Whitechurch DCNN8188 – Secretive data but from where and why and who?

51.98868 -4.67913 Met Office Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1975

Whitechurch (now generally known as Eglwyswen) automatic weather station is in what would best be described as a back garden-cum-market garden in Pembrokeshire over 7 miles from the coast. It sits between vegetable patches to the north-west of a poly tunnel and is bordered on all sides by tall hedging. The Met Office assess the site as CIMO Class 4 and are happy to proclaim national daily maximum temperatures from here as below.

The Met Office has a £1.2 billion super computer into which they feed data from the likes of this site below seen from Google Street view.

Clicking on the link for Whitchurch on the above “extremes” page takes you quite inexplicably to the data from the coastal site of Aberporth 11.8 miles away.

What causes further confusion is that the temperature figures quoted at Aberporth for the referenced date of the 14th November are nothing like the quoted maximum for Whitechurch and show just 8°C – the small matter of 8.3°C lower. The link also refers to other stations quoted as “nearby places” ranging from 30 to 36 miles away. Are the actual historic figures for Whitechurch for the day before such a secret that they cannot be divulged?

The plot thickens even more. It is possible to see the historic data from most Met Office automatic stations from a third party organisation –https://weatherobs.com/

These are the hourly details actually recorded for Aberporth which bear no similarity to those quoted by the Met Office link figures and actually reached 12.9°C but still 3.4°C less than claimed for Whitechurch.

And taking this a step further why couldn’t the Met Office have just shown the data for Whitechurch itself in the first place in lieu of this rambling run around quoting misleading data from sites either quite distant or dissimilar locations. Aberporth is on the coast, Whitechurch is well inland. So here is the Whitechurch data that the Met Office do not seem to want to divulge.

Notice how sharp the temperature spike is on the 14th compared to the same graph for Aberporth. Worth noting that another nearby automatic station, Scolton Country Park at 13 miles distant and also inland, did not reach such highs.

Leaving aside such confusing and misleading representations of data , back to the actual Whitechurch site itself. The general public assumes that government agencies with such large budgets would be both “high tech” and of the utmost scientific integrity. The Met Office itself portrays its recording sites as quite grandiose as below.

Without wishing to personally disparage these amateur meteorologists below, I seriously doubt the general public would expect this below to be the Whitechurch weather station as publicised in the Guardian newspaper back in 2016. As I recently proved the Met Office claim accuracy to one hundred thousandth of a degree celsius……..does anybody really believe that from this?

Further details of the site can be viewed in this youtube interview with the site’s custodian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9DMnFvFxNw

I have no wish to belittle the efforts of the many amateurs who assist in the data recording, but is this really the standard with poor siting that the public expects and deserves to produce data upon which huge Government decisions are being taken? Can the Met Office not represent its own data in a manner the public can actually understand? Or are they actually trying to hide something?

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/11/16/whitechurch-dcnn8188-secretive-data-but-from-where-and-why-and-who/