Helens Bay DCNN9288 – A confusing history.

54.66865 -5.74847 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Installed 1/1/1961

Helens Bay is a small seaside town a few miles to the west of Bangor in Northern Ireland. It lies in a small patch of grassland owned by the railway company just above the line itself running through a shallow cutting. The current site is certainly confirmed, however, the long term nature of the site is uncertain.

Firstly, the current site richly deserves its dismal class 5 rating. Most historic aerial images indicate extensive shading, the screen is very closely hedged in, above the railway cutting slope and no doubt subject to the disturbance of the passing trains. Despite this poor location the Met Office opted to automate this site from 1/11/2002……or did they and if so where? Below is an extract from the archived data precis.

“AWSHRLY” indicates “Automatic Weather Station Hourly” and that its data starts from 1/11/2002. “DLY3208” indicates a form used for manual reporting sites. Unusually, there are two DLY3208 entries, one set ends 31/10/2002 indicating transferring to the AWS from the following day. Strangely though another set of data recording DLY3208 also starts 1/11/2002 concurrent to the AWS data implying two notably individual and separate but simultaneous data sets. This has resulted in a “treblication” of readings with 3 shown per day in the files.

Column D indicates 2 daily sets of readings from the AWS as “12” and one from the “manual” site as “24”. Whilst this occasionally happens on transfer of sites from manual to automatic with an overlap period, these are not usually indicated as separately denoted files. The archives also show separate files for rain recording also closing down and then reopening on the same dates. This rather suggested a relocation but I could not find any actual corroboration in the archives. I checked other Met Office sources to find this location map of the Helens Bay site on the seafront by the local golf course. This is clearly marked as an official Met Office site.

Unfortunately, Google historic images do not go back far enough to positively identify screens at either quoted location which are almost 1 kilometre apart.

It is notable that golf courses are and were frequent locations for weather stations (i.e. Nairn, Kinross, Banff etc.) and there does appear to be the vestigial remains of a site visible in this 2002 image at the location indicated on the WOW page.

At this stage it is very difficult to confirm the provenance of this site. Normally as a currently operating Class 5 site this would not concern me as its inaccuracy (+/-5°C) really is not suitable for the historic climate record. However, the overlap period of manual and automatic recording could prove to be very useful in comparing the different systems if co-located. This issue of comparisons and its relevance to climate reporting will become evident in future temperature reconstructions. For now Helens Bay has to be ruled out for any historic recording which is very unfortunate in the Northern Ireland context as there are so very few reliable sites.