Dungeness WMO 03888 – and The 103 Missing Met Stations Mystery.

I came across the above station from the Met Office’s “Climate Averages” site.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-climate-averages

It helpfully gives co-ordinates to find Dungeness, its elevation and obviously it is an “Observing Site” because it says so. You can look up monthly averages for 30 year periods, running from 1960 to 2020 with “accuracy” down to the second decimal place. Comparison to other locations is a useful tool. Any young student writing their Climate Change essay has all the ammunition needed to prove the ongoing disaster, emergency, chaos, crisis or whatever…….but

I live in Kent and fancied a day out so went to have a look at the Dungeness site but simply could not find it – annoying. No worries, I diverted to look at the Folkestone site instead.

Couldn’t find it, clearly not my day but there was always Dover nearby.

No joy finding this one either. My failures to locate seemed remarkably implausible, I can definitely read a map. I checked the CEDA MIDAS entry to discover Dungeness was installed 1/1/1885 and CLOSED DOWN 31/12/1986, Folkestone CLOSED 2003 and Dover CLOSED 2002. Where on earth were temperature readings coming from for sites closed up to 38 years ago?

I contacted the Met Office enquiries desk to ask what was going on, their initial response:

” Thank you for your email.

We are aware of a very small number of climate stations that are displaying incorrect information as part of the map you refer to. We are working to resolve this and improve the access to data on the map. I hope this helps.” ……..A very small number – how many is “very small”? I was already at 3 out of 3 missing sites.

So I made a Freedom of Information request to get a real (but only partial) answer. A full list of the “Open” and “Closed” stations appearing on the Climate Averages web page was supplied.

OF 302 SITES MARKED ON THE CLIMATE AVERAGES LISTING, 103 (OVER A THIRD) NO LONGER EXIST.

The Met Office declined to initially answer how the data after closure dates was compiled. I requested a review of their partial response to my questions and tried to pin them down on the methodology used just for the Folkestone and Dover sites. Their response:

“By way of further advice and assistance as part of this internal review, I can advise you that
the Met Office is unable to supply specific details of the observing sites requested, as this is
not recorded information. We would advise you that we do not attribute unmodified values
from one station to another station. We use regression analysis to create a model of the
relationship between each station and others in the network. We use these regression models
to generate an estimate for each month when the target station is not operating or missing
data within its period of record. Each estimate is based on data from up to six other stations.
The chosen stations are well correlated with the target station and have data for the missing
month. The choice of predictor stations will change as the network evolves (for example, when
stations open and close). Unfortunately, this means that there is no single answer to the
question of which stations have been used to create the estimates for Folkestone and Dover,
as it will vary from month to month and from variable to variable. The climate averages on our
web page are the mean of the original observations (where available) and the estimates for
the specified station and averaging period. Further details of the analysis method can be found
in section 2 of the following paper:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/joc.1160.”;

(n.b. the “helpful” link is pay-walled)

I leave it open to readers to interpret this explanation for themselves and come to their own conclusions as to why it is being done. The next post regarding Lowestoft and “Historic Stations” data will further confuse the issue.

Meanwhile, Dungeness ,it seems, has 102 other colleagues “Missing but not In Action”

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/09/04/dungeness-wmo-03888-and-the-103-missing-met-stations-mystery/