Stornoway Airport WMO 03026 – The Met Office’s incredible forecast abilities.

58.21365 -6.31880 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1873 (According to the Met Office)

The Met Office claims this weather station holds a continuous temperature record for the same location from 1873. It seems remarkably prescient of the Met Office to decide to locate a weather station in just the correct place for use by an airport not constructed until 64 years later in 1937 and 30 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight. Amazingly good powers of forecasting. So what is the true story?

Firstly an assessment of the site. Tim Channon estimated the site as likely Class 3 based on proximity to hard-standing areas. The Met Office’s own Class 4 rating (inaccuracy due to siting of an additional 2°C) indicates Tim was likely generous in his rating though he would not have had the benefit of the Streetview imagery below. This is a very exposed and windy coastal site.

The real problem though is the way the Met Office is promoting the site readings as very long term.

As I pointed out above, it does seem rather unlikely this site was originally located in its present site, so what does inspection of the site’s actual data show? The coordinates given on the details page of “hard Data” are those of the present site with no indication of any relocation throughout the dataset.

Furthermore viewing the basic CEDA archive also suggests continuous site operation with digitalised temperature records dating back to 1873

Any 21st century undergraduate in a “Climate Science” subject would have to delve very deep indeed to dispute the authenticity of this site’s location and in reality there is no reason why they should – the “Prime Source” is the Met Office after all. For my part I refused to accept the definition of “airport” in 1873 was just a coincidence and the airport was actually built around the weather station so I did delve deeper.

Back in the 19th Century, weather stations were frequently installed around Municipal centres, stately homes, seaside resorts, existing observatories, walled gardens, botanic gardens et-alia. Going back to the hand written original records told the true story. The Stornoway weather station was actually in the grounds of Lews Castle. Filed away in the Scottish “Red Book” of Climate Returns 1857-1913 under the county name of “Ross-shire” is this type of return.

Having now identified the real location of the screen from over 150 years ago the task was then to identify when it was moved to its present site. At this point I got lucky. I found a detailed research paper solely concerning weather records from The Isle Of Lewis from a researcher seeking to add social records over the period of the datasets available.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14702541.2022.2158366#d1e333

It is a long read but has the very handy line.” The recording station at Stornoway moved to Stornoway Airport in 1968, from where the record continues today; although the station has moved within the airport grounds. “

Thus the Met Office claimed continuous data record of 151 years from the same coordinate indicated site now comes down to a maximum of just 56 years at the airport and from different points within that site since. Although the exact location with the grounds of Lews Castle is not known, the map below indicates the likely distance between the two sites at 4.25 kilometres.

Yet again the Met office has spliced together two different data sets. The Lews Castle Garden site would have been a sheltered site at an aprroximate 30 Metre amsl elevation – the airport site an open windwsept site at 15 Metres amsl. The two areas are climatologically quite different but wrongly retained the same indentifiying numbers in the archive data set.

Is all of this just ineptitude on the part of the Met Office or is there some motivation behind this covert dataset bonding? Did nobody ever stop to think about the dates when attributing 19th century readings to a site with the name “Airport” included? The Met Office pointedly refuses to use data from “amateur” weather stations – I seriously feel they should look at their own some what “amateurish” operations first.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/12/23/stornoway-airport-wmo-03026-the-met-offices-incredible-forecast-abilities/