Hadlow – How good is this site rated?

51.228581 0.320241 No Current Met Office CIMO Assessment Installed 27/10/2016

Hadlow is a small town in west Kent that is host to an historic castle and a prestigious agricultural college. The college has in modern times grown into a major community facility including a primary school and garden centre on campus and even Charlton Athletic Football Club’s youth academy. The college runs courses up to and including graduate level in a range of agricultural areas including engineering. For full disclosure I have personally worked there in the past. The weather station there is very interesting indeed for a surprising reason.

The Met Office prominently defends its poor siting of weather stations on the internet by a dedicated webpage of excuses. https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/learn-about/how-forecasts-are-made/observations/observation-site-classification An extract below reads like a list of reasons for failure – when authors resort to tems such as “holistic” one should be remarkably wary. Quite why “record verification” was slipped in there baffles me – a “strawman” perhaps.

“WMO Siting Classifications were designed with reference to a wide range of global environments and the higher classes can be difficult to achieve in the more-densely populated and higher latitude UK. For example, the criteria for a Class 1 rating for temperature suits wide open flat areas with little or no human influenced land use and high amounts of continuous sunshine reaching the screen all year around, however, these conditions are relatively rare in the UK. Mid and higher latitude sites will, additionally, receive more shading from low sun angles than some other stations globally, so shading will most commonly result in a higher CIMO classification – most Stevenson Screens in the UK are class 3 or 4 for temperature as a result but continue to produce valid high-quality data. WMO guidance does, in fact, not preclude use of Class 5 temperature sites – the WMO classification simply informs the data user of the geographical scale of a site’s representativity of the surrounding environment – the smaller the siting class, the higher the representativeness of the measurement for a wide area.  Indeed, it should be noted that WMO Class 5 is not the same as a Met Office ‘Unsatisfactory’ inspection assessment, which ultimately determines the ongoing use of a site. We use the Met Office grading system to determine record verification because; it has historical relevance, covering a wide range of long-standing criteria at UK observation sites, the equipment, and the exposure in a holistic manner and has clear meaning to what is acceptable or not. It tells us how much confidence we have in the data and permits comparisons. ” 

The reason I am making this point is that there used to be an official Met office weather station at Hadlow College from 1966 to 1994 (DCNN 5323 at 51.22328, 0.32998) until the college developed that particular part of the site. The Met office opted against relocation and closed down a reasonable quality and very well observed site that looked like this in 1990.

So what is in the headline image I opted to start this post with? Well that is unquestionably a CLASS 1 weather station at Hadlow College installed 27/10/2016 by the same government department (Department of Science Information and Technology – Minister Peter Kyle MP) that runs the Met Office….but it NOT a Met Office “official weather station” The site owners helpfully include detailed site coordinates, temperature data and good quality colour imagery of every one of their 51 sites around the country. Here is CLASS 1 standard Hadlow. N.B. No antiquated Victorian casings in sight, just modern high tech equipment of a much better standard in flat and clear open country that reports automatically.

So if the government sponsored UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology can manage to find this top quality site and record lots of information (handily including air temperature readings on a half hourly basis) how come is it that the Met Office makes excuses for not being able to? Here is the UKCEH map of sites and their site searchable index.

https://cosmos.ceh.ac.uk/about/network

As i noted at Morpeth: Cockle Park whilst the Met office was effectively downgrading a formerly good site, the UKCEH almost simultaneously opened a Class 1 standard site. If UKCEH can do this regularly why cannot the Met Office?

Cockle Park – Can’t get much better than this.

I am attempting to get access to UKCEH data for comparison purposes. In the meantime the Met Office needs to answer even more serious questions.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/08/19/hadlow-how-good-is-this-site-rated/