Urquhart:Northwood DCNN0580 – A “personal reasons” site – whatever that means.

57.59432 -4.37417 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Initially installed as a rain gauge only site 1/11/2005 Temperature records from 1/4/2013

Urquhart is close to the south westerly extreme end of Cromarty Firth just to the east of Dingwall with the very interesting looking A9 bridge over the Firth nearby. The near vicinity is already well served with long standing automatic synoptic weather stations notably Kinloss, Lossiemouth, Tain Range and Lentran so it does seem slightly odd for the Met office to have only recently added this rather humble manually reporting station whose data (if reliably produced) is only really appropriate for climate reporting. And therein lay the important questions, – is the data reliable and why install it so recently ?

The Met Office hosts the Weather Observations Website (WOW) where a few of its own weather stations report a small range of readings but also lots of private weather sites post on there as well. Urquhart Met Office site is one of the few “Official” ones that does report on there and gives the site description as below.

I am confused regarding quite exactly what the “Reasons for running the site” is supposed to indicate. This is claimed to be an official Met Office climate reporting station appearing on this list below. Surely climate data reporting is the reason for a climate reporting site.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-synoptic-and-climate-stations

Quite what “Personal” is supposed to indicate as a reason I cannot explain, what I do know is that if a record was set here it would be accepted as from an “official” site. Conversely the nearest and highly sophisticated private weather station to my home is not an “official” one and any record readings would be dismissed as unacceptable by the Met Office despite being of the very highest siting and equipment standard.

So what are this site’s standards? Clearly the Met Office do not rate this very highly grading it a low Class 4 with typically very limited equipment for air temperature, relative humidity, soil temperature, air pressure and precipitation only. No wind measurements are taken as this site is in a back garden surrounded by trees and the tall perimeter hedging creating a walled garden effect. This is the best StreetView image I could manage from May 2008 (note that date) with the larger than usual screen to the left of the house.

More recent images do not fully show the screen due to the growth in the height of the hedging almost entirely obscuring it from view. Just the top of the screen is visible to the right of the flagpole with the Saltire hoist (not a windmast) also in this 2008 image.

In the same way as Baintown and Frittenden and many other back garden sites, Urquhart predates the readings dates archived from 2013 by the Met Office by many years. This implies it was once just one of the thousands of private/amateur sites existing in the country. The Met Office has opted to accept the data from some of these sites into its climate recording system – why and on what qualification standards seem unspecified? Is this or most of the other such adopted sites so good it warrants inclusion despite there being superior automatic sites close by – the Class 4/5 ratings of almost all of them surely says no.

Conversely a private airfield site near my home is in what would easily be a CIMO rated Class 1 flat open land site. It has fan assisted aspiration to ensure greater accuracy than a conventional Stevenson screen but the fact that it is not in one of those (despite superior radiation shielding) rules it out. What makes this all the more strange is that this private station reports almost unfailingly every minute of the day with remote interrogation information access. Obviously that is superior to the just once a day at 09:00 manual reading and infinitely more so if those daily readings become somewhat “optional”.

As is my normal practise with manual reporting sites I check whether or not readings (the sole function of the site) are actually being taken and if so how reliably. The Urquhart site, in preceding its readings inclusion date, must have had some form of “track record” to justify itself….or possibly not. For the last 10 full years of readings, they have varied from a very best of 93% (unsurprisingly its first full year) to as few as 69% (just 251 days in the year and not a “lockdown” one). Compare that to my reports on the likes of Ipstones Edge, Cawood or Lake Vyrnwy . 431 days readings out of a possible 3,652 at Urquhart are simply not there. Furthermore I can even deduce when the changeover from LIGT to PRT was done (30th August 2017) because just like the fiascos at Shanklin and Ventnor maximum readings stopped for an extended period (with other readings continuing) awaiting either getting the PRT working properly or training the observer to use it.

Without wishing to sound as if I am putting down any individual amateur enthusiast, the ineluctable fact is that the Met Office is the responsible body. They chose to adopt low grade, poorly observed sites based on no published nor recognisable qualifying standards. There is no apparent justification on purely meteorological grounds for the addition or inclusion of such sites which call into question why they are doing this. The inference that such poor sites somehow assist in modifying real world accurate data is one easily drawn.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/06/13/urquhartnorthwood-dcnn0580-a-personal-reasons-site-whatever-that-means/