Morecambe DCNN 7239 – Living on the Coast, and a further investigation into instrument changes.

54.07629 2.85964 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1915

A personal anecdote about Morecambe, I went nearby (Heysham) as a child on a family holiday ( over 60 years ago!). Getting to the “sea front” I couldn’t see the sea at all and wondered what was going on. All I could see were warning notices advising not going out too far and the dangers of “Quicksands”. I ended up being too scared to have much fun on the beach. This wasn’t really a problem as after the first day it rained incessantly and I spent most of the family summer holiday playing table tennis indoors in the holiday camp. This is relevant to the weather station as whilst it is not a typical site it is still oddly well representative of the area.

Morecambe site is a classic example of an original sea side resort weather station largely designed to boost up the holiday image of the the town with often dubious sunshine and temperature records as part of the tourism marketing. Such resorts would vie with each other for holiday business with local “sunshine leagues” and often skullduggery to amend results was not unknown. Such locations were well cared for as part of “Civic pride” and often were in quite extravagant enclosures such as Bognor Regis. Bizarrely these sites were probably more suited for climate reporting purposes rather than conventional forecasting based sites as “climate” data was largely their focus – if often somewhat “enhanced”.

This 2009 StreetView imagery shows the site in its manual reporting days.

Obviously this is not a desirable site at all being on what is often a very busy road adjacent to the large car park of the bingo hall, and in front of Lancaster Council Offices, but at least its manual readings up to 2011 were excellently well kept. A recurring concern though is the actual screen location so close to the perimeter railings which is a very common but strange phenomenon common to weather stations. I have no idea why this is so common and would welcome any reader’s thoughts on this.

The site was automated in 2012 and this immediately afterwards image shows that (as at Gartocharn) the complete screen was also changed. Note the solar panel and power supply for the automated equipment.

A point I raised regarding such instrumentation changes on my Hunterston review is that automation of sites requires changing the thermometer to an electronic Platinum Resistance Thermometer(PRT) with continual temperature readings that are stored in its memory as 60 second averages broadcast over the internet to the Met Office. This means that a single PRT thermometer provides both the day’s maxima and minima. PRTs are much faster reacting to temperature changes as Dr Eric Huxter detailed here.

This is not a trivial change, as Eric details, this rapid response PRT equipment regularly detects brief and transient heat “Spikes” that would not have been detected by traditional LIGT instrumentation in the past. Naturally such instruments will also record any unusual dips in minima that a LIGT though these are much less frequent…..and that is very important indeed. Referring back to the somewhat perverse calculation process of meteorological averages (which is solely based on extremes rather than norms) transferring to a PRT for all readings will cause both an elevated maxima and lower minima derived “mean”. However, only using the PRT for maximum readings (but retaining the now superfluous LIGT for minimum readings at manual sites ) will remove any lower PRT minimums thus further enhancing daily means.

This is a point to be developed shortly on the Surface Stations Project but from recent reviews of mine and Eric’s findings it is becoming more and more evident that instrumentation changes and the associated dates warrant detailed investigation. Basically many manual reporting LIGT stations, such as Morecambe, were converted to automatic ones with PRTs in the period 2009/11 and many more manuals were switched to PRTS but retained LIGT for minima around 2017. These changes would inevitably have caused step changes in maxima and means regardless of site changes. Furthermore there are many brand new manual sites coming online all the time needlessly retaining this dual instrumentation – below is a reader supplied image of the manual Whitesands screen only opened in 2024.

Where all this has led is that Morecambe is a lowly seaside station that was originally modestly good but the later development of motorised transport and seaside development will have progressively corrupted reading’s accuracy likely elevating them. The relatively recent instrumentation change will further elevate temperatures from picking up transient spikes likely from motorised vehicles. And as I have often said before, the Met Office will unquestionably not only know this but will also be actively exploiting this as demonstrated with instrument changes at existing and new manual reporting sites.