North Somercotes:Church End DCNN2496 – How to prove Global Warming? Allow activists to collect the “data”.

53.44109 0.1414 No Met Office known CIMO Assessment. Temperature records from 1/10/2024. Images Courtesy Dave Ward.

I feel this review of North Somercotes is a very important one to demonstrate how the collection of raw data can potentially be manipulated right from the very start. I am extremely grateful to Dave Ward’s assistance with this – Dave asked me earlier in the year where I might like photography and he would see what he could supply in his travels. There was nothing online regarding this new site so the only way was to be there in person. This review needs to be taken together with Dave’s imagery from Donna Nook to consider all the ramifications. It is also worth noting the proximity of Wainfleet No 2 to Gibraltar Point – there certainly seems to something about very close sites in Lincolnshire.

According to the Met Office:-

“about 40 km apart” …………really?

As is clearly shown above a new manually observing official weather station was opened (reporting from 1st October 2024) under 4 km from a relatively long term and fully equipped automatic site. If that seems a somewhat odd thing to do, it has to be borne in mind that Donna Nook is rated as the worst possible CIMO category of Class 5 and has its readings flagged as potentially suspect presumably for when the range is in active use. Dave’s previous images showed how unacceptably compromised that site is despite having a massive surrounding area available to relocate to.

In any branch of real science, technology and engineering the imperative is to improve on previous understanding or technology. Any new weather station should be Class 1 or 2 at worst. The UK Centre for Ecology and hydrology, for example, has over 50 of its own research weather stations and seems to manage to find good quality sites even to the embarrassment of the Met Office such as at Morpeth Cockle Park or Hadlow. So it would be reasonable to expect new Met Office locations to be ever improving and more representative of the wider environment.

Unfortunately the Met office seems to have great difficulty in achieving what the UKCEH (funded by the same source – the UK taxpayer) seems to find remarkably easy. Indeed the Met Office seems to find no end of reasons for failure in this regard and even posts a webpage seeming almost to excuse themselves from any effort or liability.

So firstly, how good or bad is this new North Somercotes site? Rather than my view, here is Dave’s first hand experience.

” Your co-ordinates were pretty well spot on, however actually seeing the screen was not easy – yet again a Met Station in completely inappropriate surroundings. The only street view imagery seems to be from 2009, and the growth of the hedges since then is remarkable. I went down the footpath running across the adjacent field, and walked close to the northern border of the paddock before I could be sure it was actually there. I then took a series of shots both wide angle & zoomed in as I walked back, and a further one from the corner of the field looking in the same direction as the Street View screen grab I’ve included. “

This really is great spotting work from Dave, that little white box roughly in the middle of shot above was all he initially had to go on for identification. Or this one below almost equally difficult to be sure this was it.

Even with better close up images it is clear to see this is not a desirable location being surrounded to all compass points by rapidly growing vegetation shielding out the typical “Fen blow” of the region.

At very best this site will likely be rated Class 4 by the Met Office or even Class 5 and on a par with its near neighbour. In fact a reader has commented on this sort of matching up newer sites to be as bad as older ones for continuity having been involved in the new site at the atrocious Hull East Park.

At this point I would normally wind up this review, however, I had specifically asked Dave for help with this site for an ulterior motive! I knew something of the establishment of this site that concerned me greatly – who decides to bring onboard this type of low grade, domestic amateur site when there really is no evidence of quality control nor particular need? The meterological conditions surrounding North Somercotes should be almost exactly the same as Donna Nook so close by.

Enter – “Tithe Farm Global Warming Mitigation and Adaption project” The North Somercotes site is in fact Tithe Farm, Church End complete with Glamping Yurts et alia. At this point I must state I have no wish to speak ill of the departed, however, this site is in the home grounds of the late Wilfred (Biff) Vernon who was a lifelong “climate activist”. The weather station was adopted in October 2024 before he died in January 2025. Whilst there are many online eulogies to his career and efforts within the locality, this does not override the need for improving observational accuracy nor the inclusion of what should be a rather superfluous addition to the already suitably represented area.

This appears to be part of a growing trend with new Met Office stations in sites “favorable” to particular ideologies such as Dundreggan Rewilding Centre or the likes of the National Trusts willing to relocate screens from outside to inside walled gardens rather than maintain the current sites such as at Poolewe and the soon to be reviewed Wallington. Replacing older military sites with dubious quality and potentially “agenda driven” site owners certainly does not seem a move in the right direction and very much open to question. The important issue is data accuracy not just producing any evidence that supports a theory however inaccurate the data may be.

So what are this site readings actually like? So far there are only 92 days of 2024 readings available….. or rather only 79 because on 8 of those 92 days no maximum readings were recorded, a further 4 had no minimum taken and on one occasion neither maximum nor minimum. To start off with a 13% failure rate to derive a daily mean is not an impressive beginning. Why not simply automate these sites from the onset? Manual sites are already equipped with an electronic PRT and data logger so there is very little to add.

I ran a manual comparison myself of the 79 days of overlapping readings with the nearby Donna Nook to discover the correlation was that the new site is averaging 0.8 °C hotter in its wind broken and hedged in site. Obviously this is far too short a period to form any sort of conclusion and it will not be until late summer that the 2025 readings will appear online to gain a more meaningful comparison. Despite this it does not look like a promising start.

Finally just to check I was not drifting into dark conspiracy theory-land I put my findings to Grok AI to get the nearest thing to an objective opinion that I could. I admit to being very surprised at the response.

“My views on why the Met Office placed it there

This does look like a poor operational choice, even if not malicious. Met Office relies heavily on volunteer observers for its climatological network (hundreds of manual sites), and rural gaps get filled where willing participants and land are available. Biff Vernon was a long-term resident with strong public environmental/climate advocacy (e.g., Time and Tide Bell project highlighting sea-level rise, writings on global heating and adaptation). It’s reasonable to infer he (or the household) volunteered the site—perhaps seeing participation as aligning with his interests in supplying “evidence” for climate impacts in a vulnerable coastal area. Practical convenience for the Met Office (low cost, local enthusiasm) likely trumped ideal siting.That said:

• Perceived conflict matters. Even without any data tampering (and there’s zero evidence of that here), siting a station in the garden of someone with a clear personal mission on global warming creates an optics problem. It invites skepticism that the data might subtly “support the narrative” the host promoted, especially if local biases (e.g., slight warming from nearby structures) aren’t fully corrected in homogenization. Public trust in official temperature records erodes when stations like this feed into national averages used for policy.
• Standards should be stricter for new stations. Legacy stations sometimes get grandfathered in despite flaws, but a 2024 installation had no such excuse. The Met Office’s own guidance emphasizes representative exposure and avoiding local influences (buildings, trees, concrete, etc.). Accepting a likely Class 5 site undermines their claim that locations are “carefully chosen.” Your broader work cataloguing UK stations (and highlighting default Class 1 assumptions) is a useful public service here—independent scrutiny fills gaps where official metadata is thin.
• One station ≠ systemic conspiracy. This single site has negligible impact on UK-wide or global temperature trends (Met Office homogenizes and cross-checks across the network). But it exemplifies a real, documented issue in surface networks worldwide: many stations compromise on exposure for practicality. If a pattern of suboptimal new sites in activist-friendly or urban-adjacent locations exists, it’s fair to call it out as sloppy science rather than deliberate fabrication.

In short, I share your concern that this was an “atrociously badly sited” addition. It’s not evidence the Met Office deliberately planted biased data to “prove a point,” but it does reflect lax application of siting best practices and poor judgment given the host’s background. Better transparency—public photos, explicit CIMO ratings per station, and stricter volunteer-site vetting—would help.“

I very much doubt Grok felt the need to flatter me or agree just for the sake of it.

To finish I would like to again give my sincerest thanks to Dave for all his efforts and point out that he has supplied me with imagery for several other sites as well which I will be highlighting soon. A picture definitely paints a thousand words and adds extra perspective to the subject.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2026/04/19/north-somercoteschurch-end-dcnn2496-how-to-prove-global-warming-allow-activists-to-collect-the-data/