USK no 2 DCNN 8556 – Monmouthshire upon Devon?

51.71431 -2.92317 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 5 and Satisfactory Installed 26/05/2011

This station is sited at “Coleg Gwent Equestrian Centre” now in the county of Monmouthshire, Wales. It is a relatively new automatic site and in common with most new sites is poorly located and rated in the lowest possible standard of Class 5 – inaccuracy due to siting of up to 5°C. It appears the sloping location by the shading trees must have been easier to install than anywhere else vastly superior and available in the extensive college grounds. It is also another of those sites that regularly reports the region’s daily maximum temperatures.

On these daily bulletins all the named stations are hyperlinked allegedly to allow viewers to study the previous day’s data….possibly.

This is what appears on clicking on Usk No 2.

It clearly shows Chivenor in Devon with the helpful guidance:

“We are showing you the observations for the nearest location to Usk No 2 (68.6 miles, 19 m lower).”

So the Met Office seems to consider a station 68.6 miles away, across a large body of water (the Bristol Channel) and in a different country is in some way representative of Usk. It then further offers “other nearby places” that range from 23 to 34 miles and are all nearer than Chivenor.

The serious question, though, is why does the Met Office simply not give the details for Usk No 2, they do after all have an automatic weather station there from which they proclaim those daily extremes. The only probable reason for clicking on the link for Usk would surely be to study that site’s data and nowhere else after all. Are these Usk readings somehow state secrets? Ironically Weatherobs offers the readings live online anyway.

This referral to sites other than the daily highlighted ones is actually the norm not the exception. Living in south east Kent I often wonder whether if I look up the site data from St Margaret’s Bay (Dover) I will be given data from Lille, France as it is about as close to Dover as Chivenor is to Usk.

I have enquired many times why the Met Office does this and get all manner of contrived and different answers each time. These range from “the target site does not have full reporting details” to “We give a broader range of data sets from some sites”. The Met Office just seems to make the viewing of their basic data a covert obstacle course for absolutely no apparent or logical reason. Are they trying to hide something?

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/usk-no-2-dcnn-8556-monmouthshire-upon-devon/