Newport (Shropshire) DCNN 4787 – England’s record coldest recording site (maybe!)

52.7773 -2.42766 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 4 Installed 1/1/1903

Reviewing Met Office weather stations should really be a straightforward exercise and probably rather boring. However, for a multitude of reasons the Met Office seems to complicate even the simplest of functions into a web of confusion that needs unravelling. Newport allegedly recorded the coldest ever temperature in England but did it? Where and when that occurred is not that straightforward.

The Newport weather station is located at the Harper Adams University – an agricultural research centre adopted from the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) that also runs a number of official weather stations on behalf of the Met Office. The site recorded the UK’s “official” coldest temperature of a very cold -26.1°C back in 1982. However, a number of posters on “X” suggested I should investigate the veracity of this claim on the simple grounds that cold records can reflect poor screen locations just as much as warmer recording ones – a fact hard to refute.

Looking at the archived records brought up some inconsistencies when viewed together with historical imagery. The above Streetview image does not really indicate somewhere likely to record significantly lower than anywhere else even though Shropshire (being far from the sea) is well known for cold winter temperatures. This is what the CEDA front page looks like.

Nothing indicates a relocation though the first two “Measurements made” show the site was automated from 28th September 2010. A long term site with digitally archived temperature readings for temperature going back to 1928 is shown by the “DLY 3208” form completion. What do the older street view images reveal prior to that automation date?

May 2009 reveals….no weather station. Despite no annotations the archives do not show earlier locations with the digital converted annual readings all the way back to 1928 showing the current site coordinates – presumably an effect from modern day data input. So the research begins – what about that cold record?

https://www.harper-adams.ac.uk/news/201160/harpers-record-temperature-makes-tv-appearance

A few comments from the observer, Bill Burrell, start to ring some alarm bells.

“Records show that people have been recording the temperature at Harper Adams since 1903 and it just happens to be one of the responsibilities of NIAB. I knew it was cold that day, but it came as quite a shock when I saw it was -26.1 degrees Celsius, I had frost on my eyelashes!”

There is no problem with that interesting observation but then……

“Mr Burrell added: “We quite regularly see cold temperatures here in Edgmond because of our location – it’s rural and quite exposed but Harper Adams is in a frost hollow. This is where the coldest air sinks.” The Met office particularly mentions such “Undesirable sites” by stating they avoid

“Frost hollow where overnight temperatures on still clear nights may be far lower than at neighbouring locations.”

The headline image of the weather station at Harper Adams certainly does not look like a frost hollow to me – Bill would certainly know his stuff so obviously he was taking readings from somewhere other than the modern site than the reporter failed to mention.

The last resort for site identification is going back to photocopies of the original hand written documents – these have been recently described as “a digital black rubbish sackfull” and not easy to navigate but finally I unearthed an original with accurate enough coordinates to locate the site.

This demonstrates how readings were recorded back then which clearly makes a nonsense of modern day Met office staff proudly proclaiming readings to the fifth decimal place of a degree celsius as at Cavendish. Genuine historic comparison is not only tricky but also some of the recent Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion practises are highly debatable – more in a later review.

Luckily the above site seems to have run until relocation and simultaneous automation in 2010. There was though major construction around the screen (evident in the imagery) probably causing the move.

So is this relocation relevant? This is the flat area removal distance of 264 metres……but it was all uphill all the way to the new site.

The new screen was moved away from its former lower elevation (frost hollow) site that was being rapidly developed to a newer, much more benign location by the roadways and car parks that was less likely to record such low extremes as before. Realistically this was, in some ways, a good practise by the Met Office in that they removed extremely localised effects from the overall temperature record. Unfortunately, by continuing to add the former not so good practise data into the overall historical system going forward causes a suggestion of overly rapid rise in average temperatures. This is only an artefact of inclusion/exclusion of sites from the data averaging process……considered “sleight of hand” in many people’s opinions – including mine.

In conclusion whatever the merits/demerits of the current Newport site are , it does not have a reliable history of recording from the same location and is dubious in its likely site quality i.e. before (a frost hollow) and after (Class 4 by a car park and metal railings). It does, however, demonstrate how difficult it is to get to the basis of weather station sites suitable to compile an accurate national historic temperature record. It is a microcosm of the entire rural site closure/ urban site retention (even increment) that is slewing the current recording system to exaggerate very modest temperature increments into absurd ideologically motivated numbers.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/02/27/newport-shropshire-dcnn-4787-englands-record-coldest-recording-site-maybe/