Met Office Shock: More Non-Existent UK Weather Stations Discovered Reporting Invented Data

 Last month the average maximum temperature at Newton Rigg was 11.5°C, the lowest was 3°C, while 23mm of rain fell. Newton Rigg is near Penrith in Cumbria and in its historic database the UK Met Office claims it is an open site and is one of its 380 UK wide temperature measuring stations. This claim is also made in two Met Office lists of site class classification obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in 2023 and 2024. All of which is rather strange. Newton Rigg closed in 2021 and all the data being published as climate averages are estimated, i.e., invented. The historic database contains 37 stations and seven of the total, no less than 19%, are closed or do not exist. Invented figures are also being supplied for Lowestoft, Cwmystwyth, Nairn Druim, Eastbourne, Oxford and Paisley.

The Met Office claims that monthly data are available for a selection of long-running historic stations and series typically range from 50 to more than 100 years in length. Sunshine data are noted to use a Kipp and Zonen sensor in some sites, while all the others have data recorded by a Campbell-Stokes recorder. All the others, the Met Office omitted to make clear, except those where the figures have been invented for the non-existent stations.

Of course as regular readers well know, the UK Met Office has form as long as its arm when it comes to making up temperature data. In a separate public database it was recently found that the state meteorologist was making up 30-year average temperatures from 103 non-existent stations. The Met Office referenced the station names and provided single location coordinates for the imaginary sites including one improbably based next to the water on Dover Beach. Massive social media publicity led to a rapid change, with individual coordinates being removed and the database being renamed to suggest the information came from a wider location.

A subsequent inept ‘fact check’ from Science Feedback largely written by the Met Office found it “misleading” to suggest that the data were “fabricated”. Rather they were estimated using “well-correlated neighbouring stations”. Alas for this explanation, it was subsequently revealed that the location of Norwich in this dataset uses supposedly well-correlated information from five stations that do not exist. The Met Office claims its estimates use a scientific method that is published in peer-reviewed literature.

Of course at this stage in our corresponding we must give our regular shout out to citizen super-sleuth Ray Sanders. Writing on Tallbloke’s Talkshop, Sanders is undertaking a forensic investigation of the Met Office’s weather data gathering operations. In his recent investigation into the Newton Rigg site he provides the following photographic evidence of its closure. First the site in April 2021, based in the grounds of a college campus. The measuring device is clearly visible in the near centre of the picture....<<<Read More>>>...