Met Office Deletes Huge Chunks of Historic Temperature Data After Fabrication Claims

Last August, the Daily Sceptic drew attention to the UK Met Office inventing temperature data at its fictitious ‘open’ weather station at Lowestoft. Figures were said to be compiled from “well-correlated neighbouring stations”, but research by citizen sleuth Ray Sanders found there were no such operations within a 40-mile radius. At the time, the Daily Sceptic referred to the matter as a “smoking gun” and said that unless the Met Office could finally reveal its workings out, “the only realistic conclusion to draw is that the data are invented”. No explanation has been provided but in a shock unannounced move the Met Office has now withdrawn all the Lowestoft data from its historical record back to when the site closed in 2010. Similar withdrawals of data have also occurred in the stations at Nairm Druim and Paisley.

The move casts serious doubt over attempts by the Met Office to estimate temperature trends across many once open but now closed weather stations. Sanders is not inclined to minimise the scale of the problem facing the Met Office. When subject to “proper scrutiny”, the Met Office “could not substantiate its fabrication of false data and has had to delete them in their entirety”.

The practice of inventing temperature data from non-existent stations is not confined to the UK. In the USA, the weather service NOAA has been charged with fabricating data from more than 30% of its reporting sites. Data are retrieved from surrounding stations and the resulting averages are given an ‘E’ for estimate. The addition of the so-called ‘ghost’ station data means NOAA’s monthly and yearly reports are “not representative of reality”, states meteorologist Anthony Watts. If such evidence was presented in a court of law it would be thrown out, he adds.

Temperature measurements and estimates are a highly imprecise science. The dreadful mistake meteorological operations like the Met Office and NOAA make is to leverage their ‘trusted’ status to promote the political Net Zero fantasy by claiming an accuracy and precision that is simply not available in their rough-and-ready figures.

The problem with Lowestoft is that the Met Office has been unable to back up its widely promoted “well-correlated stations” explanation. The four nearby stations to Lowestoft supplied in a Met Office public domain database are all, alas, closed. Sanders dug further and found that the only open well-correlated sites available were Cromer, a Class 4 junk site with possible unnatural errors up to 2°C at 35 miles distance, and Class 2 Weybourne, 41 miles away. Well-correlated except for the fact they are too far away to provide a monthly estimate for Lowestoft to one tenth of a degree centigrade. For its part, the Met Office refuses to name well-correlated stations for any of its calculations, claiming “it is not retained information”. Sanders has expressed incredulity at this explanation, exclaiming: “What, not ever, not even for one day? Hands up anyone who believes that!” Freedom of Information requests to obtain station names have been met with the Met Officer stating that such attempts are “vexatious” and not in the public interest.

It might be suggested that the public interest is not best served by monthly temperature figures for Lowestoft being presented until a few days ago as follows (the two columns on the left after the year and month claim a monthly average based on daily highs and lows):

All pretence at estimating these figures has now gone with the following now published. Similar cleansing has occurred at Nairm Drium  and Paisley and previous ‘open’ claims have been changed to ‘closed’.

Meanwhile, the Met Office continues to invent data for about 100 non-existent stations that are used to provide ‘location-specific’ long-term average temperature data. Political pressure is mounting for the Met Office to make a full public statement about its temperature gathering operation – a public statement that addresses the many criticisms of fabrication now widespread on social media. Sanders is clear on the core issue that needs the urgent attention of the Met Office: “How would any reasonable observer know that the data were not real and simply ‘made up’ by a Government agency?” He has called for an “open declaration” of likely inaccuracy of existing published data, “to avoid other institutions and researchers using unreliable data and reaching erroneous conclusions”.

Erroneous conclusions seem to have been reached by the local council in the Welsh spa town of Llandrindod Wells. A few years ago it declared a fashionable ‘climate emergency’ at a time when the Met Office was claiming the local maximum temperatures had risen by 1.07°C relative to the period 1960 to 1990. How did it know? Last month marked the 50th anniversary of the closing of the weather station at Llandrindod Wells. Precision to within one hundredth of a degree centigrade is the product of a computer model – the disclosure of the input details of which are said to be not in the public interest.

Hopefully any much needed explanation will be of a higher standard than that sent recently to Matt Ridley following a recent article in the Telegraph. The science journalist had criticised the Met Office’s exaggeration of warm weather and in passing noted that the meteorologist had been “embarrassingly duped by activists”. In a post on X, Ridley said the Met Office claimed that he was wrong in saying that it based its wildly unrealistic projection for the UK climate in 2070 on the extreme and implausible computer model scenario known as RCP8.5.

As exhibit 1, Ridley posted the following from the Met Office’s own site.

Time for the Met Office to come clean on using junk computer models as well as invented and exaggerated temperature readings.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.