Neatishead (DCNN?) – Need to Know Basis?

52.71439 1.47151 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 4 Installed 19/12/2022 Data from May 2023

Neatishead is a very recently installed installation at Remote Radar Head Neatishead (formerly RAF Neatishead).The weather station is fully visible from the adjacent Royal Air Defence Radar Museum, a tourist attraction and military archive. This is an image of the recently constructed large Radar dome – the weather station is now to the right and acknowledged by the Met Office to suffer from the effects of shading by the dome.

Whatever the operational requirements may or may not be for the MOD to have weather reporting in the immediate vicinity of the Radar Station, it seems odd that the very new weather station should be sited in such a meteorologically compromised location from inception. There does not appear to be any site constraints in the area with plenty of free space further away. If there are imperatives (not for public notification) for the proximity of the weather readings to the dome, then surely the site would not need CIMO assessment for climate reporting purposes and data solely used for site specific purposes. There are already several other Met Office stations in the area.

{n.b. there are numerous Met Office weather stations around the country where data is purely for site specific purposes and not deemed to require any form of CIMO assessment. Such sites’ readings are not added to the historic temperature record. A future post will cover such sites.}

In early May this year Neatishead recorded the national daily high temperature. The station did not appear on my recently obtained (under Freedom of Information Request) list of climate reporting stations by CIMO classification and I was unable to ascertain its exact location. With the assistance of Paul Homewood and his excellent Not A Lot Of People Know That blog, Dave Ward located the site and top quality photographer Trevor Shurmer visited the site and kindly supplied images such as this below. Trevor did not have his “collar felt” taking these and there was no obvious significant security or prohibition of photography.

In the meantime, I contacted the Met Office enquiry desk to confirm the CIMO rating. Their long delayed response was somewhat surprising:

“Hello Ray, 

Thank you for your continued patience with this matter.

We’ve heard back from the support team involved, and can confirm the following:

Neatishead was first opened on 19th December 2022.

Whilst we look up what CIMO rating the site is, we will need to know why you are enquiring and what are you doing with the information?

We look forward to hearing back from you. 

Kind regards,

Thomas

Weather Desk”

Astonishingly the Met Office was not prepared to tell me their assessment (a requirement jointly stipulated by the International Standards Organisation and the World Meteorological Organisation for all reporting stations ) unless I divulged why I wanted to know and what I would be “doing” with this information!

Leaving aside that such information is hardly likely to compromise national security, it is held under “Environmental Information” for which even supplying your name is not required under Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Despite advising the Enquiries desk staff of this, they declined to supply this information, hence yet another FOI. The subsequent reply was a revelation in a most unexpected way.

“The Met Office holds this information. Please see the information below.
The site was inspected on the 13 May 2024. The Screen Temperatures and Wind were both classed
as a CIMO 4S.
In order to provide advice and assistance, the Screen Temperatures have been classed as a CIMO 4S
due to shading.
All Met Office weather stations are inspected by trained expert Met Office Regional Network Officers at
a set interval. Each weather station is assessed against both the World Meteorological Organization
inspection standards and Met Office inspection standards. It is the Met Office inspection standard
which is used as the official benchmark for assessing the suitability of a site to record temperatures to
be archived in the long-term climate record.”

Why such a revelation?………Had the Met Office NOT assessed the site until 13th May 2024 i.e. 18 months from installation, and seemingly only AFTER I originally raised the query? Was this the possible cause of their tardy responses to me? Would it still not be CIMO assessed had I not raised the issue? Why was it not assessed on installation or, more sensibly, prior? Does the Met Office really just pick a spot at random, fit instrumentation and then think “oh dear this isn’t very good”?

Furthermore, yet another confirmation that the Met Office do NOT limit themselves to the internationally agreed standards and use their own unique standard determinations – so much for international comparison and the “Global” temperature record.

Is all of this really “Best Practice” and does it represent “Value for taxpayer’s money”? I, for one, think not.

Any views?

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/neatishead-dcnn-need-to-know-basis/