Portpatrick, Craigenlee Croft DCNN 6805 – and the Met Office expects to be taken seriously? PLUS an open CHALLENGE!

54.86294 -5.07543 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 (WRONG) Installed 1/4/2105

When Tim Channon originated the Surface Stations Project in 2012 he initially reviewed the “Synoptic” stations before moving onto a few of the other “Climate” reporting stations. Whilst the former are sophisticated sites with a wide suite of instrumentation the latter are much more basic units reporting primarily just temperatures, pressure,humidity and precipitation. In reviewing Cavendish he made a very salient point regarding these that I feel is important to repeat:

“Note please: this site will be owned and operated by a private individual, a volunteer who has done this year in and year out, within the land space that he has. Keep any criticism for the Met Office and professionals who fail to make the nature of sites they use very clear!”

The Met Office sanctions many “amateur” sites for climate reporting purposes and it is they who should be taken to task for the use of totally unacceptable sites to contribute to the national historic temperature record. My criticisms are thus aimed at the Met Office not the site owners and operators.

This Portpatrick site was installed in 2015 therefore after WMO CIMO classifications were fully understood and operational. For my part I find it very strange why manually recording stations like this Craigenlee Croft site are still being introduced when automation makes the whole data collection system much simpler. Data availability by the minute, as demonstrated in my (not Tim’s) review of Cavendish, has much greater forecasting benefit – even if the 5th decimal part of a degree reading is quite risible. This faux accuracy point rather makes siting detail important – at the falsely claimed accuracy level the tiniest waft of, in reality undetectable, warm air would be registered. So here is the Streetview image of the owner’s home, extensive gravel driveway, and unenclosed Stevenson Screen.

I personally would like to discuss with the Met Office site inspector who classified this as Class 4 simply to enlighten them of what the CIMO regulations actually state – they clearly have not read them.

To go through the details for uniformity of approach, below are the 3 and 10 metres radius circled areas.

is it just me or is it difficult to understand how the gravel driveway and parked cars within exclusion zones are not noticeable? It is easy to envisage a regular occurrence of a car reverse parked with its exhaust pipe under 10 feet from the unenclosed screen – hot day, run the engine for a while to run the air-con, cold day run the engine to defrost the wind screen. Do not forget that Met Office staff were willing to put in writing that their PRTs register to the 5th decimal place. As a former Met Office manager put it ” A perfect example of this was the Met Office site where temperatures were recorded to 4 or 5 decimal places, giving the readings the sense of extreme accuracy, whereas they just showed the stupidity of the observer. “

The nearby house wall to the north with the trees to the south west will all cause various shading effects. The street view image shows the vegetation around the screen well above regulation heights . Being unenclosed in a domestic rear garden means that any normal life activities can intervene. This site is probably worse than the absurdly compromised Derrylin site. Barbecue, garden rubbish fire, hanging laundry out to dry anything and everything goes………….So you think this is not a good site maybe?

This is Portpatrick:Southcliff which ran from 1/7/2000 to 31/11/2014 and was probably the same amateur meteorologist’s home who simply moved house and the weather station went with them – actually a common experience as I will highlight in future reviews. Yes really Met office weather stations move when their owners move house.

How did the former site rank on CIMO regulations? Judge for yourself from this 2009 image.

I find it indisputable that both sites were/are class 5 Junk by WMO standards. Why does the Met office use such low grade inaccurate and unreliable sites? Consider this from their “Location Specific, Long Term Climate Averages”

The Met Office claims to use data from “well correlated” and “nearby” stations to form “climate averages” for closed stations but then fails to record which sites they actually used – or rather it refuses to divulge the information on the grounds it is not recorded. Or is it the case that they do not want the public to “infer” that the climate averages for Lough Cowey, County Down, Northern Ireland (closed 2008) might have its ongoing figures derived from various back gardens in Dumfries and Galloway?

So finally here is my open challenge to the Met Office – FACT: You are using readings from a back garden in Scotland to fabricate data for a closed site in Northern Ireland. Prove me wrong.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/05/11/portpatrick-craigenlee-croft-dcnn-6805-and-the-met-office-expects-to-be-taken-seriously-plus-an-open-challenge/