Logan Botanic Gardens DCNN 6802 – Intent to deceive?

54.74289 -4.95856 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 4 Above site installed 12/11/2012

There has been some form of weather recording at Logan Botanic Garden since 1907 though temperature records have only been archived since 2000 with the site probably only being a rain gauge prior. It is beyond parody for a Met Office inspector to assess the site as CIMO Class 4 – it is blatantly obvious that it is Class 5 – error due to siting of up to 5°C. If this really were Class 4 just how bad would that make 112 Class 5 assessed sites?

The above image is from the Garden’s Facebook page which reads “On November 12th, the met office installed our new automatic weather station in some of wettest and muddiest conditions. Hats off to them and a big thank you. You can now type Logan Botanic Garden weather into a search engine and we can be “seen” with a five day forecast.”

Not only can you get a five day forecast but with surprising regularity you also get this……….

Normally I would use a Google or Bing maps aerial locator image as the headline but unfortunately this site is so obscured by artificial vegetation and man-made structures that I was unable to clearly identify the site. Luckily since the early days of the Surface Stations Project more imagery is online, as above, to really show how bad some locations are and supply independent details. In this case it is proven that this site was installed recently by the Met Office themselves as an automatic reporting station and in a very poorly rated location.

Further evidence of the nature of Logan Botanic Gardens can be found on its own Wikipedia page which states:

“The area has a mild climate, with mild winters, due to the influence of the North Atlantic Current and the Gulf Stream. The combination of this, acidic soils and the sheltered aspect of the gardens enables plants to be cultivated which would not normally survive outdoors in Scotland, with species from as far away as Chile,Vietnam.Australia and New Zealand all thriving in Logan’s borders.”

In other words – and to interpret for the benefit of the Met Office – these walled gardens are designed to create an artificially contrived micro climate that is not representative of anywhere outside its immediate locality.

The Met Office themselves discuss the relationship between CIMO classifications and site recording area as below (note my bold):

The WMO Siting Classification for Surface Observing Stations on Land was formally introduced from 2014, enabling us to make broad comparisons of our weather and climate stations with those around the world. These WMO classifications focus on the exposure of an observed element at a site, with a Class 1 assessment being the highest standard and Class 5 the lowest………………..

…………………..most Stevenson Screens in the UK are class 3 or 4 for temperature as a result but continue to produce valid high-quality data. WMO guidance does, in fact, not preclude use of Class 5 temperature sites – the WMO classification simply informs the data user of the geographical scale of a site’s representativity of the surrounding environment – the smaller the siting class, the higher the representativeness of the measurement for a wide area. “

The above demonstrates that the Met Office recognises that a “higher numbered” CIMO rating (typically 4 and 5) indicates the site is NOT representative of a wide area. In the case of Logan Botanic Gardens readings represent the 5 hectares of the site’s micro-climate………

………So why does the Met Office claim Logan Botanic Gardens represents the climate of the nearly 13,000 square kilometres of Dumfries, Galloway, Lothian and Borders?

Intent to deceive?

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/11/13/logan-botanic-gardens-dcnn-6802-intent-to-deceive/