Magilligan No 2 WMO 03907 – Why the Met Office has become unfit for purpose, record chasing is now their prime motivation.

The above image is from a post on the Met Office’s X (formerly Twitter) account and is a classic example of both their absurd levels of gaslighting the public and their rather patronising ignorance. Before detailing the absurdity of their claims I shall quickly address the latter point they raised

” Although not a bank holiday in Scotland,”

Do no Scots work for the Met Office? Unlikely as they have a regional office at Dyce. Yesterday most certainly WAS a Bank holiday in Scotland and very few banks (if any) were open. 25th August though was not a PUBLIC Holiday, a significant difference.

55.16043 -6.94914 Met Office (wrongly) CIMO Assessed Class 2 Installed 4/8/2011

In modern day typical record chasing style the Met Office desperately sought on 25th August 2025 to find “records” to break to keep up their absurd mantra of ever spiralling upward temperatures. Having already in 2025 sought out any records they could find to break in May and June by chasing “moveable feasts” such as the comical “first day of Wimbledon” , their latest attempt fell to the early “late summer”/August Public Holiday Monday.

A quick bit of history. The August Bank Holiday Monday was introduced throughout the UK and Ireland in 1871 as the first Monday in August. In 1964 this was altered in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to the Monday after the last Saturday in August but Scotland retained the original tradition based largely on its cooler climate and earlier Autumn onset. This last August Saturday condition actually meant the Bank Holiday Monday could fall in September which it did on both 2/9/1968 and 1/9/1969. In 1971 this anomaly was corrected to make it the last Monday in August with Scotland following this for the banking sector but not the Public Holiday.

I mention all this trivia to demonstrate that the “August Bank Holiday” has a history of possible dates varying from the 1st to 7th August and the 25th August to the 2nd September i.e potentially 16 possible days in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but only 7 in Scotland. However, the actual numerical day number from the start of the calendar year can also vary dependent on whether it is a leap year or not, so possibly 18 different day points!

All of this is completely irrelevant to meteorology and especially the average of weather measured over a 30 year period i.e. climate but seems to endlessly preoccupy the Met Office – do their publicists have nothing better to do? Are they even required on the public payroll to produce such floccinaucinihilipilification?

Magilligan weather station recorded just 24.5°C (a modern day warm orange weather map colour in lieu of the traditional cool green) on a 25th August. A measure of how unremarkable that is was the 24.1°C recorded at Strabane 46 days further on in the year on 10th October 1969. I have friends who set their central heating thermostats to 25°C and the Centerparcs holiday villages group boasts its main domes are nearly 30°C all year round. And yet somehow the Met office conjures up such numbers to suggest shock horror – but what demonstrates just how unfit for purpose they really are is found when you study their Magilligan weather station in detail.

Firstly the Met Office claims this is a Class 2 site – IT IS NOT. Since when did the CIMO regulations allow for 115 square metres of black silage bales to be stacked within the 30 metre exclusion zone.

Those bales are typically between 1.2m and 2.4m in diameter and stacked up to 3 high, likely up to 500 cubic metres of sileage heating to waft over the screen in any gentle south easterly breeze. In addition they will also represent a major windbreak effect.

Is this silage dump a feature of the Magilligan site? Very much so and to such an extent that nearly every Google Earth historical image includes them notably at their peak in late July/early August. Consider this view below ( n.b. this is from 9/2020, the headline image is from 2024)

And then consider this image from 4/2021

And this from 4/2025

The story here is very simple in agricultural terms. Fields around are cropped in the latter summer, processed and stored on this site (around now) as animal fodder through the winter. In addition to the silage’s stored effects it also gets to and from the store by very large motorised vehicles and motorised handling equipment passing within just a few metres of the screen on a very regular and long term basis…….and if the Met office inspectors viewing this site cannot see that then they shouldn’t be driving there.

The Magilligan site is rendered totally unacceptable by the nature of all the distorting extraneous heat sources and transient effects. It is worth remembering the process of meteorological recording and averaging is predicated on registering the extreme points as the primary data drivers and all the distortions that results in as I detailed in this post. Add to this that PRTs will record any short term temperature pulse from a vehicle exhaust and the deficiencies of Stevenson Screens (Aitken Effect) will over/under record (especially night-time minima) due to wind shelter and Magilligan is a de facto worthless site. The Met Office should be ashamed of its own poor site husbandry of one only opened in 2011.

Going back to the headline bogus “Bank Holiday” record proclamations by the Met Office it is worth recalling the other sites mentioned. Hawarden is of course Chester Airport and is a classic example of a relocation from a poor site to a significantly worse one simply to chase records and break an already dubious record from a nearby even worse site at Hawarden Bridge.

Ross-on-Wye recorded the England high from its very pretty but wholly inappropriate sun trap more likely designed for sun bathing than accurate temperature recording.

But the award for most dubious ever record (and one which the Met Office REFUSED to account for under Freedom of Information request) must go to Charterhall in Scotland. This is the site that failed to record any readings at all for 18 consecutive days and then suddenly, on coming back online, managed to instantly record the Scottish all time national “high” of 34.8°C

And this is the “accepted” Scottish national record high despite the Met Office passing 35.1°C into the archives for Floor Castle on the same day and again refusing to answer under FOI to justify how this could possibly happen….And it is still there on file to this day.

In summary Magilligan is demonstrably yet another unacceptable junk site despite what the Met Office falsely assesses it as. Records for variable dates/moveable feasts are pathetic faux showbiz gimmicks unworthy of any institution claiming scientific integrity. This is par for the course for the Met Office and all its recent Shlock Horror headlines. The Met Office is past its use by date – time for a change.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/08/26/magilligan-no-2-wmo-03907-why-the-met-office-has-become-unfit-for-purpose-record-chasing-is-now-their-prime-motivation/