Pershore WMO 03529 – A military airport, the burial ground of over 100,000 carcasses, gruesome liqueur pumping, a massive parking lot, a comparison with the CET and a demonstration of UHI.

52.14282 -2.04127 Met Office CIMO Assessed CIMO Class 4 installed 1/1/1953 relocated 1957 relocated again 1993.

A number of issues to discuss here. Following on from the review of Pershore College this is the other Pershore weather station also known by the Met Office as Throckmorton depending on where you look it up. The screen is sited at the north, north eastern end of the runway of the former RAF Pershore/Throckmorton Airfield which is no longer used for aviation. It has, however, subsequently been used for other, somewhat more gruesome, purposes. And, in conjunction with Pershore College, offers a demonstration of Heat Island effect.

The location sits between the runway end and Long Lane (the sole airfield access road) running partly around the airfield perimeter. As can be seen from the aerial image there is extensive roadside hedging encroaching onto screen. Additionally there are significant metallic structures likely to distort wind patterns.

The Street view image from 2011 clearly shows the screen and surrounding influences on screen temperature just a few metres from the road and layby parking/viewing area.

Whoever is responsible for the roadside vegetation maintenance is not known to me but I suspect it will likely have passed to the Local Authority in the airfield’s post operational days. Clearly it is not considered a priority for aviation safety anymore leading to significant unchecked growth. The effect on temperature readings is inevitable with the screen now barely visible at all. The 2024 current view from the same spot is below.

This neglect of key Met office operational sites in this manner is a recurring theme in so many of my reviews even of such highly and expensively equipped sites as this. As I observed with Shobdon Airfield a relatively small annual investment would ensure continued site reading’s integrity. Absent such maintenance and all the last decade’s temperature readings for the historic record have needlessly become unreliable and unusable for the key aspect of climate reporting. In this particular case many of the wind readings will be distorted a large part of the time as well.

So what else is problematical? In common with disused airfields they are being repurposed. Often industrial complexes develop as they have here and the sites readily lend themselves to parking things up. Just like Bedford and others, Pershore is turning into an ever increasingly large parking lot for either scrapped or new cars – often unsold but pre-registered models notably EVs.

And the gruesome part was the burial of over 100,000 cattle slaughtered prematurely following the Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001. https://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/7763691.protest-as-foot-and-mouth-carcasses-hit-102000/

Not only were the local residents angered and distressed at huge volumes of traffic and the stench involved in this operation, the issues did not go away when they stopped. The rotting carcasses required tankers to pump out the resultant “liqueur” and yet more traffic and stench for a considerable time after. Quite what effect this may have had on soil and surface temperatures is not recorded. It must certainly have been an unpleasant situation for the residents.

This location though rapidly changing, is still rural and just 6 kilometres from Pershore College weather station.

Two sites in such close proximity and just 2 metres difference in elevation, should not consistently significantly differ in temperature readings. As I noted in my report on Pershore College there was a significant recent difference in daytime maxima with the now developed College site warmer. Further comparison of recent cold temperatures also indicates the College holds onto this warmth overnight whilst the rural airfield site drops much colder and much more quickly. The Weatherobs comparison graphs clearly demonstrate this. The airfield site dropped to -5°C by midnight last night (9/1/2025) then ultimately down to a minimum of -6.6°C early this morning.

Conversely, at the same times, the College site had only dropped to -1.3°C by midnight and recorded a minimum of -4.8°C. Large differences.

The holding of daytime stored heat, slower temperature decline and higher minimum are all clear indications of Heat Island effect. This is not a cherry pick, ongoing inspection of the two near neighbours regularly indicates such major differences. Unfortunately whilst the Met Office provide “Climate Averages” for the airfield site (by whatever data homogenisation they choose) they do not freely supply comparative data for the College site. The primary concern, though, is that the College site is the one being used to represent the CET but is no longer representing the natural environment.

The current cold weather period is readily demonstrating these UHI Effects. The weatherobs screen capture from 2:00 am 10/1/2025 shows real time temperatures varying from 0°C in urban areas of Birmingham/ Winterbourne and -1°C of Coventry/Coundon, and Pershore College contrasting with as low as -5°C at rural Pershore/Throckmorton and -6°C at rural Benson and South Newington.

I will be monitoring and soon reviewing more of the stations in this Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Worcestershire concentration. The above map only indicates automatic reporting stations in this area, there are surprisingly several more manual reporting stations, many in inappropriate locations (i.e. domestic gardens) to add to the above.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/01/10/pershore-wmo-03529-a-military-airport-the-burial-ground-of-over-100000-carcasses-gruesome-liqueur-pumping-a-massive-parking-lot-a-comparison-with-the-cet-and-a-demonstration-of-uhi/