Motherwell Strathclyde Park DCNN 6435 – Unsatisfactory Piles of Rubbish

55.78602 -4.02304 Met Office Assessed CIMO CLASS 5 & UNSATISFACTORY Installed 1/1/1979

There really should not be much to say about this station other than it is a complete disgrace to meteorology. The back story here demonstrates the worst of the Met Office’s ongoing practice. Paul Homewood’s excellent “Not a Lot of People Know That” blog exposed the shortcomings of this site as far back as 2018 prompting Paul to conclude “The thermometer at Strathclyde Park breaks all of the rules for proper siting and should be immediately withdrawn from the Met Office list.”

The site was demonstrated to be unsatisfactory back then, nothing appears to have been improved in the interim and the latest Met Office rating is still “Unsatisfactory”. And yet it is still there functioning and contributing readings to the historic temperature record. So what is the full story?

The BBC proclaimed “On Thursday 28 June 2018, a temperature of 33.2C degrees was measured in Motherwell, North Lanarkshire.” This beat the Scottish all time high record previously set in 2003 at Greycrook, Borders region. Greycrook station itself had been shutdown only months after setting that “record” with archives showing

In the same way that the Faversham 2003 national record had been hotly disputed by Philip Eden (Vice Principal of the Royal Meteorological Society), the Greycrook reading was considered equally dubious. It seemed there was an overt eagerness to get a new “record” breaker for Scotland in the same vein that Floors Castle was prematurely proclaimed.

No sooner had the 2018 reading been prematurely announced prior to checking when many of the public raised concerns about the site’s validity and various “vehicles” were found to be in the immediate vicinity of the Stevenson screen. Distortion of readings by vehicles parked close to screens with engines running should never happen if sites were correctly located. This point seems lost on the Met Office who have literally dozens of sites in car parks prone to distorted readings. My next station profile of Nettlecombe relates to one site where readings are bizarrely distorted by the vehicles of those actually responsible for taking the readings.

The Met Office ate humble pie and declared the readings void, however, it was not just parked vehicles that were the problem – the site itself was wholly unacceptable. Readers of NALOPKT supplied onsite images showing just how poor the site was.

Significant piles of general detritus appear around the screen on the other side of inappropriate screening completely contrary to required standards. The obvious solutions were either upgrading the site or removing the station altogether but either way its readings were discredited (unsatisfactory by definition) and some action must be taken. None was.

More recent street view imagery from 2021 indicates nothing significant has changed and indeed may have worsened. A distant image but demonstrates continuing issues.

Perhaps the most damning issue is that the site is officially still deemed “Unsatisfactory” as at end of August 2024 by the Met Office themselves yet its data is still being archived for the historic temperature record. Surely knowingly continuing to use such openly discredited sites is irresponsible on the part of the Met Office. I reiterate Paul’s point myself – the thermometer at Strathclyde Park breaks all of the rules for proper siting and should be immediately withdrawn from the Met Office list.