Cardington WMO 03559 – Met Office drifting into Surrealism

52.10466 -0.4216 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 2/ Met Office graded “GOOD” Installed 1/1/1952

Cardington is most certainly not your average Met Office weather station site. This is one of their most important sites in the entire UK being the principal Meteorological Research Unit. The story with Cardington is further indication, as seen at Cawood, of quite bizarre data presentation to the public.

The above description goes on to detail this site has just about every onshore and atmospheric measuring device available to modern meteorology. As well as major research and development it is also a training centre.

The screen itself is very well sited – Class 2 almost seems a bit harsh though almost certainly correct. Again, surprisingly, it is only Met Office rated as “Good” (Cawood was Class 1 and Excellent) given it is such a high profile establishment. The 100 metre circled area below looks to be clear of significant intrusions. Despite these marginal mark downs the readings from Cardington should be perfectly representative of the area and good quality for compiling the historic temperature record.

The difference with Cawood is that Cardington is an automatic station directly operated and controlled by the Met Office with onsite staffing and much more sophisticated than the former manual more basic unit. Its readings are available hourly online and the Met Office themselves are supplied with data on a minute by minute basis.

However, again, when I checked on the “Climate Averages” for the time series of 1960 through to 2020 (and ongoing) for fully equipped flagship site Cardington I was presented with this.

Whilst there was just possibly an excuse for not showing Cawood (being a manual site operated by a third party) there can be no rational reason to avoid simply providing unadulterated (non homogenised) rolling 30 years averages directly from such a sophisticated facility as Cardington.

What possible rational reason is there for failing to show a long term quality site like Cardington and instead quoting a remote (23 miles away) site like Northampton, Moulton Park which was only installed in 1976 and CLOSED DOWN in 2018. In what other business or industry (I hesitate to use the term science) would anyone ever quote artificially derived data from somewhere else in lieu of hard real world numbers for the immediate location? Do real numbers indicate something different to those the Met Office would “prefer” the public to understand?

The Met Office seems to be operating in a surreal world of its own invention that is getting ever more remote from reality. It is now overdue for a reality check – perhaps the license payer funded “watchdog” could start actually verifying.