Middleton:Hillside DCNN 4100 – The clue is in the name.

53.09908 -1.58863 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Installed 1/5/2009

The Met Office has many legacy sites going back almost a century and a half. It is understandable if some older sites do not meet modern CIMO regulations that certainly were not considered back then. What is not acceptable is that the Met Office continues to open new sites in locations that it then has to assess as “Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C)” and thus unsuitable for its intended purpose of “climate reporting“. The inspection of Middleton reveals a complete disregard not only of CIMO regulations but the Met Office’s own unique assessment procedure.

Middleton was installed as a manually reporting site under 16 years ago and has never been automated thus has no effective benefit for immediate forecasting purposes with only a limited range of instrumentation. It sits in the back garden of a domestic property off a road known as “Hillside”. The Met office is very specific in its own site requirements as below:

It is quite obvious that this Middleton site does not meet any distance requirements from buildings or artificial heat sources set by CIMO/WMO standards but surely the Met Office might, in the 21st Century, at least try to get somewhere near their own stipulations. Here is the Ordnance Survey sheet with contours at 5 metre intervals.

It has to be expected that Derbyshire is not a particularly flat county but it is clearly absurd to be locating weather stations on known extreme slopes for climate reporting purposes. The road is called “Hillside” as an obvious description. There are many local requirements for immediate weather conditions data for transport, danger alerts and so on, but it is difficult to see how this just once daily reporting manual station can even assist with those either. Surely Met Office personnel inspecting this site must be aware of its inappropriate nature – the steep natural slope is one thing, the precipitous edge of the nearby quarry is very much unnatural.

As mentioned in my review of Buxton, Derbyshire only has 3 weather stations (one per every 500 square miles) every one is an unacceptable Class 5 with only one single unit reporting automatically – Coton-in-the-Elms which is very poor indeed and will be reviewed shortly. It is highly noticeable that whilst the Met Office was hyping spurious readings from the 11 stations (one per every 14 square miles) of Urban Heat Island compromised west London on May 1st, there were not discussing Central England weather stations. This disproportionate and geographically unrepresentative mix of locations is not driven by meteorological requirements so what is the reasoning behind it?