Stormont Castle DCNN9268 – A total waste of time and taxpayer’s money.

 54.60292 -5.82962 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 (obviously wrong) Installed 1/1/1956

Stormont Castle weather station lies in the Parliament buildings grounds to the south east of the main building in the wooded service area to the overall site. In many of the numerous aerial images on Google maps the screen is indiscernible as the surrounding vegetation completely blots it out of view. That this site is officially Class 4 indicates the remarkably inconsistent application of WMO regulations applied by the Met Office – this is beyond doubt Class 5 Junk.

I almost always link to the CIMO regualtions under the image header, however, a brief recap is in order to fully understand how poor this site actually is.

Just that one line “Away from all projected shade when the sun is higher than 20°” instantaneously rules out this site as Class 4 and dumps it into Class 5 wildly inaccurate junk status. Did the Met Office inspector examining this site not notice there are an exceptionally large number of very large trees in very close proximity to this site? It is almost impossible to accept which part of the overall site area was not well understood seen below in wider angle.

To both clarify this shading point and put the other blatantly obvious major problems into context, consider the Met Office’s response to me regarding the siting of Bingley No 2 weather station alongside Bradford West Electricity substation.

“Bingley No2 is a CIMO4, due to projected shade as the primary cause. ”

So Bingley is severely marked down because of the “projected shade” {who cares about the sub station transformers almost, but not quite completely, omitted from their image} from a couple of rather distant small trees. What does this say about trees almost obscuring the screen from aerial images at Stormont?

I suspect the inspector was too occupied measuring distances to the 730 square metres greenhouse to the south west. Or the 3,500 square metres of concrete service area and parking to the west. Or the 1,600 square metres of buildings and paved area to the east. Or the 4,000 square metres of roadway, buildings and parking to the south. And as for all those cars…….well they possibly were not there when the inspection was made so seemingly do not get considered despite, at times, visibly being seen within 5 metres of the screen.

The Stormont site is by no means a well equipped one and is of virtually no forecasting use whatsoever. It was originally a manually reporting “Climate” site reporting once daily figures covering air and ground temperatures, air pressure and basic precipitation. It is of even less use for historic climate recording purposes than forecasting being in such an unrepresentative location, with 100% unnatural surroundings and in such a wind sheltered area to suffer extreme Aitken effects. Despite this site being almost pointless for genuine accurate historical data recording, the Met Office then opted (in 2009) to spend significant taxpayer’s money to automate the site.

I genuinely find all the above behaviour by the Met Office completely “unsound” and devoid of any scientific or meteorological rigour. Were this an “amateur” of private weather station, the Met Office would rule all its data as unsatisfactory.

Does nobody employed there simply stand back and consider the overall situation and realise these sorts of sites are simply unsuitable for reasons fairly obvious even to the lay man? Or is it simply a case of ticking boxes, not engaging logical thought and taking the salary working towards the pension?

I would like to remind the Met office of two things. Firstly their own website detailing what they themselves claim and which they are very clearly NOT adhering to.

And secondly, I would remind them they are Civil Servants charged with performing a scientific remit for the benefit of the public they serve. They are expressly not a political arm of government producing figures to satisfy an ideology.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/10/22/stormont-castle-dcnn9268-a-total-waste-of-time-and-taxpayers-money/