Lough Navar Forest DCNN9515 – Ridiculous comparisons but they are “Peer Reviewed”

54.439129 -7.90089 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Installed 1/1/1961

Lough Navar weather station is the most westerly of all UK weather stations being 12 miles to the north west of Enniskillen and just 14 miles from the open sea of the North Atlantic off the Republic of Ireland. This is a long term manual site that seems unable to supply the regular observer with “holiday cover” as every year there appears to be regular one and two week gaps with no readings at all. This is the least of the issues though.

Met Office WOW indicates the “reason for running the site” as “Education” but there does not appear to be any conventional educational establishment in the area. In the field area to the east is a DEFRA Air Quality monitoring station which appears to be specifically aimed at “Heavy Metals” contamination.

https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/site-info?site_id=LN

The general summary is one of a very heavily shaded site with extremely irregular maintenance of the ground cover in the immediate vicinity of the enclosure. For clarity it appears as below but in many StreetView historic images it is barely visible through the tall overgrowth.

This is not a good site, reflected in the lowest possible Class 5 unregulated site status. Perhaps the oddest aspect is the almost classic way the Met Office “gridded square” climate averages chooses to compare this 64 year old continuously running site.

The first comparative, Lisnaskea Creamery, is 23 miles away. This also manual reporting site was installed 4 years after Lough Navar and closed in 2000. For 24 years of the 1961 to 2020 climate averaging period its data was contrived from unspecified other sites. Exactly who makes the sort of decision to use barely 60% of period data in preference to a continually operating site?

Going back to my revelations of Dungeness and the 103 Missing Met Stations Mystery the Met Office advised me of a “Peer Reviewed” process using up “to 6 well correlated” stations to formulate climate averages for closed sites but only supplied a pay walled link. Given their persistent refusals to divulge the names of any stations used in this “peer reviewed” process I did not feel inclined to pay for a link to the process only. By chance, however, I stumbled across a foreign site that openly reported the process. A lengthy (safe) link is below to read the full process.

Click to access Development%20of%20a%20new%20set%20of%20long-term%20climate%20averages%20for%20the%20UK%20%20.pdf

To rephrase the question then, why did Matthew Perry and Daniel Hollis chose to create a process, with their benefit of hindsight, that required fabrication of data both prior to site’s existence and after their closure in preference to sites available for the entire period?

On what genuine meteorological grounds can a known class 5 JUNK site such as Lough Fea (50 miles away) with temperature records only starting in 1989 be so good as to ignore Lough Navar? Why make up those first 29 years by a peer reviewed process when Lough Navar already had them?

Is the serially abused Class 5 Junk Banagher:Caugh Hill (also 50 miles away) and only installed in 1969 really better than Lough Navar?

Just how credible is it to suggest that the very poor (but incredibly old) Class 4 central urban Armagh site that is over 30 miles inland from the Irish Sea and an amazing 53 miles distant is, in any way, “well correlated” with Lough Navar?

Back in the days before the answer to every meteorological question forced the response “Climate Change”, the Met Office produced “Fact Sheets” that admitted the huge differences between close locations that I highlighted at Teignmouth . This all now seems to be hand waived away.

Did these modern authors really expect credence to be given to data fabricated from Junk sites to be portrayed in preference to the (now correctly re-assessed as Class 1) Thomastown just 12 miles from Lough Navar?

There are far too many questions for the Met Office to hide away from – their scientific integrity is in on the line.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/08/20/lough-navar-forest-dcnn9515-ridiculous-comparisons-but-they-are-peer-reviewed/