Mugdock Park DCNN 6223 – A complete absence of quality control.

55.97328 -4.33057 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1990

Mugdock Park weather station is set in the large Country Park and House tourist centre from which it takes its name. It looks like the low grade innocuous rural weather station that makes up a large proportion of the lesser equipped manual reporting sites that predominate in the “Climate” reporting (not directly used for weather forecasting) list of Met Office locations. It may seem harmless enough but Mugdock Park displays the lack of quality control over readings that renders them useless for practical purposes.

In the guest post on “Comparing temperatures past and present” author Stephen Connolly excellently detailed the manner in which daily temperature averages are calculated for meteorology purposes. Simply put, add the day’s highest and lowest readings and divide by two. This system takes no account of the overall day’s weather profile e.g. a high of 25°C, low of 5°C derives a meteorological average of 15°C being the exact same as another day of 17°C high, 13°C low. The “weather” contrast between these two examples is obvious but not reflected by the average. This situation was highlighted in May 2024 when the Met Office promoted a dull, wet and dreary month as the “hottest” ever resulting in accusations of “gaslighting” the public. This caused a reporting policy direction change into promoting the crossing of “thresholds.”

The above demonstrates the vulnerability of meteorological averaging to the freak “blip” high or low extremes as any unnatural “blip” in temperature can have a marked effect. It is unlikely for there to be strong unnatural cooling effects on a Stevenson Screen but there are very many opportunities for sudden short lived artificial heat sources raising the single point daily high. The siting requirements set out in CIMO guidelines are intended to ensure no external artificial influences come into play hence the necessity to adhere to them……all of the time.

This is where the likes of Mugdock Park can become practically useless. Going back to the issue of Strathclyde Park, Motherwell and that infamous brief Scottish all time “record” set by the ice cream van parked alongside the screen, it is obvious that motorised vehicles and screens are a bad combination for reading accuracy. The headline street view image from 2009 indicates a parked tractor in close proximity but that is only a tiny part of the problem. Here is the current google aerial imagery of the site – note the extensive car parking facilities.

However, if you trawl back through time on Google Earth Pro historic imagery and pay particular reference to the warmer summer tourist seasons, the images often reveal major problems. Back in 2005 the section by the screen was grass covered “overflow” parking hence only a few cars parked within 2 metres of screen. Overall very similar to the Nettlecombe example.

However, the popularity of the site has resulted in the area being tarmac covered and increased parking by the screen. Image below from 2022 – also note the building constructed in the last 4 years to the immediate west of the screen.

From the point of view of siting alone, this simply has to rank by any reasonable standard as unacceptable. The site is effectively uncontrolled with both agricultural parking and frequent visitor parking in absurdly close proximity. The heat emissions of just one exhaust (reverse parked), the thermal effects emanating from a hot engine (forward parked), the reflective property of bright shiny metal close by, any of these will definitely (not “possibly”) affect the screen readings. Remember the Met Office officially confirmed to me they can record temperature to the 5th decimal place of a degree (i.e. a one hundred thousandth) as at Cavendish . {By way of analogy, world record holder Usain Bolt took 9.58 seconds to run 100 metres. A single millimetre is one hundred thousandth of that distance!}. As a former Met Office employee included in the post on Metrology whilst discussing the change from LiG thermometeres to PRT units.

“A perfect example of this was the Met Office site where temperatures were recorded to 4 or 5 decimal places, giving the readings the sense of extreme accuracy, whereas they just showed the stupidity of the observer. “

Worth noting is that almost all manual reporting Met Office weather stations have now been converted over the last decade to primary use of PRTs. The former conventional liquid in glass thermometers are only as “back up” though I suspect rarely, if ever, used for maximum readings. The meteorologist for the Wallingford site (employed by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology) confirmed to me that the instrumentation was changed there at the Met Office station in October 2017. The Youtube clip in the Floors Castle report indicated a calibration date of 2019. The relevance of this change is noted in the Metrology post.

“For example a site on an airport may present no problems for a MiG; the quicker response of the Pt may catch a quick burst of an aeroplane’s exhaust as it passes en route for take-off or landing.   This will result in a higher Maximum Temperature recorded for that day.“

In the case of Mugdock Park substitute in car or tractor exhaust for the same effect and then apply meteorological averaging. And then add into all of this mix that actually taking readings seems to have been somewhat erratic. From the “Remarks” section of the CEDA Archives is just a short extract of tens of missing readings over a short period.

As I have demonstrated multiple times (just one example being Hartpury College) this absence of large numbers of readings does not seem to overly concern the Met Office who quite perversely still manage to derive a notional “annual average” temperature from however few daily readings are taken – an arithmetic meaningless.

Going further into the mire of absurd presentation the Met Office seems preoccupied with, in search of “Climate” comparisons for this “Climate” reporting site provides this.

Whilst Bishopton is still operational, Paisley {at Scotland’s oldest observatory – Coats Observatory} actually closed in 2011, Helensburgh No 2 closed in 2002, Springburn in 1997 (before Mugdock Park came into being), and Arrochymore even further back in 1992. I suggest none of these sites bore any climatological similarity with Mugdock Park nor could comparative readings be made with this latter site’s demonstrable erratic and extraneous influences and variations.

In summary Mugdock Park was added to the Met Office’s “Climate Reporting” stations in 1990. The use of the immediate site vicinity has substantially changed over time with increasing levels of car parking in exceptionally close proximity. Buildings have been constructed shading the site and the original saplings are now mature trees worsening the trapping effects of artificially warmed air. The instrumentation will have changed to a modern type that is even more likely to pick up on the multiple brief extraneous heat effects and these artificially enhanced readings will have a disproportionately large effect on distorting meteorological averaging. Reading frequency is so questionable as to make annual averaging a pointless exercise in producing fiction numbers.

It is hardly surprising the Met Office can produce “spurious data” proving anthropgenic climate change since 1990 with the multiple likes of Mugdock Park to work with.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/03/18/mugdock-park-dcnn-6223-a-complete-absence-of-quality-control/