Normanby Hall DCNN2419 – A mid quality station with a good record but oddly marked down + Yet more strange AI interpretations.

Normanby Hall lies a few miles north of Scunthorpe in rural Lincolnshire. The present house was completed in 1830 for the owners the Sheffield family who had long held the title of “Duke of Buckingham”. A former Sheffield family home in London was Buckingham House now better known as Buckingham Palace. Samantha Cameron (wife of former Prime Minister David Cameron) was raised in Normanby Manor.

Normanby weather station lies to the rear of the formal garden with its ornamental pond in a large enclosure and in reasonably open countryside. The classification of class 4 is again another of those examples of harsh application of CIMO regulationns. Firstly the 10 metre radius circle below is perfectly free from any problematic issues. The site is flat and the only tree/shrubs within the 30 metre exclusion area are between the northwest and northeast. There will be no sun shading from these compass points and it is hard to imagine significant wind shelter from such sparse vegetation.

Site rankings such as this rather make the Met Office look frankly incompetent. They seem perfectly willing to justify the likes of Chertsey being surrounded by high level solar panels or Heathrow as being Class 3 by strict tape measurement but then make a reasonably good site like Normanby Class 4. Does the Met Office really think such heavily compromised urban sites are more accurate than this rural location? I seriously doubt that there are many (if indeed any) independent meteorologists who would agree with their assessments.

This is the wider angle view of Normanby with the 100 metre circled area annotated. I cannot claim this site is perfect but surely Class 2 is not unreasonable and Class 3 a certainty. It seems likely that readings here would be perfectly representative of the wider north Lincolnshire countryside.

The site has an installation date of 1993. Although I have not been able to track down any records, it is known that there had been an independent weather station here for a long time as was common practise for many stately homes. Originally this may have been an “adopted” Met Office climate station which was initially once daily manually observed. The readings record up to automation on 30/11/2010 was impeccable again suggesting this was a function of the grounds staff rather than a pure amateur hobbyist.

The inclusion of data from this site in historic climate recording seems perfectly reasonable though it is a pity records further back in time cannot currently be located if they do exist. Normanby Hall is not a regular performer in the Daily “Extremes” listings but occasionally appears demonstrating anything but “extreme” conditions as recently providing the UK high of just 7°C.

All of the above again makes for Google’s bizarre and unwarranted pronouncements of its AI whenever searches are made. This is not a direct Met Office problem but surely they have a sufficiently high profile to stop Google making such blatant errors. Simply asking about Normanby Hall weather station prompts Gemini overview to proclaim there isn’t one. Surely if it does not know, AI should simply not proffer anything rather than intentionally mislead. However, in this case its pronouncements reach almost surreal proportions…..

Simultaneously with claiming there isn’t a Normanby Hall weather station it includes an image from Alamy Shutterstock of yes ……….Normanby Hall weather station. I cannot directly reproduce the Alamy image without paying copyright but I can direct readers to it here for confirmation. In addition I have expanded the google supplied image below.

I regularly make the point that the general public accepts as authority such online information from these types of dubious sources but seems equally unwilling to accept genuine evidence from what is decried as “alternative” sources. For my part I cannot understand why the Met office so frequently marks down rural sites to the absurd extent that some probable Class 1 sites such as Stowe are assessed as unreliable Class 4. Conversely atrocious urban sites are frequently hugely overrated.

I will continue to search for older records from Normanby as I do feel it is a worthy inclusion site for historic recording. If anyone knows where its data may have been retained I would appreciate any notification.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2026/01/22/normanby-hall-dcnn2419-a-mid-quality-station-with-a-good-record-but-oddly-marked-down-yet-more-strange-ai-interpretations/