Darvel:Hillview DCNN 6578 – Another back garden amateur site going downhill.

55.61498 -4.28410 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 (Wrong) Temperature readings from 5/2/2018

Another very new Scottish domestic garden manual reporting site. It seems the Scottish branch of the Met Office (based at Dyce airport, Aberdeen) is obsessed with having weather stations in walled kitchen gardens, domestic back gardens or airports. They also seem to have an interestingly different interpretation of CIMO regulations for weather station siting from the rest of the world let alone the rest of the UK.

The headline image shows the length of shadow the Screen itself casts running to the north east indicating a mid afternoon image. With all the trees around it is a certainty that shading from the sun will be a factor as will wind breaking from the prevailing south westerlies.

Aside from the shading issues, proximity to buildings and general garden activities (laundry drying, barbecues, etc) yet again there is the issue of significant slope. Names such as “Hillside”and “Hill View” and inded any of the very many sites with “hill” in the name does rather suggest that some form of slope is involved. In the case of Darvel the local area is particularly steep and the gardens to the homes in the area clearly reflect this. This site slopes to the south with the rear and side hedging likely holding in still air to warm up from the south facing house walls. An indication of the slopes is evident in StreetView which normally tends to visually flatten slopes. This is a class 5 site by any assessment that is simply unacceptable for contributing data to a national historic temperature record.

The Met Office chooses to portray itself as a high technology, high quality organisation operating to the highest standards on professional integrity and scientific accuracy. The reality is that very many of its sites are extremely poor quality, unregulated sites with no quality control or standards maintenance. The amateurs running these sites may be well intentioned but are they fully qualified and supervised? There is no way of knowing what may happen in private property locations with no possible public scrutiny.

If the general public were aware that the whole “climate” alarm and its massive life style changes advocated was being largely based on data from such uncontrolled sites would they be so willing to accept it.