From DAILY SKEPTIC
by Chris Morrison
Last month, the Daily Skeptic highlighted the UK Met Office's practice of fabricating temperature averages from over 100 non-existent measuring stations. Helpfully, the Met Office even went so far as to provide coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary locations. Due to widespread interest on social media and the frequent re-publishing of the Daily Skeptic article, the Met Office has changed its ridiculous claims. The move was, of course, not publicly announced because drawing attention to it would be opening Pandora's Box and risking subjecting all Met Office temperature information to greater scrutiny. Instead, the Met Office has discreetly renamed its “UK Climate Averages” page to “Location-Specific Long-Term Averages”.
Significant changes have been made to the new site, no doubt intended to allay suspicions that the Met Office has made up the figures over time. The original suggestion that selecting a climate station can provide a 30-year average from 1991 to 2020 has been replaced with the statement that the site is “designed to display locations that provide uniform geographical coverage of the UK, but does not reflect all existing weather stations or the current Met Office observing network”. The new page still refers to the sites as “climate stations,” but the exact location details have been omitted.
The cynic might note that the Met Office has solved its problem of inventing data from non-existent stations by suggesting that it now comes from “locations” which may or may not have some relation to stations that once existed or actually existed exist today. If this is a reasonable interpretation of the matter, it could indicate that the matter is far from over.
Thanks again to hard-working citizen journalist Ray Sanders for alerting us to the Met Office's unannounced changes and providing a link to the previous averages page on the Wayback Machine. Detective Sanders has been on the case for some time after discovering that three named stations near his home, namely Dungeness, Folkestone and Dover, did not exist. The coordinates provided for Dover placed the station in the water on the local beach, as shown in the Google Earth photo below.
As a result, Sanders found through a request for information that 103 of the 302 locations listed on the climate average list — more than a third of the total — no longer existed. Sanders then sought further information about the methodology used to provide data for Folkestone and Dover. In response, the Met Office said it was unable to provide details of the requested observation locations “as this is not recorded information”. However, it was disclosed that for non-existent stations, we “use regression analysis to build a model of the relationship between each station and others in the network.” This creates an estimate for each month the station is not operational. Each “estimate” is said to be based on data from six other stations chosen because they “correlate well with the target station.”
In the case of Dover, the nearest “rail station” is seven miles away in the non-existent Folkestone, followed by Manston, 15 miles away. By “well correlated” the Met Office perhaps means they are in the same county of Kent. Regardless, computer models are available to show the way.
Ray Sanders had sent details of his findings to new Labor science minister Peter Kyle MP, and the Met Office's recent changes may have been encouraged by a discreet political push. At the time, Sanders asked, “How would a reasonable observer know that the data was not real and was simply 'made up' by a government agency?” He called for an open explanation of likely inaccuracies in existing published data “to prevent other institutions and researchers from doing so.” using unreliable data and reaching incorrect conclusions.”
The Met Office also runs a historical data section which identifies a number of locations with long temperature records. Lowestoft closed in 2010 and the numbers have been estimating ever since. Stations at Nairn Druim, Paisley and Newton Rigg have also closed but continue to report estimated monthly data. “Why would a scientific organization feel the need to publish what can only be described as fiction?” asks Sanders.
The original Braemar station in Aberdeenshire has been recording temperature data since Victorian times. Due to its interesting topography surrounded by high mountains, it recorded the coldest temperature in the United Kingdom at -27.2°C in 1895 and 1982. In summer the temperature can rise as the heat lags behind. In 2005, a new site was established some distance from the original and, following Met Office procedure, was named Braemar 2 to reflect both the distance and climatological differences. The Historical Data section of the Met website shows how Braemar 2 provides data back to 1959. “For reasons I find difficult to understand, the Met Office has chosen to highlight a false conflation of two significantly different data sets for an illogically defined period of time that does not represent either location,” notes Sanders.
Recent changes the Met Office has made to its climate averages pages show the government-funded operation is fully aware of the growing interest in its overall temperature recording business. This interest has grown because the Met Office is fully committed to using its data to further the Net Zero policy imagination. But it is silent on the biggest concern that has been raised recently, namely the promotion of temperatures accurate to a hundredth of a degree Celsius, maintained by a nationwide network in which almost eight out of ten stations are so poorly located that They have internationally recognized “uncertainties” of up to 5°C.
Chris Morrison is the environmental editor of the Daily Sceptic.
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