Battersea Heliport DCNN 5023 – A suitable climate measuring point?

51.46958 0.17941 Met Office assessed as CIMO Class 5 AND “UNSATISFACTORY” Installed 18/5/2018

Obviously the above image is not of a Met Office weather station whose data is used to compile the historic temperature record – that would be totally absurd. It is in fact an image taken from a Met Office Station whose data is used to compile the historic temperature record………and shows its surroundings.

This is the location of Battersea Heliport Weather Station that was fully assessed for climate reporting purposes – it did not have to be assessed.

In such a precarious landing/take off site, even for highly trained helicopter pilots, it is clearly essential to have accurate site temperature, air pressure and wind readings continuously available from the site, not only for the safety of passengers and crew but also a significant part of central London. Nobody could have any problem with weather data recording at such a site. Surely though, everybody would consider such a site exceptionally unrepresentative of the natural environment, even asking the suitability for climate reporting would likely be met with “rolling eyes”.

A senior civil engineer who worked on elements of this site commented to me -“it’s surrounded on three sides by high rise and for about 10 km by hardstanding in every direction.  It simply can’t be being used for climate purposes.” He also provided the site imagery below to emphasise his point.

Astonishingly the Met Office chose to assess this site for World Meteorological Organisation Standards rating it in the lowest Class 5 and prone to up to 5 degrees celsius error margin. From Freedom of Information request –

Additionally they graded it by their own unique rating system as “Unstaisfactory”. Their latest release of gradings I obtained by Freedom of Information request is below..

There is no obligation on the part of the Met Office to assess stations against either of the above standards. Many stations simply are not assessed at all because their data is only for site specific and immediate purposes for instance such as Helicopter take offs and landings. Many aviation and military sites are not assessed as there really is no intent of using site data for anything other than local needs. So why was Battersea Heliport put through such testing for no logical reasoning – surely nobody intended to use such data for climate data reporting – or did they?

These are the CEDA ARCHIVE notes for a military Heliport known as “Plymouth: Kinterbury Point”. It clearly states –

“No MIDAS Open data are available from this station”

Even though recently installed in 2020 no data is publicly archived nor are any readings used for the historic temperature record. No problem.

In contrast the Battersea Heliport Archive readily offers daily readings to freely download

https://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-midas-open/data/uk-daily-temperature-obs/dataset-version-202407/greater-london/62084_battersea-heliport

It appears the Met Office have installed (in 2018) an aviation site(Battersea Heliport) for a private company in a totally inappropriate site that no rational person could ever consider as representative of the natural environment to use its aviation purposed readings to contribute to the historical temperature record……..Weird or purposeful?

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/09/25/battersea-heliport-dcnn-5023-a-suitable-climate-measuring-point/