Valley WMO03302 – Fake Provenance of Met Office data. Untrustworthy, incompetent…or both?

I would firstly like to pay tribute to the late Tim Channon who instigated the UK Surface Stations Project back in 2012. I did not know him nor followed Tallbloke’s Talkshop back then which I find a great pity. I believe his review of Valley was the first he did and it is certainly the one in which he detailed the systems he employed. That review was the first of his that I ever read and I have been wary of updating such great work he put in on his (for me) iconic post. It is here in full to read first. I will add my observations which introduce a surprising aspect of Met Office misrepresentation……the clue to which is in the headline image.

WMO 03302 RAF Valley meteorological station

53.25265 -4.53651 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 3 Installed 1/12/1930

Tim called this one Class 3 without the benefit that I have of knowing the Met Office’s own assessment. There is no point in my querying Tim’s view simply because he very rarely got it wrong or rather rarely ever different to the official later view. For my part I do have reservations of all aviation sites as former USAF pilot Hifast emphasised in the review of RNAS Culdrose. Valley after all is a “Top Gun” training site a la Coningsby! For aficionados of flying at 500mph not much above the ground here is an interesting youtube clip.

One point Tim did raise, however, was whether or not this was the original location so I decided to check that out and came to an astonishing finding. Here is the official CEDA archive of RAF Valley Weather Station.

RAF sites normally have long standing records and from these I discovered the manuscript coordinates of the site from the original copies. I can confirm that in fact the screen was, unusually, always in the same location as now.

This was very encouraging as I felt there was perhaps some value in analysing data going back to December 1931. ……..and then the penny dropped – RAF Valley was not built until 1941 and THERE ARE NO RECORDS PRIOR to 1st JULY 1941

So where does this lot of “Historic Station Data” up to 1941 actually come from?

Finally, I tracked down a little note in the Valley archives completely out of the date sequence stating:

“RE RMRK #2 : ALL OBS NOW CORRECTLY ATTRIBUTED TO SALT HOLYHEAD (11451). TMAX TMIN AND SUNSHINE TO 1946”

All the figures for almost 10 years are still being attributed to Valley despite them being from the “Salt:Holyhead Met Office site” 6 miles away and even on a different island. So given the Met Office know this themselves (and have done for quite some time) why are they not correcting their own website? If this type of completely incorrect attribution is going unnoticed what confidence can the UK public have in any of this below being correct? Almost certainly none at all.

Whilst those first 10 years of “historic data” for RAF Valley weather station are, in reality, complete fiction, what faith can be had in the 60 year averages for 1961 to 2020 for the above quoted comparative site of Cwmystradllyn? Cwmystradllyn site was only installed for temperature readings in 1974 and closed down readings in 1982.

10 years worth of mis-attributed data at RAF Valley almost pales into insignificance compared to 49 years worth of fabricated data at Cwmystradllyn both before and after it even existed. The machinations of Matthew Perry and Daniel Hollis in concocting these “Climate Averages” for non existent sites is intentional whilst the RAF Valley errors are more likely the incompetence typified as at Tenby and Wattisham amongst many others.

The Met Office is boldly headlining its long standing Historical data – BUT ITS PROVENANCE IS FAKE. Nobody is buying it!

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/valley-wmo03302-fake-provenance-of-met-office-data-untrustworthy-incompetent-or-both/