Durris DCNN1319 – Another demonstration of the Greenhouse Effect.

57.03163 -2.40388 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1988

Google maps automatically orientate north to the top. The Durris site is to the north east of over 10,000 square metres of greenhousing with the prevailing winds from the south west – is it just me does that seem a site possibly likely to be influenced by an artificial environment? And there is more to it than that.

Durris is not quite as bad as the former Ravensworth site but it is a close run thing. Not only can light breezes waft artificially warmed air over the screen but also the hedging enclosing the screen looks almost designed to entrap static air. This is the current Streetview image.

Clearly this is not a very good site, hedged in over three sides though it does appear well cared for and its observations record is very good indeed. Of more concern to me was how much the site to the southwest had been developed over the 37 years of its existence and whether or not this would make any difference. I turned back historic images to 2005 to find (or rather not find) the site as below.

Not only has the area of greenhouse more than doubled over the last 20 years, the weather station simply was not at its current location back then. There are no notes in the digital archives indicating any relocation with all of them falsely quoting coordinates for the current site. So where was it? The oldest streetview image of september 2008 did show it at its current site so the relocation was sometime prior to that and also in its pre PRT fitting condition (it was changed over in September 2017.)

It then took literally months of on and off search attempts to ascertain where the screen was. The adjacent green houses are actually a seed potato nursery producing a huge quantity of product as well as ongoing research into varieties and strains. It appears it was the site owner who was responsible for the weather station and in a facebook post I was able to figure out the former location. I will not dwell on this source as it also included issues of criminal charges (of an alleged sexual nature) against the owner who subsequently sold the site to a Dutch conglomerate.

What I found was the original completely different location 150 metres away as below. Clearly the 9:00 GMT observation visit was made a lot easier and was a possible motivation in the relocation.

This all brings together why simply picking up temperature readings from a computer screen is not a reliable way of creating a historic temperature record. From 1988 (as far as I can tell – there could have been other moves) this site was in a location remote from the greenhouses in open country though undergoing continuous cropping and vegetation changes. It was moved to an enclosed garden area in close proximity to the greenhouses. These greenhouses subsequently further expanded to the south west. In 2017 the instrumentation changed and the date of this change is not publicly available information – I have deduced it from the long 3 month period of no maximum readings recorded being a feature of the change over period for manual recording sites.

This situation in extremely common amongst so many recording sites where covert relocations, significant site changes and undisclosed instrumentation change dates render any historic comparison impossible. The Met Office obsessively quote crude averages figures to the second decimal place as if the public is supposed to be impressed with such faux accuracy. The reality is so very different.

Durris will not be included in any temperature reconstruction of mine.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/07/07/durris-dcnn1319-another-demonstration-of-the-greenhouse-effect/