Langdon Bay DCNN5334 – How hot are car exhaust fumes?

51.13351 1.34338 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 4S Installed 1/1/1984

For reasons nobody local to this site (such as myself) would ever understand, the Met Office calls this site Langdon “Bay”. It is, in fact, better known as Langdon “Heights” being 120 metres vertically upwards from the “Bay” itself. Like many Met Office sites it is in a restricted access area, in this case by a major Coastguard site with other important and somewhat secretive international communications links. It is inadvisable to embark on photography in the immediate MOD controlled area.

Having been inside the Gravesend (Broadness) Radar Station enclosure a few weeks prior, I was also able to visit this site on similar business some years ago. It was a very enlightening visit.

This site is as close to France as it is possible to get in England. On clear days the views over the busy English Channel shipping and onto the French coast are quite breath-taking. The nearby cliffs are an unfenced drop away. East Kent occasionally has the nearest thing to a continental climate as the British Isles ever gets when south easterlies bring in either very hot (or very cold) dry weather from Europe over only the shortest sea crossing to modify them. This should be a very important site for weather forecasting purposes literally often on the “front” line of changing weather patterns. Inexplicably it is a very poor Class 4S site and probably should be rated even worse, if at all.

A study of the above Google aerial image suggests lots of problematic issues, such as immediate shading from the trees and rather close proximity to the car park – when you are actually there it looks much worse. This alternative aerial view below handily shows the long term storage containers by the screen.

About 20 years ago I arrived at the site to meet a colleague and reverse parked into the third bay from the right in the above image – where the black car is parked – just in front of the screen. My colleague was already there, parked in the second bay, having lunch in his car. It was a hot day and he had the engine running to keep the aircon chilling him down. I vividly recall his comment looking at the weather station “you couldn’t make it!” From our experience at Gravesend we just laughed and went about our business. When we returned later to the car we discussed the distance from our car’s exhausts to the screen and estimated under 3 metres. The image below marks the 10 metre radius from the screen showing our guess was reasonably accurate.

Regardless of CIMO regulations, distance measurements, percentages of ground cover, shading or anything else, I personally find it difficult to understand how this site can be given any genuine level of accuracy. The coastguard station is a 24/7/365 operation with vehicles continually coming and going in the car park – and more than the occasional helicopter take off and landings. I have no idea which came first (the screen or the car parking) but surely they are not compatible neighbours so close together.

Even without the car park, the screen is away from any level of breeze being completely shaded in all directions by buildings, shrubs and even store rooms. Although this is typically a very windy site, the surrounding structures create a totally unnatural sheltered environment around the screen. The earliest sunrise on the millenium morning in 2000 was here but the screen would have been in the shade.

Perhaps the ultimate irony came when I asked the Met Office to supply their methodology for calculating the “Climate Averages” for their claimed (but non existent) Folkestone and Dover sites. They were unable to demonstrate how their calculations had actually been made because the data used was not recorded and was variable over time. The Met Office seemingly were not aware that Langdon Heights are, in fact, a part of…….Dover.