The Met Office is Unable to Name the Sites Providing ‘Estimated’ Temperature Data For its 103 Non-Existent Stations

Last year the UK Met Office was shown to be inventing long-term temperature data at 103 non-existent weather stations. It was claimed in a later risible ‘fact check’ that the data were estimated from nearby well-correlated neighbouring stations. Citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders issued a number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to learn the identity of these correlating sites but has been told that the information is not held by the Met Office. So the invented figures for the non-existent sites are supposedly provided by stations that the Met Office claims it cannot identify and are presumably not recorded in its copious computer storage and archive.

Mr Sanders is understandably unimpressed with the explanation that this vital identifying information is not retained, writing: “Is the general public just supposed to ‘believe’ the Met Office without any workings out evident. To me, and every single scientist who has ever lived, it is imperative to show the data used – ANYTHING LESS IS NOT VALID. No Verifiable Data Source = No Credibility = no better than Fiction.”

Until recently, the Met Office showed weather averages including temperature for over 300 stations stretching back at least 30 years. The data identified individual stations and single location coordinates, but when 103 were found not to exist the Met Office hastily rewrote the title of the database to suggest that the figures arose from a wider local area.

Following the change, Sanders sought FOI guidance about Scole, a temperature weather station in Norfolk that operated for only nine years between 1971 to 1980. Type in Scole on the new ‘location’ database and it is identified as one of five sites that are the “nearest climate stations to Scole”. Sixty years of average data are given including 10 years before Scole was actually established. This itself is odd since the Met Office justifies ‘estimating’ data for closed stations to preserve long usability of the data. It would appear a stretch to use this explanation to justify preserving 1960s data from a station that did not open until 1971. Sanders made a simple request and asked the Met Office to reveal the names of the weather stations used in compiling the climate average data for Scole from 1990 to 2020. If the Met Office was unable to supply the full list, he made it as easy as possible and asked for the name of the last station supplying data.

The astonishing claim that the Met Office was unable to help because the information was not held was followed by an explanation that “the specific stations used in regressive analysis each month are not an output from the process”. The unimpressed Sanders observes that the Met Office archives billions of numbers and data items but does not seem to keep a record of its workings out. “So they have no proof whatsoever of how their climate averages were compiled,” he observes.

Sanders also sought similar details about another ‘zombie’ site, namely, Manby in Lincolnshire. This actually closed for temperature readings in 1974 but again 60-year averages are currently available. Sanders was intrigued by this site since the CEDA archive that collects Met Office data showed it was still open, a claim also made in an earlier FOI disclosure by the state meteorologist. Again Manby is identified as the nearest climate station when its name is searched on the climate averages site. But the Met Office’s Weather Observations Website shows it is closed and Sanders notes the Met Office has since confirmed that to him. It has been 50 years since an actual temperature reading was taken at Manby but as with Scole the Met Office under a FOI request is unable to name any of the ‘well-correlated’ sites supposed providing data.

It is difficult to understand why the Met Office cannot answer a simple question seeking guidance on where temperature readings were taken. Presumably they would be obtained from the five nearest ‘stations’ identified when a location is entered into the climate averages database. But as the Daily Sceptic has reported in the past, there might be problems with this approach. Cawood in the West Riding of Yorkshire is a pristine class 1 site designated by the World Meteorological Organisation as providing an uncorrupted air temperature reading over a large surrounding area (nearly 80% of Met Office sites are in junk classes 4 and 5 with ‘uncertainties’ of 2C and 5C respectively). Cawood has good temperature recordings going back to 1959. But no rolling 30-year average for Cawood is provided. Instead, the Met Office flags data from five other sites, four of which don’t exist, with the fifth located 27 miles away at a 163 metres higher elevation. Even worse, the location of Norwich brings up five nearby stations, including Scole, none of which exist.

As the Daily Sceptic has noted in the past, the Met Office has only itself to blame for the often trenchant criticism it receives on social media about its temperature collecting operations. It does a fine job of forecasting weather, but activist elements in its operation have weaponised inaccurate temperature recordings to promote the politicised Net Zero fantasy.

Recently, the chief scientist at the Met Office, Professor Stephen Belcher, called for Net Zero “to stabilise the climate” claiming he saw “more extreme weather” in the Met Office’s observations. In the UK, he suggested that between 2014-2023 the number of days recording 28C had doubled, while those over 30C had tripled compared to 1961-1990. A more extreme weather trend is not something that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has seen, while observations about more recent hot days might ring truer if they were not based on the increasingly urban heat-ravaged Met Office databases.

And Ray Sanders’s take? “We are regularly told in the mainstream media, particularly the BBC, that we are entering an existential ‘climate emergency’, so how is it nobody wants to discuss the obviously fictional data that is being manipulated to support this ‘argument’?”

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.