Hayling Island DCNN5680 – Declare an emergency 64% of the time.

50.78509 -0.9861 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1954

“A climate emergency has been declared by Havant Borough Council during a meeting held of the Full Council on Wednesday 20 November.

Councillors agreed to a motion that commits the council to do everything within its power to take the steps to become a greener borough.  

The need for urgent and transformative action has been identified as a priority following a shift in the political balance of the council following the election earlier this year when members of the Labour Party, Liberal Democrat Party and Green Party formed an alliance to take on a new political leadership.“

This is an examination of the type of data from within the Havant Borough Council area on which that declaration was made.

Hayling island weather station was installed in its current location in Havant Borough Council area in 1954 and though the digital archives only show data from 1959, the manuscript copies can be viewed online for the additional first 4 years. The site has never moved and the record is continuous ever since. The Met Office Long Term Location Specific Climate averages runs from 1961 to 2020 which makes Hayling Island a perfect candidate to supply data but the Met office prefers to manipulate data otherwise. Rather than opt for Hayling Island’s complete period data they refer, in lieu, to the likes of the frankly ridiculous parody of a weather station at Solent pictured below. Tim Channon did a “must read” lengthy review detailing how appallingly bad Solent was showing unmodified data transfer from one site to another, dataset bonding, covert relocations over totally different climatologies and dubious record keeping.

Solent Weather station only existed (at various different locations) with archived records from 1986 and was closed down in 2015. Quite why the Met Office chose to use a site requiring mathematical conjuring tricks to supply data for the 25 years before its existence and a further 5 years after its demise in preference to the continuously running Hayling Island site is a question I doubt anyone at Havant Borough Council ever considered. Presumably they just “trusted” the Met Office, a dangerous practise.

What of the site quality at Hayling Island itself – at Class 4 it is only marginally better than the atrocious Class 5 that Solent would have been and the nearby, equally absurd taxpayer money pit precipitating “Climate Emergency” Bognor Regis. The headline image indicates a large circle within the Hayling enclosure and though I cannot identify what that actually is, I can guarantee it is not an improvement for meteorological reading quality. This is the Google Streetview look.

Clearly this is not the type of site likely to represent the natural environment of anywhere other than near an English Channel beach but that really has become an irrelevance since actually bothering to take meaningful observations here appears to have become typically a 21st century optional exercise. When originally installed in the 1950’s it had the sort of impeccable readings record typical of the age.

I started examining the recent observation record solely with regard to temperatures. As detailed in the Reification post, both daily maximum and minimum readings are required to formulate the meteorological daily mean. Hayling Island is a manual reporting station (fitted with a PRT for maximum readings in 2017) requiring reading at 09:00 GMT on a daily basis. Here are details of the last 8 full years on which a daily mean could be calculated.

2017 – just 234 days, 2018 – 54 days, 2019 – 120 days, 2020 – 347 days, 2021 362 days, 2022 – 327 days, 2023 – 294 days and 2024 at just 122 days. Ironically the best recording days were through the Covid lockdown era.

Out of the 2,922 total days only 1,865 (64%) were successful enough to derive a daily mean. 1,057 days (36%) were abject failures at the sole function of temperature observations. Compare that to the effort required for a long term perfect record at the likes of rural sites such as at Ipstones Edge and Lake Vyrnwy .

Are those councillors declaring a “Climate Emergency” emergency even aware that the responsible body for the required temperature data recording is so incredibly bad at their primary function that they cannot even get reliable and regular readings from a very large proportion of their sites including Hayling Island.

Well they will be soon as I will forward this report to their – “Proposer of the motion, Councillor Grainne Rason, who is Cabinet Lead for Climate Emergency, Environment and Water Quality, said “The risk from extreme weather events, that may have an impact on our residents, businesses, and the environment, is escalating.”

And I will point out to him that perhaps sticking to the functions of a local authority is far more important than his council tax payer funded virtue signalling from a position of ignorance of the facts. Should I get a response I will make it known – but don’t hold your breath!

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/hayling-island-dcnn5680-declare-an-emergency-64-of-the-time/