Tenby DCNN8172 – Seriously?

The above image is not a photo-shop – this is Tenby weather station as it appears on the latest Street view image. How long it has been there, if it is even still there, where it ever was in the past and how many Tenby weather stations actually exist is the cause of some remarkably confusing debate. One thing is, however, quite certain – this site is a complete waste of instrumentation.

To get some clarification on the location of the official Tenby Met Office site I consulted their Weather Observations Website to find not one but eight “blue spot” marked “Tenby” sites as below.

The WOW website also includes private sites which requires clicking on each one to find out whether they are official ones or not. The inland most westerly site seemed improbable, the first to rule out I thought …

Oh, that was a surprise – it is “official” and run by the Met Office. It does not however look anything like the coastal headline image. Better check out the others to be sure – started with the most easterly coastal site.

Okay so there are two in the general Tenby area? Try another.

Three is surely a bit of overkill isn’t it? Keep going – if there is a “South Beach” what is that one to the north of it?

Still keep going and this one is just called “Tenby” could this be real one?

Well actually no because this one says “This site is not reporting observations” but that often does not indicate anything at all as was discovered at Pitsford

Keeping on going finally ruled out the two sites away from the coast as private weather stations but this still left a last one.

So there appears to be 6 locations referred to as potential Met Office “Tenby” sites. {n.b. The WOW site has just been modernised and brought “up to date”!} The CEDA archives themselves show two sets of archived data, one still operational known as just “Tenby” and the other closed but formerly known as “Tenby Priory” A cross reference to the given WGS84 coordinates supplied for the operational one led to a site that is NOT the headlined image.

51.66890 -4.70714 Met Office CIMO Assessed 4 Installed: According to the CEDA Archives – 1/1/1969 but actually originally installed 1/10/1897 nearby.

If all the above various site locations were confusing bear in mind it took me days of research to get this far and then things got extremely complicated. Firstly google historic images show the headlined image screen at that car park location all the time up to 2021 when it was moved 60 metres to the north west across the golf course to be shielded by the surrounding bushes detailed below. Very much an equally undesirable site. Why go to the expense and not improve matters similar to Culzean Castle?

For the majority of this screen’s life it was in that car park location with hot car engines or exhausts distorting readings probably ever since the dawn of the internal combustion engine. Readings from such sites are clearly unreliable and any alleged records would be no more convincing than the Motherwell: Strathclyde Park fiasco.

What is particularly strange is that the relocation is not noted anywhere contrasting sharply with the deliberate noting of the minute screen location within its small enclosure at Charterhall. Then again, despite all the Met office’s claims to the contrary, Tenby, like very many official locations, is not in any form of enclosure whatsoever. As Philip Eden of the Royal Meteorological Society noted in his investigation of the alleged Faversham 2003 record high ” The site is also open to the general public and interference from visitors unknown has not been ruled out”. There is not even a vestige of site security at Tenby.

The site archived temperature record then takes a truly bizarre twist. The other Tenby site at the Priory was actually some distance away on Caldey Island and was operational from 1914 to 1957 BUT it claims to have temperature records from 1897……..how does that work? A look at the scanned manual originals attributed to the Priory give the coordinates of the mainland site!

The Archives for the mainland site only show temperature records running from 1977 so what happened to the site’s previous 90 years records? Well it appears the Met office finally realised its mis-attribution mistakes and ended up apparently deleting the data from 1921 to 1957. From their archive notes;

Piecing together all this confusion to make some form of reality:- Tenby originally had its weather station installed near the golf course in 1897. Records were taken from that same site until some time between 2021 to 2024 when it was relocated from a seriously compromised site to one that really is only marginally “less bad”. Readings were mis-attributed to another site some distance away, discovery of this mistake resulted in deletion of a large chunk of the data ….though it may still be available in manuscript form somewhere. There may, or may not, be other official Met Office weather stations in Tenby but I could not physically locate them and I genuinely doubt they actually exist.

And then the final twist, the readings reliability in actually being taken is far from good. Below are examples of notes recorded in the digital archive. Perhaps the only thing stranger than some of the “reasons” given for not taking readings is that someone else was then actually employed and paid to digitally transcribe in full these manuscript excuses.

I have detailed this review in greater detail than this low grade site ever deserves to highlight just how “sloppy” so much of the Met office practises are in addition to the poor siting and observation standards of so much of their voluminous system. A case of “Never mind the quality, feel the width”!

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/05/27/tenby-dcnn8172-seriously/