Tag: Temperature Measuring Stations

Dr Roy Spencer’s Backing of UK Met Office Temperature Record Draws Furious Counter Reaction

A bitter row has broken out following Dr Roy Spencer’s backing of the UK Met Office’s controversial temperature record amid accusations of Met Office bias and poorly sited weather stations.

A weather measurement station featuring a tall blue observation platform, various temperature sensors, and green landscaping under a partly cloudy sky.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

A man with gray hair and glasses is sitting in front of a blue background, appearing thoughtful during a discussion.

A bitter row has broken out following Dr Roy Spencer’s backing of the UK Met Office’s controversial temperature record amid accusations of Met Office bias and poorly sited weather stations.

Dr Spencer asserts that his simple bias reduction modelling of daily high (Tmax) and low (Tmin) UK summer temperatures over the last 65 years produces variations in average temperature “essentially identical” to those published by the Met Office. But there are those who point out that coming to the same conclusion by using two different ways to measure the same faulty data doesn’t alter the fact the data are faulty in the first place.

Ray Sanders, who has undertaken a forensic examination of almost all the Met Office’s 400-plus nationwide temperature measuring sites, is unimpressed, calling Spencer’s findings, “a load of twaddle”. Speaking to the Daily Sceptic, he added: “The whole point is that you can torture numbers as much as you want, but if they were no damn good in the first place, they will never get any better.”

His criticism strikes at the heart of Dr Spencer’s work. Spencer argues that a measuring station can be placed in a non-natural, anomalously warm urban environment, but as long as that environment stays the same over time, “it can probably still be used for climate change monitoring”. He went on to state that it “might be” that there has been little additional urban heat warming in London over the last 200 years, something that seems highly unlikely given that the city has grown in the period from a low-rise centre with numerous surrounding small villages to a major metropolitan area full of everything from tall glass buildings to airports. Sanders says that Dr Spencer’s opinions on UHIs (Urban Heat Islands) are “risible”. Simply saying things were bad in the past so they can be compared to now – with the caveat of ‘if things haven’t changed’ – is irrelevant, he states.

Spencer’s model starts with a baseline of three sets of data from sites that are said to have a 126-year continuous temperature measuring record. They are the Central England Temperature Series (CET), a group of three stations, Armagh and Stornoway Airport. This is the first problem. The CET has shown a number of station changes in that period, while the Stornoway record was compiled at another site nearly three miles away until its re-location to the Airport in 1968. Spencer’s high/low calculations go back to 1960 so the Stornoway move, unhelpfully not identified by the Met Office, will likely affect his figures.

The current CET portfolio includes two CIMO Class 4 site with international unnatural ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C, a junk classification also shared by Armagh and Stornoway. In addition, Paul Homewood has discovered that the Met Office has retrospectively cooled the near past and boosted CET readings from the last 20 years. Sanders has done considerable research on all the junk stations and dismisses them as “truly crap sites of incredible bad provenance”. For good measure, he notes that the Armagh weather station used to be housed in a metal box bolted to the side of a building by a first floor window.

Once he has established his initial baseline, Spencer incrementally adds further stations which adjusts the overall composite average. Each time a station is introduced he adds or subtracts its average difference (the bias) over the overlapping years until it lines up with the baseline. Further and better particulars can be obtained from his original article here. This method assumes long-term biases at each station stay mostly the same over time and using that assumption seems to produce the same warming trends as the Met Office. The uncharitable thought, ‘garbage in, garbage out’ springs immediately to mind.

Something that does not seem to have been considered in Spencer’s work is the effect of the change over the last few decades of measuring devices from liquid in glass manual thermometers to automatic electronic systems. This is a largely unaddressed issue in meteorological science but it is highlighted in recent work compiled by Dr Eric Huxter. Looking at the daily Tmax published by the Met Office throughout last May, he found that on average about 0.89°C was added to the maximum recording by temporary and most likely unnatural blips that would not have been picked up by slower-reacting glass bulb devices. Dr Huxter has told the Daily Sceptic that he is confident that electronic devices are biased to recording higher Tmax temperatures, especially given siting issues.

Since the Met Office picks up its daily Tmax from the one minute record, one way to remove some of the distortion would be to average the high over a longer period. Thus the national record declared at RAF Coningsby on July 19th 2022 at 3.12pm falls from a 60-second spike of 40.3°C to a five-minute average of 39.96°C. Over 10 minutes, a possible time frame for movement in liquid in glass bulb thermometers, the fall is 0.5°C. Still hot of course, but not BBC-ready ‘record’ headline hot.

Dr Roy Spencer is a brilliant sceptical scientist who is behind the valuable UAH satellite temperature record – an uncorrupted series that since 1979 shows less global warming than (frequently-adjusted) global surface datasets. He is one of the authors of the excellent climate report published recently by the US Department of Energy that has helped push back the notion of ‘settled’ political science. He is also an authority on urban heat island corruption. In a recent peer-reviewed paper with fellow Energy Department report author Professor John Christy it was calculated that the UHI effect accounted for about 22% of the observed summer warming across all US stations since 1895. For some of the suburban and urban locations – stations that Ray Sanders might refer to as “crap” – the UHI warming bias was no less than 65%.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

I would like to wish all my readers a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous, sceptical New Year. I am enormously encouraged by all the support you give me during the year and the fantastic contributions that some of you make when you respond to the publication. Your input often leads me to think harder and sometimes follow up leads that I had not previously considered. Such support and contributions are a great help to those of us who labour at the copy face. Thank you.

Massive Cover-up Launched by U.K. Met Office to Hide its 103 Non-Existent Temperature Measuring Stations

Last month, the Daily Sceptic highlighted the practice at the U.K. Met Office of inventing temperature averages from over 100 non-existent measuring stations. Helpfully, the Met Office went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites. Following massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of the Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office has amended its ludicrous claims.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

Last month, the Daily Sceptic highlighted the practice at the U.K. Met Office of inventing temperature averages from over 100 non-existent measuring stations. Helpfully, the Met Office went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites. Following massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of the Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office has amended its ludicrous claims. The move has not been announced in public, needless to say, since drawing attention to this would open a pandora’s box and run the risk of subjecting all the Met Office temperature claims to wider scrutiny. Instead, the Met Office has discreetly renamed its “U.K. climate averages” page as “Location-specific long-term averages”.

Significant modifications have been made to the new page, designed no doubt to quash suspicions that the Met Office has been making the figures up as it went along. The original suggestion that selecting a climate station can provide a 30-year average from 1991-2020 has been replaced with the explanation that the page “is designed to display locations that provide even geographical coverage of the U.K., but it is not reflective of every weather station that has existed or the current Met Office observation network”. Under the new page the locations are still referred to as “climate stations” but the details of where they are, exactly, have been omitted.

The cynical might note that the Met Office has solved its problem of inventing data from non-existing stations by suggesting that they now arise from “locations” which may or may not bear any relation to stations that once existed or indeed exist today. If this is a reasonable interpretation of the matter, it might suggest that the affair is far from closed.

Again, we are obliged to the diligent citizen journalist Ray Sanders for drawing our attention to the unannounced Met Office changes and providing a link to the previous averages page on the Wayback Machine. The sleuthing Sanders has been on the case for some time, having discovered that three named stations near where he lives, namely Dungeness, Folkestone and Dover, did not exist. The claimed co-ordinates for Dover placed the station in the water on the local beach as shown by the Google Earth photo below.

As a result, Sanders discovered from a freedom of information request that 103 of the 302 sites marked on the climate averages listing – over a third of the total – no longer existed. Subsequently, Sanders sought further information about the methodology used to supply data for both Folkestone and Dover. In reply, the Met Office said it was unable to supply details of the observing sites requested “as this is not recorded information”. It did however disclose that for non-existent stations “we use regression analysis to create a model of the relationship between each station and others in the network”. This generates an estimate for each month when the station is not operating. Each “estimate” is said to be based on data from six other stations, chosen because they are “well correlated” with the target station.

In the case of Dover, the nearest ‘station’ is seven miles away at non-existent Folkestone followed by Manston which is 15 miles distant. By “well correlated” perhaps the Met Office means they are in the same county of Kent. No matter, computer models are on hand to guide the way.

Ray Sanders had sent details of his findings to the new Labour science minister Peter Kyle MP and the recent Met Office changes may have been promoted by a discreet political push. At the time, Sanders asked: “How would any reasonable observer know that the data was not real and was simply ‘made up’ by a government agency?” He called for an open declaration of likely inaccuracies of existing published data “to avoid other institutions and researchers using unreliable data and reaching erroneous conclusions”.

The Met Office also runs an historical data section where a number of sites with long records of temperature are identified. Lowestoft closed in 2010 and since then the figures have been estimated. The stations at Nairn Druim, Paisley and Newton Rigg have also closed but are still reporting estimated monthly data. “Why would any scientific organisation feel the need to publish what can only be described as fiction?” asks Sanders.

The original Braemar station in Aberdeenshire has recorded temperature data since Victorian times. Due to its interesting topography surrounded by high mountains, it recorded the U.K.’s coldest temperature of -27.2°C in both 1895 and 1982. In summer, the temperature can soar as the heat stays trapped. A new site, some distance from the original, was set up in 2005 and in common with Met Office procedure was labelled Braemar 2 to reflect both distance and climatological differences. In the historical data section of the Met’s website, Braemar 2 is shown supplying data back to 1959. “For reasons I find difficult to understand, the Met Office has chosen to highlight a spurious merging of two notably different data sets for an illogically defined period that fails to represent either site,” observes Sanders.

The recent changes made by the Met Office to its climate average pages shows that the state-funded operation is fully aware of the growing interest in its entire temperature recording business. This interest has grown because the Met Office is fully committed to using its data to promote the Net Zero political fantasy. But it is silent on the biggest concern that has been raised of late, namely the promotion of temperatures, accurate to one hundredth of a degree centigrade, obtained from a nationwide network where nearly eight out of 10 stations are so poorly sited, they have internationally-recognised ‘uncertainties’ as high as 5°C.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.