Stonyhurst DCNN 7269 – A current contributor to the Central England Temperature Series and astonishing levels of propaganda.

53.84509 -2.46994 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 The World’s longest continuously running site temperature record from 1846.

In researching for background information regarding Stonyhurst I was astonished at the amount of what I can only describe as propaganda that I had to wade my way through. Quite why this station is allegedly so controversial is a puzzling mystery that I will try to resolve.

Stonyhust College is a public school in Lancashire that had its original observatory and weather station built in 1846. This was later moved to a new building in 1865 with the original records carrying over to the new site. This leads to the claim of being the world’s longest continuously running temperature though there are other counter-claiming sites. Quite surprisingly the CEDA archives have not archived any temperature readings for the years 1979 to 1999 inclusive . The “Measurements Made” section indicates manual readings (DLY3208) ended 30/6/1978 with automatic readings (AWSDLY) not being resumed until 1/8/1998. It is unclear if records actually do exist for the interim period.

The world’s longest running “national” temperature record is the Central England Temperature Series (CET) with data running on a monthly basis from 1659 and thence daily from 1772. It is worth noting that the stations used to compile even the more recent data have changed over the period. Despite Stonyhurst’s longevity it was not continuously included in the CET being removed in 1959 and only reintroduced to the series in 2004 replacing the Ringway highly meteorologically compromised aviation site. Other notable exclusions from the CET include Cambridge University Botanic Gardens.

More detail on the CET amendment can be found here

Click to access Parker_etalIJOC1992_dailyCET.pdf

The potential age of any site is, of course, scientifically irrelevant – it is the quality of the site throughout the period that is important. Below is a close up of the site from an odd but useful source of information – a bee keeper.

The site is not enclosed and there are no indications from Google Earth Pro historic images that it has ever been in the period of its re-inclusion in the CET. However, the earlier images do not indicate any screen at all at the current quoted site prior to 2015. It would appear there have been several re-locations within the site over its lifetime. The evidence of one’s own eyes shows the current screen unusually close to a large potentially shading structure with it also being near to brickwork, paved areas and a tarmac footpath. Most importantly the Met Office themselves expressly do not consider this site to be representative of the wider area in classifying the site as Class 4 with a defined

2.5 Class 4 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 2 °C)

The Met Office clearly states in its own online information pages

” the WMO classification simply informs the data user of the geographical scale of a site’s representativity of the surrounding environment – the smaller the siting class, the higher the representativeness of the measurement for a wide area.” 

This clearly demonstrates that “the smaller the sitting class” i.e. Class 1 or 2 represents a wide area whilst a higher rating i.e. Class 4 does NOT represent a wide area. There are currently only 3 stations in the CET – Rothamsted (Class 1), Pershore College (Class 4) and Stonyhurst (Class 4) as a modern addition known to be unfit for purpose. These are intended to represent the large area north of the M4 and south of Scotland – the old definition of “The Midlands” clearly does not apply with this Lancashire site inclusion.

The reality of representation of the wider area question is excellently portrayed by this apiarist’s site for whom an understanding of the climate is critically important. It starts discussing, “The Weather at Stonyhurst” with the remarkably direct comment – “In the next four pages the difference between theory and practice is explored” {take note Met Office} 

As the apiarist points out “Stonyhurst being in the Forest of Bowland lying just south of the Lake District is one of the wettest places in England. It has also one of the lowest sunshine records in England.” and then continues to compare the stark differences of the climate there with that of Hull at a similar latitude.

Despite the obvious and acknowledged unrepresentative nature of Stonyhurst, the Met office still opted to return the site to the CET. As I emphasized in my review of Pershore College, this marks the demise of the CET credibility – a straightforward case of GIGO – garbage going in and getting garbage out. Of course everything that I have stated above is likely to be “Misinformation” in the eyes of the Met Office – why do I say that? Well consider the Met Office own web page concerning the CET.

In the style of criminal under police questioning this descriptor page of the CET actually spends the majority of the discussion “denying” claims of tampering with the CET and accusing others of spreading “Misinformation” Reads very much like a “guilty conscience” – who decided what “misinformation” Anyone may encounter?

I personally find the outstanding hubris of claiming – “To take account of changes in technology and the weather station network over time requires a careful process of adjusting the contributing data to produce a consistent series.” – to be quite breathtaking.

Further online investigation into the CET and data manipulation subsequently led down far more avenues and shameless propaganda than I could mention here. However, one that truly amazed me came from the BBC and a programme I mercifully missed.

“The Climate Wars”, “Fightback”, “counter-attack”, “The Battle Begins”, Fight for the Future” – What on earth does science have to play in this sort of rhetoric?

In summary, Stonyhurst is a long running site of rather dubious provenance that is poorly sited and only reflects a particularly wet and “unsunny” small area. The Met Office have reintroduced this known very unrepresentative site into the World’s longest running temperature series to seemingly corrupt its erstwhile integrity. Same old, same old.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/03/08/stonyhurst-dcnn-7269-a-current-contributor-to-the-central-england-temperature-series-and-astonishing-levels-of-propaganda/