Hull East Park – a.k.a.The Costa del Humber.

53.76580 -0.29796 Met Office Rated CIMO Class 5 Installed 14/10/11…by someone.

One of the most appallingly bad locations the Met Office has. It appears with almost monotonous regularity as the region’s daily highest temperature as well as National highest three times so far this year. Is this the hot spot for your summer hols or is it just a terrible site to read temperatures?

A strange history. The site was not directly installed by the Met Office rather it was part of a “Citizen Science” project that “enabled the public to get hands-on with nature led by Imperial College London. Wikipedia describes the “climate” part of the project as follows

“The OPAL climate survey launched in March 2011, coordinated by the Met Office. It asked people to look for contrails in the sky, estimate their thermal comfort, and measure wind using bubbles. The results are helping scientists learn more about the ways we affect our climate, and how we may adapt to it.”

Measure wind using bubbles?

When the project finished in 2015 the Met Office officially adopted the site but also rather oddly simultaneously removed its hourly previously published reporting from their own WOW website.

Intrepid photographer Oliver King kindly supplied on site photography to help analysis of this difficult to access site.

The Stevenson Screen is the white box to the right in the undergrowth by the hedge – behind is the roof rack of the tour coach regularly parked on the other side. A more detailed view

This site very clearly warrants its awful Class 5 rating with an error margin of up to 5°C. I decided to compare its regular daily high readings with local Private Weather Stations (PWS) on the Met Office’s own “Weather Observations Website” and discovered a very high quality weather station at a Hull University research centre only a few hundred metres away.

https://www.hull.ac.uk/work-with-us/research/institutes/energy-and-environment-institute/our-work/sudslab-uk

I contacted the particularly helpful academic staff at the University who granted me temporary personal access to their live streamed data – interestingly this access also allowed me to view the previously unknown hourly output from the East Park Met Office site. The Official Met Office readings were consistently higher by up to 3°C over the University site and displayed an unusually “spikey” variation. Furthermore the Met office site temperature readings were equally higher than the two nearby PWS known as “Hull Weather”.

I queried this site with the Met Office, supplying comparative data from the University and photography of the poorly maintained state their official site had fallen into. Their first answer was simply to advise why I could not look up their official data for the site until months later despite my indicating I already had this data.

“The Met Office surface observing network consists of a variety of different types of observation sites, including those that report current weather conditions frequently, and contain a full array of automatic sensors (observing wind, temperatures, precipitation, sunshine and visibility), and smaller sites that only report a subset of these parameters. Many of these smaller weather observation sites are not displayed on our website, and Hull East Park is one of these, therefore daily data from Hull East Park is not available on our website. You can, however, find archive data up to the end of 2022 for Hull East Park on MIDAS Open on CEDA. MIDAS Open data is updated annually and the next annual release of MIDAS Open is due soon and will update data to the end of 2023.”

So I put in a Freedom of Information request to be told –

“Hull East Park Weather Station was last inspected on the 20 March 2024. The CIMO score was
assessed as a CIMO 5 for Temperature and Humidity. The Met Office rating was assessed as
Satisfactory according to the Met Office assessment process. In order to provide advice and
assistance, the current Met Office inspection grading scheme for air temperature measurement uses a
4 grade structure: Excellent, Good, Satisfactory and Unsatisfactory. Where possible, remedial action is
taken to improve the condition of stations which are assessed to be Unsatisfactory.”

Basically this response states the Met Office ignores ISO/WMO standard 19289:2014(E) and continues to use its own arbitrary standard that cannot be questioned because they say so. Hull East Park is therefore deemed “Satisfactory”. Clearly in rating it as a wildly inaccurate CIMO class 5 they have accepted its junk status ( i.e. Unsatisfactory) but as they mark their own homework there is no accountability they are held to. Meanwhile the ongoing UK temperature record is exaggerated ever upwards.   

Surely Hull East Park was never intended to form part of the UK climate reporting network and should no longer be considered acceptable. Readers views are most appreciated.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/08/27/hull-east-park-a-k-a-the-costa-del-humber/