Met Office Temperature Network Is Junk
By Paul Homewood
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The Met Office’s UK temperature network is junk, according to new FOI information released:
From The Daily Sceptic:
Nearly one in three (29.2%) U.K. Met Office temperature measuring stations have an internationally-defined margin of error of up to 5°C. Another 48.7% of the total 380 stations could produce errors up to 2°C, meaning nearly eight out of ten stations (77.9%) are producing ‘junk’ or ‘near junk’ readings of surface air temperatures. Arguably, on no scientific basis should these figures be used for the Met Office’s constant promotion of the collectivist Net Zero project. Nevertheless, the state-funded operation frequently uses them to report and often catastrophise rises in temperature of as little as 0.01°C.
Under a freedom of information request, the Daily Sceptic has obtained a full list of the Met Office’s U.K. weather stations, along with an individual class rating defined by the World Meteorological Office. These CIMO ratings range from pristine class 1 and near pristine class 2, to an ‘anything goes’ or ‘junk’ class 5. The CIMO ratings penalise sites that are near any artificial heat sources such as buildings and concrete surfaces. According to the WMO, a class 5 site is one where nearby obstacles “create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”. Even the Met Office refers to sites next to buildings and vegetation as “undesirable”. It seems class 5 sites can be placed anywhere, and they come with a WMO warning of “additional estimated uncertainties added by siting up to 5°C”; class 4 notes “uncertainties” up to 2°C, while class 3 states 1°C. Only 13.7%, or 52 of the Met Office’s temperature and humidity stations come with no such ‘uncertainty’ warnings attached.
The above graph shows the percentage totals of each class. Class 1 and 2, identified in green, account for just 6.3% and 7.4% of the total respectively. Class 3 identified as orange comes in at 8.4%. The graph shows the huge majorities enjoyed by the darkening shades of red showing classes 4 and 5. It is possible that the margins of error identified for classes 3, 4 and 5 could be a minus amount – if for instance the measuring device was sited in a frost hollow – but the vast majority are certain to be pushed upwards by heat corruptions.
Last year, the investigative journalist Paul Homewood sought FOI information from the Met Office about the Welsh weather station Porthmadog, which often appears in ‘hottest of the day’ listings. He was informed that the site was listed as class 4 and “this is an acceptable rating for a temperature sensor”. Hence, continued the Met Office, “we will continue to quote from this site”. In short, observes Homewood, the Met Office is happy to use a class 4 site for climatological purposes, “even though that class is next to junk status”. 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, Homewood continued. “How many other weather stations are of such poor quality?” he asked.
Now we know.
Full post here.
The Met Office of course pretends that it knows the average temperature of the UK to within 0.1C, and that it can accurately compare current temperatures with those a century ago.
Not only do we now that is a lie, but we also know that they knew this all the time as well.
It is time to establish a network of a small number of high quality stations, and only use these to publish official temperature trends in future.
If they want to still use the old datasets, they should show the appropriate error bars, along with a warning that the margin of error is so great that they have no statistical significance at all.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
So! ….. opening another new Horizon event then? Who are the claimants and prosecutors in this case
This is HUGE. Sceptics should shout it from the rooftops at every opportunity. Heads should roll (but of course they won’t). Paul, with apologies for piling even more work on you, is it possible to compile a table of all those oft-quoted modern “records” and the relevant weather stations (eg Heathrow, Cambridge Botanic Gardens, Coningsby) complete with the, shall we say, integrity rating of the stations quoted? I think we can all guess the answers but it would be good to see it in a simple table that could be finessed to all and sundry who tell us we are in a “climate emergency”.
You can actually view them all yourself. Go to the listing here https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-synoptic-and-climate-stations
Copy and paste the co-ordinates shown (they are only approximate so you may have to search) to google maps.
Here is one that I parked my car with my exhaust with 3 metres of the Stevenson Screen!!!
https://www.google.com/maps/place/51%C2%B008'00.6%22N+1%C2%B020'36.2%22E/@51.1335228,1.3432968,44m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d51.1334864!4d1.3433907?entry=ttu
Thank you very much Ray. I will take up the challenge when I am able and report back to Paul H.
Wow, that is horrendous. I have been operating and amateur weather station for a number of years and so am fully aware of siting requirements, but some of the locations of the so-called ‘professional’ stations simply amaze me!
To YorksChris, what I find even more astonishing is that posters on this thread are trying to defend poor siting as if it doesn’t make any difference.
Seemingly highly variable factors (car exhausts a classic example) do not seem to be considered as mattering. I reckon motor manufacturers should quote miles per gallon testing by continuously driving the car downhill – doesn’t make any difference to comparing cars after all does it?
The weatherstations were never set up to provide pinpoint accurate readings to be used to justify a global scam. The Dover one is no doubt to provide information for shipping. The ones at probably every airfield in the country are to provide important information to pilots.
It’s not huge, because even though a site might have a large error, that error is mostly systematic not random. It is biased one way or the other.
Even though the absolute temperature reading may be biased, that bias is constant over the years, so it is quite valid to use for trend plotting.
(This of course falls down if there is a change at the site, such as new buildings or road surfaces being built nearby.)
Absolute rubbish. If the site does not meet WMO requirements it is junk – end of. The whole point of those requirements is to eliminate artificial and VARIABLE factors. So a site by a sewage treatment plant will have continually variable and intermittent effects as will any aviation site or car park or botanic garden or variable foliage etc etc etc. your comment is typical of a bot trying to disrupt a thread.
Spot on, some places are substantially warmer than other nearby places, all that matters is any time variation of those temperature offsets. Too much fuss is made about “poorly sited thermometers”, it only matters if the degree of poor siting changes with time.
Nonsense. Both the Met Office and the BBC quote temperatures as being precise, exact and accurate. There is never any mention of “trends”.
I get your point, but a surprising number of stations are very short-lived and only maintain data for a few years. Site changes are also common. So often you see composite records that are spliced together from various sites in an area that may give a very misleading impression of trends over time.
I take the point when looking at trends but if the met office and the BBC claim that on a particular day the temperature was the highest on record then the accuracy of the measurement is important since they are then looking at absolute temperature and not a trend.
Ray Sanders: like I keep saying, it does not matter whether or not I am a bot, because you still have to address the argument. It makes no difference if the argument comes from a human or a bot.
In fact it might improve things on here if there was a resident bot. It would improve the intellectual discipline.
Back to the actual argument instead of ad-homs, as you say it makes a difference if the error is systematic or random. I would say most of the problem is nearby buildings etc, which would be systematic, unless there has been a change during the life of the site.
So has your programming allowed you to look at the actual sites in detail before making your comment. Have you considered the site specifics, indeed have you even considered the reasons the WMO make such stipulations? Or have you just commented on your belief system (if bots have one) to derail the 100% valid point of Paul’s investigations.
p.s. it is impossible, by definitiion, to make an ad hom comment to a bot.
That’s true IF the site hasn’t got contaminated but I’m betting most started out as high grade and have become low grade – because there’s no reason to set up a bad site 100 years ago. Also if the warmer ones are used for homogenization, it’s a big problem.
Well done Paul. As I have posted on here before, when I have queried the status of sites I have been assured they all meet the highest standard. Amazingly they claimed this one was acceptable….Bingley 2 smack bang next to a major electricity sub-station.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/53%C2%B048'41.0%22N+1%C2%B052'00.3%22W/@53.81138,-1.8693344,666m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d53.8113769!4d-1.8667595?entry=ttu
Somehow though I doubt the Met Office will change its ways/propaganda.
Here is today’s bizarre “record” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68435197
Note that as usual with the BBC, this is based on “may” and “expected”. The BBC can’t wait for the official Met Office propaganda.
Its just England and Wales do meaningless. For the UK it’s nothing like a record. I wonder how the dealt with the extra day? Included it in the average even though its usually a March day?
The most pathetic aspect of the reports on our rather wet February has been the constant reminder that “climate change causes our winters to be wetter as warm air holds more moisture than cold air”
Anyone who has lived in the tropics will have experienced very intense rainfall, but a one degree rise in average temperature causes only a 7% increase in the moisture in the atmosphere- in no way explaining rainfall 100% above its average.
That’s simply weather
Stephen, the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship you are referring to is often misinterpreted in meteorology terms. The temperature rise only increases the capacity of the atmosphere to hold 7% more water vapour, it does not actually directly cause a 7% increase in water vapour as that is subject to many other factors. It is of note that many observations indicate a “water vapour deficit” relative to “recorded” temperature increases which suggests either other factors are overtaking the effect or…..temperature increases are being over recorded.
As you say though, none of the temperature increase, real or otherwise, can be attributed to levels of weather variation. Propaganda trumps facts every time apparently.
You don’t need to explain anything 100% above average if the variation in the average is 100%. UK weather is highly variable.
Ray
I agree with what you are saying, both the Met Office and all MSM trumpet maximum temperatures even if they last a couple of picosecond.
As for trends they’re also contaminated for most of country, possibly with the exception of a couple in Scotland like Altnaharra most have been overtaken by urban spread. When I first moved to Derby 40+ years ago East Midlands Airport was a small local airport. It’s now a large complex hub with a large number of warehouses including developments in Castle Donnington, transport and passenger flights, large car parks and even a new rail connection. All next door to a busy section on the M1 Motorway.
As an airport I guess it’s been recording temperature for those 40+ years. Any trend will be meaningless as will any temperature trend taken in Derby whose population has increased by 25% in those 40 years
Its pretty much all babble and lies. Extraordinary. How is it climate change if it’s not even close to a record for the UK? They use an arbitrary border and exclude a big chunk of the land mass! As for anecdotes about it being wet, a year or so ago we were told rivers were drying up and that was going to get worst. Yesterday I read the hydrological report for France – most of the country now vastly improved with virtually all the Western half in blue, meaning back to normal. Doom averted.
And the so called global average temperatures interpolate between these junk readings across most areas without any readings at all. Junk is an adequate description of the whole scam.
“Global Average Temperature” was a very poorly worded description of what it actually is, which is CHANGES in average temperature, unaffected by so-called biases of thermometers, which would be better described as offsets (from regional average air temperatures).
You appear to not understand the implications of poor siting. If a site is alongside highly variable conditions such as an aircraft runway, a sewage treatment plant, or a car park for instance (very many are) then the variations in recording are completely unnatural and quite random. Their variation over time is expressly not in step with the wider general weather so are totally unrepresentative and complete junk.,
That would be true if all stations were equally contaminated, but they are not. And it would be true if the biases stayed the same, but they have not. And it would be true if the proportion of biased stations stated the same, but it has not. We have an increase in the number of poorly sited stations with the warm bias increasing at those stations. Thus the averages are meaningless and at least part of the anomolies cause by increasing bias.
And of course it is not just in the UK that temperatures are basen on junk measurements. It is widespread throughout the world. But climate change propaganda beats genuine scientific evidence.
Yes. Anthony Watts has demolished the veracity of weather station data in North America.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” — Mark Twain
Australia also has a problem with 48% of BOM weather stations not reaching the BOM standards. A cloud survey from readers checked the sites, often with photographs. You will find details in https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com but multiple entries.
I have put the Daily sceptic article forward to “BBC Verify to investigate.” I spoofed it as a concerned citizen worried about climate disinformation and shoddy populist right wing media attempting to defame the Met Office. How dare they print such rubbish! Let’s see if Verify take it on…but I doubt it.
How much would it have cost the Met Office, a decade or two ago, to start afresh with monitoring climate change, and to set up a completely new and properly chosen Class 1 network of, say,1,000 sites? The proverbial “peanuts”?
Most likely significantly less than their new supercomputer that can’t forecast the weather even faster.
Agree – there should be a monitoring temp & populant station on top of every school (make it a school project) and every town/city hall building …if its important, measure it record it publish it
In the days before climate hysteria (i.e the 20th Century) my local city of Canterbury recorded the national hottest temperature of the year for 3 of the years of the century up to the late 1980s. Not surprising considering its proximity to mainland Europe and the occasionally continental type climate this proximity produces.
However, there has not been an official Met Office weather station in Canterbury for over 30 years now. Rather odd that really if genuine records were being sought.
I am convinced that the Met Office is deliberately siting and quoting from unreliable junk purposes deliberately.
Depends if they would have wanted to, which I doubt as we now know they are a full on eco-activist organisation with no intention of providing truthful data.
The UK is a tiny landmass that sits in an area of the globe that means it gets hugely variable weather. Measuring temperatures and rainfall here is completely meaningless. As the BBC reports shows, they only get their “record” by excluding Scotland.
Actually Paul, I think that the so-called Urban Heat Island Effect is well-demonstrated by these poorly-sited weather stations. It shows that the majority of human-induced global warming is down to the amount of heat we pump into the local atmosphere from central heating., air-conditioning, heat pumps, hot solar panels, and of course transport vehicles. It’s not much related to CO2 itself. And it will be greatly increased by Net Zero which will need the inefficient and heat-generating production and transmission of electricity compared with the relatively efficient previous set-up. Yours, Tony Budd (BA Geography & Geology, FCIHT)
Tony, in 2022 the Met Office originally claimed the Scottish record was broken by a site in the Walled Garden of Floors Castle. Yes the Met Office really do have reporting stations in sites that are deliberately created to produce artificially elevated temperatures.
https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=1893457610801591&locale=fi_FI
You really could not make it up….but the Met Office really did.
And the photo of the reading showed a rusty old maxmin thermometer last calibrated whenever with the two scales showing slightly different readings.
Paul as a complete aside I complained to the BBC about this article on the 21st Frebruary.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-68353393
To my astonishment they responded 28th February as below.
“Many thanks for getting in touch. I am sorry you were unhappy with our coverage on this occasion.
I have contacted the relevant team, and you are correct that the combustion of hydrogen does not produce oxygen. I would like to apologise to you for this error. I have since edited the relevant line to remove the reference to oxygen.
Unfortunately, sometimes in a busy newsroom inadvertent errors that are usually picked up by senior editors can get missed. That is why we are grateful for readers like yourself who write to us, helping us to improve our coverage.
Once again many thanks for writing in. Your views have also been shared with senior managers.
Best wishes,
Cecilia”
My “views” were that journalists should have at least a “vestige” of Knowledge on the subject they write about….a GCSE should be a basic requirement.
“the combustion of hydrogen does not produce oxygen.”
Well I dunno. What if you burnt a little hydrogen in an atmosphere of ozone? Might you gut a little oxygen by-product?
So, it was an inadvertent error? And not pure ignorance? Or cut-and-paste journalism? I can imagine an original source saying that the production of hydrogen by electrolysis of water also produces oxygen.
“Sometimes in a busy newsroom…” Just how smug and self-important these people are. But it is correct in a way. The “newsroom” for them is where the official news is made out of the real news. And that is a full-time pursuit!
Surely, that sentence should have read, ‘Sometimes in a busy echo-chamber…’
Well done Ray.
Last two paragraphs: if they did that they wouldn’t be able to show any global warming.
The whole scam would then collapse and that would never do.
Without wishing to overly bang on about this subject, I seriously doubt many people realise just how staggeringly poor many/most of the Met Office sites are for climate reporting purposes. Even regular readers of this site may be surprised at some of the absurd locations such as Victorian Walled Kitchen Gardens, Sewage Treatment Works, Electricity Sub-Stations, Aircraft Runways, sheds in peoples gardens, car parks – (notably in city centres such as Sheffield).
Many are subject to known tampering not only by persons unknown (notably Brogdale, Faversham the site of the 2003 “record”) but also by the Met Office themselves. For example the Welsh record was set at Hawarden in 2022 – by the airport runway. However, for those with Google Earth Pro looking up the history of the site indicates it was moved prior to the record set to be many metres closer to the runway. It beat the previous Welsh record set guess where? in a walled garden.
The ultimate insult for me is the Hertmonceux site which is actually a Met Office regional office. Here is the google satellite view of it Herstmonceux
And here is the Street view from the Road view
I give you one guess where they moved it from to be right alongside the building and where cars are parked….”Rev up the Quattro” we need a high reading.
This is deliberate data falsification.
Well that’s an eye opener. This was needing done. Now spread the word site by site. We’ve been going on about this for ages and it is nice to finally have the facts.
The Met Office Network works very well, providing them the data they want.
The temperature is what they say it is, nothing more, nothing less.
Well along with the US and Australia, the MetOrifice was tasked with providing the ‘data’ to back up the IPCC’s output of eco-activist reports that deliberately ignore papers that do not support anthropogenic global warming.
And they pick and choose the “records”. This one is the average max-min for a month but excluding Scotland and possibly including in the average a day normally in March. Quite how they dealt with the border is beyond me if Scotland was a bit cool.
“Sunday has been declared the warmest Christmas Eve in the UK since 1997.
Temperatures hit 15.3C in Heathrow, west London, and Cippenham in Slough, the Met Office said.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67817500
For those who may not know here are those two mentioned sites.
Firstly Cippenham (Sewage Treatment Works).
https://www.google.com/maps/place/51%C2%B030'21.6%22N+0%C2%B038'27.6%22W/@51.5065467,-0.6428722,175m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d51.506!4d-0.641?entry=ttu
Secondly Heathrow (Airport)
https://www.google.com/maps/place/51%C2%B028'44.4%22N+0%C2%B026'56.4%22W/@51.4792913,-0.4506817,44m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d51.479!4d-0.449?entry=ttu
Really natural, high quality, reputable sites eh? I really do not know how Met Office representatives can keep a straight face when coming out with this industrial strength BS.
One would think after all these years of guessing about temps all over the globe that maybe we could take a hundred stations placed around the globe at places with no human impact within say about a hundred miles and use this data. If we keep using things like airport reporting or city heat traps we will never be able to get an accurate temp record.
Or just use the satellites?
But they stopped giving the right answer for a bit.
Oh dear, am I on the naughty step awaiting premoderation?
Can I ask a slightly off topic but relevant question? The temperature plots we see for GMST always show temperature anomaly not absolute temperature. But I think there must be two ways of getting that. You could take the average absolute temperature of all the instruments around the world and then subtract a nominal base value. The other way would be to calculate the anomaly for each individual measuring station and then take the average of all those anomalies. Does anyone know how they do it?
This rreally saddens me. I imagine, most of these that are longstanding stations were all adequately sited when installed. As time goes by housing and commercial developments have encroached on them over the last 100 or whatever years. It’s such a shame that the MO didn’t make more of an effort to monitor the situation. Especially before electronic thermometers, there’d surely have been someone in situ detailed to read and maintain each station and they could have passed on any land use/building changes
No David you are sadly not correct in what you imagine. This is not a case of historic compromising of established sites, rather new sites deliberately being installed in absurd locations. I can supply you with the exact co-ordinates of each and every official site in the UK. Many have been installed in such situations as Sewage Treatment Plants, Victorian walled kitchen gardens, alongside car parks not to mention aircraft runways and taxiways. Be under no illusion, this is NOT accidental.
Ray, perhaps a ‘site position quality’ rating needs to be applied to all the sites, then sent by recorded delivery to the heads of the Met Office and BBC Weather, with a public statement to that effect. At least then they can’t say they weren’t told or didn’t know. Anthony Watts did a similar site quality grading for US sites a few years ago and found something like 80+% were not fit for purpose.
It’s now official, according to the BBC propaganda machine:
England and Wales had warmest February on record – BBC News
Big Brother says so.
It is not only the question of the site, there is also the question of the accuracy of the thermometers and when the were last calibrated. When I set-up the site at Dunstaffnage in the early 1970s I was sent a handful of m-in-g thermometers, but no certificates. When I telephoned my contact at the Met office there was a long silence and a promise to ‘dig them out’. Most of them proved to be manufacturer’s certificates of long dates. The only certificate from an independent lab was dated 1936 – I remember it well as it was the year of my birth.
Fortunately we had a HP crystal thermometer so I was able to calibrate the thermometers in the lab and confirm the stability of them.
Does anyone know of the re calibration frequency of Pt resistance thermometers? Or are they ‘fit and forget’?