Cardiff:Bute Park DCNN 8491 – Is this proof that the Meteorologists simply do not care?

51.48821 -3.18857 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 5S Installed 1/1/1969

Cardiff:Bute Park vies with the likes of Hull:East Park and a select group of others for the honour of being the worst Met Office weather station in the UK. The Met Office themselves rate it as CIMO Class 5 (error margin due to siting of 5 °C) PLUS the “S” indicating suffering from major shading effects. Surely readings from such a site would be regarded with a high degree of suspicion. No, the Met Office very regularly proclaims both regional and national highs from this site.

However, the real story here is that Met Office staff totally ignore how awful the site is and are actually comfortable showing off such poor standards on national television.

On Sunday 27th Octotber 2024 the BBC aired “Weatherman Walking” a travelogue around Wales featuring former weather presenter and Met office employee Derek Brockway and a visit to the Cardiff:Bute Park Weather Station. It can be viewed in full here on the BBC iPlayer with the weather site featuring from 23:30 minutes in to 25:12. For those unable to view I have screen grabbed some stills to demonstrate the point.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001yjq0/weatherman-walking-series-14-2-taff-trail-castell-coch-to-bute-park

Nowhere in the section featuring “Stuart” who is “in charge” of all the sites in Wales is the truly awful nature of the site discussed but rather how seemingly wonderful the Met Oiffice’s technology is – or isn’t.

The pallet, plastic and general detritus hanging around seems par for the course. The overgrown shading bushes ( this is a botanical garden site – does nobody think to maintain things?) are ignored.

Those green bins flanking the screen are presumably perfectly natural features

The roadside and hard standing seem to be considered “natural vegetation typical of the region”.

And of course the screen is in the direct exhaust line of the cars in the adjacent general parking and dumping ground area. Why not simply save all the fuss and bother and just take readings from the car’s thermometers – they would likely be just as (in)accurate.

If you consider my review a bit flippant, I refer back to Tim Channon’s review of this same site back in 2012 which was equally incredulous of this being an official Met Office Site.

Bute Park, Cardiff

As commenter Caz stated in his response –

” The big problem with the site is that the screen is within a walled and hedged garden which is used to create a micro climate for the raising of plants for the park so the readings will not be indicative of the area as a whole. So you would expect the temperatures inside to be more like May than February…………. I really do think the BBC should give a health warning when they announce that the Welsh capital is warmer than Athens. Walled Gardens are what UK gardeners build to create micro climates similar to Athens.”

And yet 12 years on we have the Met Office quite unashamed and openly proclaiming, via the BBC, how important this site is. Cardiff:Bute Park is a sad parody of the regulations for locating a weather station. It demonstrates, along with many other sites, that the Met office has complete disregard for observational accuracy and integrity.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/10/29/cardiffbute-park-dcnn-8491-is-this-proof-that-the-meteorologists-simply-do-not-care/