Evidence continues to mount that the UK Met Office is chasing ‘hottest evah’ temperature extremes by deliberately siting new measuring stations in locations likely to be affected by heat spikes and unnaturally warmed ambient air.
In the last 10 years to the middle of 2024, 81.5% of new sites were junk Class 4 and 5 operations with potential internationally-recognised errors up to 2°C and 5°C respectively. Incredibly, eight of the 13 newly-opened sites over the last five years were of junk status.
Now comes news of a new site recently opened in Wales at Whitesands that in the words of citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders, “appears to be a deliberate attempt to produce artificially elevated readings both now and ever increasingly in the future”.
It’s so bad, it beggars belief that it has been added to the official list of Met Office recording sites. For starters, it is a manual operation suggesting amateur involvement with all the human errors that might entail. Sanders, who is undertaking a scientific study of all 380 plus Met Office sites, notes that from the start date in May 2024, almost half the days had no record until the end of the year. But much worse is to be found in an examination of the actual siting. Its location on sand and sandy soils is hardly ideal since they absorb and release heat more readily than clay, loam or topsoil. This creates a microclimate that can skew temperature in the immediate vicinity.
Whitesands is a camping site on Welsh sand dunes. The Stevenson screen is next to a road with a 5mph speed limit, reports Sanders, meaning that slow moving traffic such as motor homes and camper vans may pass by....<<<Read More>>>...