Wick Airport WMO03075 – Why is the Met Office presenting data in an untrue manner?

58.45383 -3.08989 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Quoted “Start date” – 1/1/1873 (at an airport??)

In exactly the same vein as my report of Stornoway Airport I have to state the obvious that aircraft were not even invented until a long time after this weather station was claimed to be installed here. It may seem to be nitpicking to point out this station was not originally here but I shall argue that in fact it is extremely important to present data accurately and precisely. Wick weather station has clearly been relocated in the past so why deliberately conceal that fact? In the absence of any responses to my “vexatious” enquiries of the Met Office, I shall present my views why they are misrepresenting Wick’s data.

From the above, the viewer/public is invited to select a “location” with Wick Airport as one of the options to see a “time series of monthly data” indicated to run from 1914. However from a different online Met Office record we are offered different operational archived dates with a different quoted station start date of 1/1/1873

Interestingly, the CEDA archive temperature records available to view only start from 1930.

The Historic Station Data page, however, offers data as below from 1914 and gives the site name (Wick Airport) together with National Grid References, digital Latitude and Longitude coordinates and specific elevation.

The CEDA archives also offer the same name/locators/elevation as do all the downloadable temperature datasets going all the way back to 1930 shown as below.

All regularly available online data from the Met Office conclusively indicates a long term site at the same location providing a single continuous dataset BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT.

A great pity it is all a disgraceful sham – and the Met Office knows it is……….BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT

As I stated above, obviously for this site to have been originally located at Wick Airport would have been fantastically prescient on the part of the Met Office. Equally unlikely would be for them to have sited a weather station just where an airfield was subsequently built around it. In years to come though it may be similarly wondered which came first at Chertsey Abbey Mead, the weather station or the solar farm!

Establishing the original location(s) of the Wick site proved to be quite an epic investigation that, out of frustration, I resorted to enquiring on “X” to resolve. As often seems to happen, after several hundred fruitless web page searches, I hit on the definitive answer which then directed me to other sites. AI is frankly useless at this type of research as it seems to use very narrow parameters and does not “think outside the box”.

The early history is sketchy but briefly, following the severe “Royal Charter” storm in 1859 (in which almost 1,000 seaman lost their lives) Robert Fitzroy (the first head of what ultimately became the Met Office) established a chain of weather stations based on ports and islands. The intention was to forward to a central point weather details in real time by telegraphic transfer and provide an “early warning system” of such dangerous events. This formed the basis of the earliest scientific weather forecasts. Wick’s original weather station was located at the Coast Guard station on the edge of its port area overlooking Wick Bay.

Fitzroy’s system required instant communications with the only dependable rapid system being the railway networks telegraphy service. The railway line reached Wick in 1873 (the station formally opened the following year) hence that is the year the CEDA archives quote for the Wick station start date when direct transmissions started. In reality the station had existed before then (almost certainly 1860) but its data had to be despatched overland to a different point for onward transfer.

It appears that with the arrival of the railway a new weather station was sited close by for the most rapid transmission of information as possible though the coast guard site continued reporting up to 1941. There are no archived temperature records for this site but they would almost certainly have been taken – whether they have ever been used in the Wick dataset is open to question. All of this is known to the Met Office though clearly not openly disclosed to the public. However, the Meteorology department of Reading University are allowed such information access and do publish the details here – presumably only for limited likely viewers.

From this the Wick station location was shown as Market Place, Wick with coordinates and elevation supplied which are definitely NOT Wick Airport. Given the site name this location was always a sheltered central urban area and today probably does not look today particularly different to the latter 19th Century. {ed note: this document also includes the location of their Dungeness site which the Met Office never disclosed to me when asked}

And this was the location of the weather station up until the Royal Air Force requisitioned a commercial grass landing strip and created a hard runway for RAF Wick in 1940. The RAF had largely assumed control of the Met Office as the “Air Ministry” and transferred the sea port function to the airport function. The Coastguard Met Office station quotes a station end-date of 1941.

RAF weather stations were almost always established in very close proximity to the control tower for easy access for staff. The screens were (in later “peacetime” years) often relocated within the airfield to positions less likely to shading effects from buildings. Unfortunately in so many cases this was largely only a token gesture paying lip service to wider area representation as Wick clearly demonstrates. This image below indicates the original site in the front of the control tower with the modern day screen just 62 metres to the east .

Furthermore the changes of modern air transport in this North Sea region are very evident in the delineation of the 30 metre radius from the screen. Note the “H” denoting the helicopter landing pad and and likely direction of take off and landing over the screen location.

In summary, I have gone into such great detail to demonstrate the ways in which the Met Office (similarly to Braemar, Stornoway and so many others) is subtly, and fully knowingly portraying data in a wholly misleading way. Wick is not a long term, same site continuous data set to be afforded scientific and historical credence. It is, and always has been, a known collection of separate datasets from numerous different locations subject to known major distorting influences. No conclusions can reliably be drawn fro such a hotch-potch collection of “figures”. None of which seems to overly concern the Met Office who carry on in an unaccountable manner of their own control.

Despite all this uncertainty Wick is not only an Historic Station but also a Climate Averages site that somehow dutifully produces “proof” of the mantra of Anthropogenic Global Warming. I suggest the “man-made” aspect is more concerned with data manipulation than any other possible aspect.

As a codicil, I find it very instructional that meteorologists both on this blog, online and various inept debunkers seem to consider data presented by the Talkshop such as at Wye, Lerwick and Ipstones Edge (where we have gone to exceptional lengths to ensure transparency) are criticised whilst Met Office deceptions like Wick are so readily accepted.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/09/02/wick-airport-wmo03075-why-is-the-met-office-presenting-data-in-an-untrue-manner/