Dyce Weather Station Next To Runway
June 9, 2024
By Paul Homewood
Thanks to Ray Sanders for this latest piece of sleuthing!
One of the Net Office’s temperature recording stations is at Aberdeen Dyce Airport. It has been operational since 1959.
Ray has managed to locate the weather station, which is about 50m from the aircraft pictured on the runway, and only a few yards from a road and car park.
It has a WMO classification of Class 4, meaning there is uncertainty of up to 2C.
Aberdeen Dyce Airport
Dyce is a busy hub, handling 75000 flights last year and 2.3 million passengers.
As with other airports, the 1959 version would have been smaller with much less infrastructure.
34 Comments
leave one →
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Ray is doing sterling work here.
Obviously the Met Office is hiding behind “not fit for purpose” weather stations with there climate “extremes” propoganda.
Looking at that photo, I would suspect it should be class 5 with a much greater uncertainty than 2C.
Having operated jets out of every single UK commercial airport I can confirm that most weather stations are situated close, if not next to operational runways.
The reason for this is that the readings from these stations are used by pilots to compute the effect that temperature, air pressure, wind strength/direction etc have on the performance of the aircraft they are operating.
Using these readings to drive a ‘man made climate change narrative’ is a totally different matter mind you.
So Paul should have another similar Blog site: “Onlyafewpeopleknowthis”
An excellent Bullseye shot thanks. but “Mother knows best” despite the efforts of the educated children …. another Generational thing.
Yes Neil and that is exactly my point, the Met Office are using excellent aviation sites wholly intended for one sole purpose – safer flying – and using them totally inappropriately for climate purposes. The important thing is they KNOW they are misleading and used to admit to it. From an archived site;
https://artefacts.ceda.ac.uk/badc_datadocs/ukmo-midas/ukmo_guide.html#2.1
“It is unavoidable that some sites do not meet all these requirements, particularly where a station set up for one purpose gradually takes on a different role, for example an airport site originally established for aviation observing may become a key synoptic or climate station while suffering the effects of urbanisation. A few sites are in city centres and may be unsuitably located close to large obstacles or even on the roof of a building.”
They damn well know they are using dodgy data and don’t seem to care.
Ray, I couldn’t agree more. Penny Endersby has a lot to answer for and should be ashamed at the way a once respected organisation has become little more than a fairytale show.
And most long-running weather stations were placed in cities, before rural telephones were common, for the purely practical reason that the new-fangled synoptic WEATHER forecasts were needed quickly, and rural data would come in too late for this purpose. The original meterologists would turn in their graves if they knew that such temporary expedients are affecting the data for CLIMATE forecasts, one-and-a-half centuries later.
The standard procedure in 1910 in the USA for introducing new stations was better, also*. For the first twenty years or so, the figures from a new station were only used for establishing deviations from the “normal” of a single, near-by, existing station. The new station was thus entirely slaved to the old station. There was no question of using the new station to “correct” the past normal.
*See: Monthly Weather Review, April 1910.
Further to my previous comment and for the sake of clarification the aircraft is parked on a hard standing next to a taxiway. The entrance to runway 16/34 is at the top right of the photo. However this does not take away the fact that the weather station can be adversely effected by aircraft self manoeuvring on the taxiway and hard standing along with Auxiliary Power Units which many jets use for air conditioning, engine starting etc.
If that is a grade 4 station the grade 5 ones must be a complete waste of time and money. Seaweed would be better.
Perhaps an FOI to ask Met Office how much they have spent on testing, appraising and replacing stations each year.
FOI’s are the only means. The U.K. Met Office are terrified of what they have been doing becoming common public knowledge. You only need to look at their replies to questions about Neatishead.
And the WMO error is not a definitive number. Clearly if this station gets blasts of heat from engines, the error might be higher.
The nicely timed photo shows an aircraft with its engine exhausts pointed at the station. Even if only for a moment, a daily high would likely be set when the engines rev to move off. In cases like this, is 2deg C really enough uncertainty? Has anyone actually measured how much the temp jumps ?
Note the white line in front of the plane. That line continues. This area appears to be a parking and or waiting place. The Google “Historical Imagery” {clock icon} has both planes and helicopters at different years. The 4/2008 image shows 2 fixed-wing planes and 8 ‘copters in proximity to the tower building.
In essence, the MET has two basic approaches to manufacturing “climate” Agit-prop.
In the case of their recent “Hottest May Ever”, they had, in all fairness, put come effort into cobbling this blatant absurdity together. Someone had to cherry pick which stations to use and which to accidentally forget. Then someone had to do a fair amount of ‘adjusting’, ‘homogenising’, adding numbers together and dividing by two, repetitively. Then someone had to decide what “ever” meant. Then practice presenting this buffoonery without laughing.
The other “record” approach is much simpler. Pick a blatantly inappropriate station which even the World Meteorological Organisation has pointed out, has “near junk” climatological status and just pick out the most extreme minute of data (whilst Tornado jets take off and land at RAF Coningsby and, kapow! “Hottest Evvver”.
And the BBC and their Chat Fekkers will happily take it seriously and beat back any queries. And the Uniparty Climate and Energy geniuses will nevef cease using either type of MET balderdash to justify actions never so unaffordable and to brush away any awkward questions.
They have a very expensive computer that they used to impress Attenborough.
I’m sure they could have employed an ex-Fujitsu software developer or similarly qualified person to create a routine to do the work. Probably called HottestEvah.exe or something similar.
The developer asks them, “Okay, what do you want the system to do?”
“Show that the world is getting warmer.”
“How?”
“We don’t care.”
Gamecock could write that program in 7 lines.
I love it when they say they need a bigger computer, as if HARDWARE was their problem. In fact, it is software. They have no clue what they are doing. Bigger computers will just give them bad answers quicker.
Here is a classic example of their cherry picking. This may look like impressive analysis but when you study it, it is deliberate data mining and word salad.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/weather/learn-about/uk-past-events/interesting/2022/2022_03_july_heatwave_v1.pdf
To demonstrate your point, page 8 gives a list
“The table below lists the highest temperatures recorded at selected individual stations on 19 July.”
“Selected”??? Why not just the top 10 or 20 or whatever but why “selected”.
The answer is quite simple, they chose all the very dodgy sites and ignored Class 1 sites in the main heat area ( such as Class 1 Rothamsted which is used in the CET) because they were over 2 degrees cooler. Blatant Fraud.
Hourly and daily data are available for Dyce via the Met Office MIDAS database, from 1957 (a nice long record):
https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/dbd451271eb04662beade68da43546e1
You have to register to get access, and be able to write some file-reading software if you want large amounts of data from the sets of 1-year files.
£100 prize for anyone who can see a taxiing aircraft in the data.
“£100 prize for anyone who can see a taxiing aircraft in the data.”
The site number has been operational since 1942 at varying locations.
Somewhat unsure what you are actually trying to say by your remark. Could you expand on it?
It is difficult to find the impact of passing aircraft in temperature data from airport sites, maybe someone can do so. To me the infamous 2015 Heathrow temperature record is doubtful as an example, because the 0900 temperature was also exceptionally high compared with near neighbours:
I’ve got a jumper on and its raining outside …and yet the met-office keeps telling everyone that its the hott and dry, beating all records, do they not have windows in the met-office
They all have their heads stuck where the sun doesn’t shine.
The population is starting to doubt the Met office. Those who take the time to look at the classification of the weather stations used by them know how many are rubbish.
My question is: who classifies weather stations, and how often? My suspicions were raised when I learned RAF Coningsby was class 3. In addition, more should be made of the fact that almost 100% of the errors will overstate the temperature.
Jeremy please see my reply below, it somehow appears to have become a “new” comment. Hey ho.
Thank you Ray. So once again the police and the criminals are one and the same.
“My question is: who classifies weather stations, and how often? “
This is the information I have in emails from the Met Office.
As an example the Met Office showed Hastings (below) as a Class 1 site.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/50%C2%B051'20.7%22N+0%C2%B034'11.8%22E/@50.8558524,0.5697313,86m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d50.8557521!4d0.5699539?entry=ttu
I queried this with the Met Office as it is blatantly obvious it is not Class 1. They have since conceded it is Class 4 and amended their records accordingly but claimed it was just a human error.
I subsequently queried a second allegedly Class 1 site in Scotland which is clearly nothing of the kind. The Met Office then declined to discuss site classifications with me and refused to respond to follow up enquiries.
It is now getting to the point that the only way to communicate with them is the slow process of FOI requests. {I must add, however, that I was extremely flattered and very pleased to be privately contacted by another reader on here with an offer of help in putting in FOIs on my/our behalf to speed up the process.} The issue is similarly exemplified by the case of Neatishead – I enquired about this new station’s CIMO rating a month ago – despite pressing I still do not have an answer…..something to hide perhaps.
Clearly the Met Office has become a law unto itself and is now quite out of rational control.
Besides the obvious “Climate Change Promotion” behavior of the Met Office, there is also the fact that it is essentially a public sector body with little notion of the concept of customers, as we see from the NHS and HMRC for example.
There was one comment that particularly caught my attention in the various recent posts about the inadequacy and total lack of integrity of the Met Office
.A retired meteorologist had set up his own weather stations and noted the difference in readings compared to the official Met Office stations near by. Given the impossibility of persuading the Met Office staff to return to honest scientific practice is the answer to set up a community funded and run system of weather stations of indisputably Class 1 standard. Connected by wireless to a central server , it could even be accessed by the general public , whether or not they have contributed time or money to set up the system. The shoddy political bias of the Met Office would then become transparent to the public.
I dont know how much a professinal weather station would cost , or the cost of the communication system or that of leasing suitable land . Is such a scheme practical in terms of organisation (need professional help) or money?
There are many independent weather stations, with data sent to websites.
The Met Office has its WOW network: https://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/
Another website, with Heathrow as an example: https://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/03772
Mike, there are literally thousands of private weather stations all around the country. Whilst some are established by enthusiasts and of quality varying largely from good to often excellent, there are also very many professional ones for site specific purposes. From my bedroom window I can see one in a vineyard, its purpose being obviously agricultural. Others are for aviation, sports, recreation, leisure and even emergency services.
Most private sites broadcast their readings online thus producing publicly accessible information that can also be easily and visually be located by site and aerial imagery. Here is an example of one website (it is sometimes slow in loading) that I have centred on the site near me – you can interrogate internationally with this one. As climanrecon has said above, there are several others in addition to one the Met Office itself runs but note that they do not accept figures from any sites other than those they own.
https://www.weatherlink.com/map/de5ffecc-aba6-4bde-bdf4-d6ac972b6c71
It would however be a mammoth task to analyse all the sites and the data. Someone may wish to take it on or may already have done so but I certainly done fancy the challenge!
To reinforce the points I am trying to make you can check out daily highs and lows, wet and windies etc from the Met Office here.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/observations/weather-extremes
What is so noticeable is that the lists show highs that are nearly always at Class 4 or more often class 5 stations and usually the same sites regularly.
Here is regular star performer Leuchars (class 5) – favourite for the private jet golf society.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/56%C2%B022'38.5%22N+2%C2%B051'43.1%22W/@56.3773695,-2.8643964,301m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m10!1m5!3m4!2zNTbCsDIyJzM4LjgiTiAywrA1MSczNy44Ilc!8m2!3d56.37745!4d-2.86051!3m3!8m2!3d56.377368!4d-2.861961?entry=ttu
What makes the list so absurd is the number of Walled gardens that are included. These sites are located in areas where the design is specifically to create an artificial micro climate that bears no relationship whatsoever the real climate. Regular stars are Hull (East Park) – a zoo, Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, Cardiff Bute Park, Floors Castle and lots of others.
My personal distaste goes to yesterday’s “highest” at Frittenden, Kent. This is a new (2011) “agricultural site” weather station on a market garden and is assessed as Class 4 but in my opinion it does not deserve any consideration at all as it is so poor.
Yesterday it recorded the UK high (it regularly does) of 19.4 °C but barely 200 metres away is a well sited private weather station which the Met Office itself has awarded a “Gold Quality” standard. This station recorded a maximum of just 17.8 °C but the Met will stand by the “superior” accuracy of their site.- perhaps the poly tunnels surrounding the Stevenson Screen at Frittenden could be taken into account!!!!!
It has a WMO classification of Class 4, meaning there is uncertainty of up to 2C.
The same 2C is what the ‘historic’ Paris climate agreement was supposed to be about 🙄
Hi oldbrew, I note you are involved in Tallbloke’s site. Whilst I personally do have an email address for Paul and have tried to contact him, do you have any other direct contact means or can I refer to you? I have had a rather important invitation to a direct video call with senior people at a certain organisation (that I shall not name) and require assistance. Can you help please?