Port Henderson DCNN0440 – Who makes these decisions?

57.69582 -5.77707 Met Office CIMO Assessed CLASS 5 Temperature records from 1/10/2013

Port Henderson weather station is one of the more remote weather stations in north western Scotland. Quite why this area has so many once-daily read manual weather stations which are very little use in immediate weather forecasting often puzzles me. Port Henderson is just 7 radial miles from equally manual reporting Poolewe, and from automatic stations at Aultbea (12 miles), Kinlochewe (18 miles), Bealach-Na-Ba (20 miles.) and Resallach (30 miles). This whole geographic section of the UK is very heavily covered meteorologically for forecasting purposes as early indications of weather fronts, but it seems unrepresentative to have so many climate reporting points in such a small and very unrepresentative coastal area.

Firstly why was this station selected as a climate reporting station? At the risk of sounding cynical it seems for no other reason than to satisfy an amateur meteorologist’s hobby. As I have said many times before, I have no wish to belittle or denigrate anyone’s interests or dedication to help, but frankly it seems absurd to just include data regardless of quality simply because it is available. Port Henderson is yet another back garden hobby that is of completely unacceptable and unregulated Class 5 standard. Who made that inclusion decision is not known let alone why but they really should be held accountable.

I am very confident that, if asked, the general public would assume that Met Office “official” weather stations met the very highest of standards befitting their input into the £1.2 billion super computer project. I am equally confident that those same people would be horrified to discover that the input data fed into the super computer came from instruments in a little white box in the back garden just behind a repro street lamp, to the rear of the garage, alongside the tall hedge in front of a vegetable patch. If then told that very many sites such as Port Henderson were “officially” recorded as having readings with an “additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C” they might not be so willing to believe in reports of “global warming” quoted to the 100th of a degree. This is the Port Henderson “weather station” just visible from streetview centre screen.

I suggest that the reason that the Met office is withholding so much basic data from me and the general public when asked, is that they do not want to admit that data from junk sites such as Port Henderson and literally hundreds of others is being used to “fill in the gaps” and produce that Zombie site data.

I believe the term is GIGO. The Surface Stations Project will not be using the likes of Port Henderson in its historic temperature reconstruction – I believe in using reliable, quality data.