from both sides would help. Or try to balance the bias.
Here is part of the Met Office stage 1 fob off that I received.
“All of our weather stations are visited and inspected by a dedicated team of inspectors on a set schedule, depending on the type of weather station. The weather stations are inspected against a set of World Meteorological Organization standards for each meteorological parameter that is measured, and assigned a “CIMO Classification” which will be between Class 1 and Class 5, where Class 1 is the highest, and class 5 the lowest. Classes 1-4 are deemed to be an acceptable standard for meteorological parameters, and Class 5 is an unacceptable standard. If the parameter is classified as a CIMO Class 5, then the data received from that site is flagged, and therefore not used in any national records until remedial action can be taken to rectify the standards.
At their last inspection, the sites mentioned were all deemed to meet acceptable WMO standards for temperature records. Trees, buildings, roads, and carparks, amongst other things, are all counted as heat sources, and are therefore accounted for in the CIMO classifications.
As well as site inspections, Quality Control is carried out on all the data that is received from our Weather Stations on a daily basis, any suspicious data is flagged and investigated.”
So as an example this site is perfectly acceptable! Smack bang next to a huge electricity sub station.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bradford+West+Substation/@53.8112961,-1.8669324,97m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x487be5cc3c960fa1:0x7d0bfccbd9428e80!8m2!3d53.8100917!4d-1.8659923!16s%2Fg%2F11flvvbth8?entry=ttu
Well done for that one Paul .
From that information it would seem that the Airfield stations would all be not acceptable , so why do they keep quoting from them .
Fairly soon they’ll run out of dodgy data and start looking stupid.
Every time the MO issue a temperature ‘alert’ we should get Ray or Paul (please) to let us know the Class of the station used so we can write to the Newspapers etc and tell them.
I’ve noticed for quite a while that the Met Office is fully signed up to ‘Man-made Climate change’, totally ignoring factual evidence. Everything they publish, their models etc all show bias well away from reality.
They are responsible to the conflicted Department of Net Zero and Energy Security, formerly BEIS, so they have to support the agenda. Years ago they were a branch of the MOD, but that probably wouldn’t make any difference these days. They probably ask the sensors how they self-identify on the 1-5 scale and an AI bot responds.
The Met Office was one of those tasked with providing the evidence for the UN IPCC along with the BoM in Australia, NOAA and NASA. A fine group of untrustworthy organisations.
As the BBC regularly uses the MO’s record temperature offerings, I wonder what they would make of the fact that their source is using unsafe techniques, by international standards, that form the basis of their facts? Surely even they would not use the data for fear of being shown to be misleading the public.
The BBC Verify Team have already checked and OK ‘d them. Justin Rowlatt said they were fine.
On a question as vital as climate change the WMO and the MET office are prepared to use anything but pristine and accurate sites?
I guess they don’t consider climate change as critical as they make out.
I’m blowed if I can see what’s wrong here. You’re told with reasonable clarity their assessment of the measurement uncertainty to which the station is prone, how they reached that conclusion, and their policy for what application such a station is available for. Remember this is a field measurement of an environmental variable. You all seem to be judging it by mathematical or physics lab standards. I used to manage the instrument section of the UK Institute of Hydrology and well accustomed to what is achievable by sticking up a sensor in the open air and how to judge and record its performance. Right and wrong don’t enter into it.
You are correct Max but the sites outlined are being used by the Alarmists just the way you say we are judging them. They are taking decimal places of a degree in temperature to show that doom is amongst us when there is no mention of a possibility of statistical error.
Max, the T.O.T. (Turbine outlet temperature) of an aero gas turbine is in excess of 600°C – many oftheir recording sites are by the side of aircraft taxiways. Do you not think they might just possibly be affected by external unnatural influences?
So, berate Met O for not engaging properly with the alarmists. Of course, we know all the reasons why they don’t but it’s not the specific issue raised at the head of the post which seemed to be adequately dealt with. Confected arguments are the alarmists game, not ours.
Sorry Max. The met office is claiming national records from sites graded class 4 which are graded as only accurate to plus or minus 2c. So coningsbys claimed 40c could be 38c by world met guidelines. The MO is not being honest when it claims to have a temp record and not mention the huge error bars.
The MO is being deceitful.
So what’s your solution? Whenever a station records a temperature larger than any previous value then that should be marked as Missing Data? Or replace the +/-2 as implied by its category by +0/-2 if it happens to be a big number? Do you go back through the data getting rid of every value that at the time of its occurrence was the highest on record?
Your issue is with the interpretation, the Met O response so bitterly complained about was with how station data and metadata are recorded. Two different things.
I need no lessons in the nonsense of using record breaking as a tool in trend detection and authored an article in Weather magazine on record breaking as a stochastic process (the statistical properties of their appearance on the time line and the margin by which they are broken). When I got into this business in the 80s it was considered laughable that one might detect trend from record breakers. If you couldn’t see change in the raw data, you wouldn’t see it in the extreme events – far too rare and prone to error. Everything changed in 2002 at the Exeter conference when the Hadley Centre legitimised it, and since then the world hasn’t looked back. Extreme events are now looked on as a poster child of climate change, but the basics haven’t changed – far too rare and uncertain to be any use.
For all that, I remain totally supportive of field measurement – denigrating the enterprise like is so common on sceptic sites like this does no-one any favours.
The solution Max is to not use data that isn’t reliable as if it is.
Not sure why you are making such an issue of the obvious?
Because I make a distinction between collecting data and drawing unwarranted conclusions from those data. The head of this post was about the former; all the piling in has been about the latter.
The pressure from Anthony Watts on the US Met forced the setting up of the US Climate Reference Network, comprised only or stations that met proper standards. In time , some of those stations become compromised and have to be dropped.
I think a good starting point would be to ensure that all stations were properly classified, with at least an attempt to derive what historical classifications might have been if they were not properly recorded, and to allow data to be compiled using classification as a filter.
Surely you’re not ‘the’ Max, from fifteen plus years ago, of tampered ARGO buoy oceanic temperature series…?
That would be salty Max; I’ve always been landlubber Max. Extreme hydrological events – floods and droughts – was my area.
So you see no problem with a scientific organisation that supposedly provides independent factual information regularly using data that they admit is made higher by location, to claim its warming and that thus we should all agree to their political agenda?
It’s no wonder we are in such a mess.
“is made higher”. Remember, uncertainty is plus / minus indicating a band in which the “true” value probably lies. One cannot say more without further information. From a data analysis point of view, claiming the minus is more likely than the plus without evidence is as much an assertion as saying the mid point is correct, probability one. I keep to the point of the original post, not conclusions drawn by biassed parties with agendas. I just don’t see that the response that Paul received from the Met Office was wrong or unprofessional.
“I’m blowed if I can see what’s wrong here.” Max are you an employee of the Met Office? There are conditions and standards set for climate reporting purposes. If a site does not meet those standards then its data is junk. I have regularly recorded temperatures higher than the stated records above in my back garden….so what? My back garden does not meet acceptable standards (it was built in the former kitchen garden to the local manor house) so I can’t claim records thus neither can the Met Office from junk sites.
No, just someone who knows where to pick a fight. The world is full of bad actors who abuse data to take the task. Those providing the original data – in this case comprising a reading and a reliability assessment – are not the target.
Max: your subsequent comment: “No, just someone who knows where to pick a fight. The world is full of bad actors who abuse data to take the task. Those providing the original data – in this case comprising a reading and a reliability assessment – are not the target.”
But the Met Office is not just “providing the original data”. It is providing press releases itself saying that temperatures are breaking records and that this is proof of climate change. THAT is the problem – the Met Office has become a political pressure group with an agenda.
The aspect you are writing about has been much covered and commented on in other posts. This thread was about the collection phase. Field data was the stuff of my pre-retirement life and I didn’t knock it then and I don’t knock it now.
Perhaps BBC Verify should be invited to investigate? They seem very keen on exposing climate misinformation (sarc).
I have already asked them to do that last week. As of today they have not responded.
I thought Porthmadog had reached 32.2C this June and was joint UK warmest so far, but I think I’ve misremembered and confused my facts. Anyway it was definitely the hottest place in Wales this June at least, 30.8C
This is the explainer why it is so hot!
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/welsh-town-thats-hottest-place-27054998
Paul, have you checked out the station at Western Park Sheffield; The Stevenson screen is a few m away from the ice-cream van at the gates opposite the Children’s Hospital.
https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMZTW0_Weston_Park_Weather_Station_Sheffield_UK
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.3813649,-1.4915168,47m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
Like Max, I cannot see what is wrong with this site:
– there is NO UHI effect
– the long grass and the bushes nearby are also going to give a cooling effect.
– I cannot understand the logic of insisting that the grass should be lees than 20cms high. In dry conditions and for example near to airport runway as the heat emitted from the surface is going to be close to that of the tarmac.
– we have here a country setting as opposed to an urban one.
Why the site is so warm on occasions is, as MrGrimnasty states, due to its setting with hills to the north, and possible foehn effect.
What I do question is why this particular site was chosen initially. It appears to be remote, what was the logic involved?
I’m not saying that. That’s an excuse offered up and should be read in context with the site conditions noted by Paul.
The point is that if you are using measurements to support a scientific theory, your data has to be scientifically rigorous.
Atypical/poor sites like Porthmadog are fine for anecdotes down the pub, cor blimey did you see it got to 35C today, but should never be used to quantify supposed climate change. We’ve had sites like this before, there was one in Kent that ran red hot, eventually the MO scrubbed it.
Regarding the site at Gravesend, I have told the MO on 3 occasions that it is no longer there but they seem unable to amend their website.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-synoptic-and-climate-stations
However not updating seems to be typical of them. Try finding the Hampton site – it’s now under water!
Why close this one if it’s OK to use junk sites?
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/famous-weather-station-closed-191601/
Being economical with the facts. Aka lying by ommission
Here’s Northolt:
Not a truck length from the busy A40, with tall trees just to the East. You can see it on streetview too.
https://goo.gl/maps/HzrvoPcfiBvdTba96
There is added significance with the trees and bushes to the north and east of this site because Porthmadog generally records its highest temperatures when winds are from the north to the east. This is partly a regional climatic effect, but it also a factor in why this particular location for the thermometer sensor is likely to read too high on such occasions. The trees and bushes shield the thermometer screen from the prevailing breeze or wind blowing on those days and adds to the ‘sun trap’ effect of the particular spot where this thermometer screen is sited.
Think it is just airfields or low grade sites? – think again. Here is the wikipedia page on walled gardens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_garden
Note it states “The shelter provided by enclosing walls can raise the ambient temperature within a garden by several degrees,”
Now of course nobody would think to put a weather station in a walled garden and then use its data to prove climate change would they?
Quote –
“Did you know Floors Castle Gardens has its own weather station?
The box in our Walled Garden, known as a Stevenson Screen contains instruments that measure temperature, rainfall and humidity. Our weather station has been an official station for the Metrological Office since 1941, recordings are collected daily by our Head Gardener Lorraine Pearson and passed to the Met Office.”
Then read this
https://news.stv.tv/scotland/hottest-day-in-scotland-officially-recorded-as-temperatures-reach-35-1c-at-floors-castle#:~:text=Hottest%20day%20in%20Scotland%20officially,at%20Floors%20Castle%20%7C%20STV%20News
This is plainly an attempt to corrupt data.
In the last couple of months there have been some very cold starts to many days, often lasting until late morning before clouds clearing and the day warming up. I think the Met Office simply take the Max and Min temperatures recorded and divide by 2 to arrive at the ‘average’ temperature of that day – those are then used to calculate the Year’s average temperature. I wonder what the daily average, on those ‘cold-start’ days would show if hourly temperatures were summed and divided by 24 ….. I wonder if this would show a much cooler average than from Max and Min – it would certainly represent the day’s temperature better ? Might be worth looking at.
Is there an official link to the FOI answer? If I share this people will just say that you made it up
I’ve just posted a copy
Paul
Then how to verify its veracity? I’m not familiar with british FOI. I would imagine there were some central portal where one could see all of the governments responses
Not sure, as this is the Met Office, which strictly speaking is not a government dept.
There’s a disclosure log here, but as you can see they only show selected items
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/legal/foi/disclosure
I’ll forward their email to you though