Bute:Rothesay No 2 DCNN6170 – Met Office up to old tricks? Continuity trumps quality every time.

55.82523 -5.05608 Met Office Cimo Assessed Class 4 Temperature records from 1/1/2013

The Met Office claims this site meets the required standards of CIMO Class 4 – if it does then so does my back garden conservatory. This site is, in reality, an unregulated “Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C)” and is a “Site not meeting the requirements of class 4.” For the Met Office to suggest otherwise is to make a parody of the requirements.

A weather station named Bute:Rothesay was installed in 1959 in the grounds of the old Rothesay School. This was a very poor site that would have ranked as Class 5. Closure and ultimate demolition of this site necessitated relocation of the weather station. The original can be seen in this historical image from Google Earth of 2005. {N.B. Temperature data from this site ceased 31/12/2012 with no overlap period to the new site.}

In every other walk of life one would expect standards to improve over time. In any other science or technology it would be imperative to improve accuracy wherever possible. The Met Office mindset just does not seem to work like that, apparently continuity is much more important and thus a bad site has to continue as a bad one on relocation to assist comparison over time. There are multiple examples such as Culzean Castle, Dunrobin Castle and Hull, East Park, amongst many others, where new sites are atrociously sited for the sole purposes of being as bad as their predecessors to continue comparative records. To demonstrate how nonsensical this is, who would today buy a Model T Ford as the “family runaround”?

The close up view of the new site reveals “Bute Produce” which is not the market garden it may seem, rather “Fyne Futures Ltd” who proclaim “Our purpose is to Inspire, Educate and Empower People to Live Sustainably”. Rather than being shown as Met Office official site (which it is) it appears as this:

Fyne Futures is owned by Fyne Homes, a limited company that is a social landlord and housing provider. Discovering this “mission statement” immediately concerned me that “Green” political motivations and either impartiality or any vestige scientific credibility rarely mix. Here is the first view I came across of this UNQUESTIONABLY class 5 junk site.

Compare the above to the headline image and it is immediately apparent that the nature of the site is continually changing. Whether or not that poly-tunnel just comes and goes dependent on inspection visits is not known but quite probably Met Office visits are very rare as they must have been at Lough Fea for such appalling standards to prevail. The image is from the site’s own collection added to street view, other normal car-cam views reveal slope, yet more variable surroundings and those growing shrubs casting increasing shadow.

At this point I like to look to the standard of observations or, in this case, the lack of them. Taking observations is yet again an “as and when” anyone can actually be bothered to. It actually becomes quite a tiresome exercise trawling through each year and counting up the omissions. This is a typical example with 18 “NA” failures in one month alone with column I maximum air temperatures and column J minimum. Suffice to say the observation’s standard is awful to the point of being useless for long term climate reporting.

How the dubious quality data from the long term old site and the equally bad new one being is being portrayed by the Met Office is equally concerning.

The site may have been renamed and renumbered on its 1.6km (1 mile) relocation in 2012, but its “Climate Averages” file certainly does not indicate those.

No mention of relocation, that the site solely named “Rothesay” no longer exists, and that the data from 2013 onwards will have been computer modelled from other “well correlated” stations. Rember tha “N.B.” from above? There was no overlap period of data between the old and new site – how can it be “well correlated” with no comparison possible?

So all we have is a subtle implication that it is all from the same place – it is Rothesay after all isn’t it? The map below and the necessity imposed on the Met Office to renumber/rename when stations are moved to sites of different climatology rather gives the game away. “Where the distance moved is large, or, where the exposure at the new site is sufficiently different that a detectable impact on the measured climatology is judged likely, it is appropriate that observations from the new site are labelled by a different set of identifiers“.

Bute:Rothesay No 2 is a classic example of Met Office modern malpractice. An historic poorly sited station is relocated to an equally bad site for no other reason than continuity. The modern observation’s record is effectively worthless due to its intermittency. The relocation is covert with incomparable modern partial data bonded onto the old site record. All of this is unacceptably poor practice but there is no authority to question or call to account such improper procedure.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/07/27/buterothesay-no-2-dcnn6170-met-office-up-to-old-tricks-continuity-trumps-quality-every-time/