Barwhillanty House DCNN 6720 – a typical example of hypocrisy and complete junk.

55.01465 -3.99757 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Archived temperature records from 1/1/1999

From the above current online Google aerial view image it is fairly obvious why this station is given the lowest possible rating. Official Met Office climate reporting weather stations are actually quite often in forest clearings though not usually as extreme as this. It would be interesting to know what percentage of the year this site is actually not in deep shade – it cannot be that often. Sadly this cannot simply hand waved away as just an outlier – this is a typical example of the appalling lack of quality standards the Met Office displays whilst hypocritically claiming otherwise.

This is the Met Office claim with regards to record verification and the reasons for ruling out private (i.e. non Met Office) weather stations.

I am confident that very few (if any) amateur meteorologists would install a weather station in such a poor site as the Barwhillanty House woodland enclosure and expect to be taken seriously. For the Met Office to claim their sites meet “international agreed standard” is grotesquely misleading. The are no actual standards at all for Class 5 which is solely described as

The international standard that Barwhillanty House meets is NO STANDARD AT ALL. Any outside weather station, however badly sited, can meet Class 5 and to suggest otherwise is dishonest.

The question that comes to mind is why would the Met Office actually install expensive equipment in such an absurd location that is effectively worthless for any realistic applications. Examining historic imagery indicates they did not. From 2009 this image suggests that originally the site was next to woodland and that plantation was subsequent.

Even back then this was an ill-advised location (still only Class 5) however, for Met Office inspectors to continue accepting use of the site once the planted saplings had grown to surround the site is inexcusable. The further Met Office claim of “an internationally-agreed rigorous quality-control process.” is equally demonstrated to be complete bunkum. {Talkshop comment: “internationally agreed” seems to do an awful lot of the heavy lifting in Met Office literature}

In summary this Barwhillanty House site is, in common parlance, junk. If the general public were aware that this standard is par for the course for sites contributing data to the historic temperature record, I doubt they would accept the extreme actions deemed necessary to remedy the alleged ” anthropogenic global warming”

Important Talkshop footnote: Laid to rest nearby Barwhillanty House at Parton Kirk is probably one of the world’s greatest scientific minds – James Clerk Maxwell. None other than Albert Einstein proclaimed “One scientific epoch ended and another began with James clerk Maxwell” I doubt he would be impressed with what is passing for scientific observations by the modern day Met Office.