Bainbridge DCNN 2212 – This would be funny but only if it was not true.

54.30837 -2.10127 Met Office assessed CIMO Class 5 Archived temperature records from 1991

This is my 100th post since restarting the Surface Station Project in August this year. I suspect many may have thought I had started by picking off the “low hanging” fruit of poorer sites to begin with – that is actually completely wrong! Almost unbelievably there are many more official Met Office weather stations that are even worse than Bainbridge for me to cover in future.

I opted for the headline site image rather than my usual map locator simply to hammer home just how atrocious, indeed risible, this site actually is. It beggars belief that any Met office inspector could accept such a site for archiving readings to contribute to the historic temperature record but it gets worse than that.

From my review of Sheffield:Weston Park I referred to the list of weather stations from which Cold weather Payments were made https://lottie.org/fees-funding/dwp-cold-weather-payment/

Bainbridge is one of the selected weather stations used to calculate average temperature from. The residents of cold and snowy Copley, with their own Met Office site, have their payments decided by readings taken at Bainbridge.

For uniformity below is the site map with a 10 metre radius circle.

To state the visibly obvious, just for the record, this site is on a working farm in North Yorkshire close to the River Bain near to its confluence with the River Ure. It sits in a moderately steep sided valley at 210 metres amsl with topography given to producing waterfalls.

As with all these working sites the weather station plays a secondary role to farming life and other operational needs will always prevail. Parking farm machinery and equipment in extremely close proximity to the screen is a regular occurrence visible in historic aerial images. Whatever the shiny bright tank is in the top image, it will certainly distort readings significantly. Temperature readings taken at Bainbridge are unreliable.

The principal point is that despite the Met Office continually proclaiming the highest possible standards, the reality is the complete opposite in the majority of cases with poorly sited units and limited quality control. Important decisions cannot be taken from wholly unreliable data. The current situation is unacceptable and must change now.