Met Office’s Risible Claim of “Warmest” May Points to Massive Urban Heat Corruptions in Database
The Met Office’s ridiculous claim that the U.K. had experienced its hottest ever May and spring provides further devastating proof that its temperature measuring operation is hopelessly corrupted by unnatural urban heat distortions.
Maximum temperature in the three-month spring, likely to be set during the day, was only the fifth highest since 2011, but the minimum figure was an astonishing 11% higher than any previously recorded figure.
One known feature of urban heat is that human-built structures release considerable warmth during the night and can warm cities and towns by surprisingly large amounts. The European weather service Copernicus has suggested that urban night temperatures can be up to 10°C higher than surrounding rural areas.
As we have seen in recent editions, the Met Office’s 380 U.K. station network is unfit for the purpose of providing an accurate air temperature average. This is because nearly eight out of 10 of the stations are so poorly sited that they attract ‘uncertainties’ set by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) of between 2-5°C.
Nearly one third of the stations are rated Class 5, a junk rating where compromising structures could add an ‘uncertainty ‘of 5°C. The block illustration below shows the station range between Classes 1-5. Only stations in Class 1 measure surrounding air temperatures without any fear of unnatural corruptions, but they account for only 6.3% of the total.
Concerns about the Met Office figures rose considerably when the Daily Sceptic published the above illustration in March.
The investigative science journalist Paul Homewood has been covering the Met Office and its data for many years. Writing this week in the Conservative Woman he observed:
The Met Office were desperate to keep this scandal secret, before being forced to release it after an FOI [Freedom of Information] from the Daily Sceptic. The WMO clearly states that Class 3, 4 and 5 sites should not be used for climatological purposes, but that is exactly what the Met Office does.
Urban heat corruptions have been the subject of considerable recent scientific interest. The United States station network run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been subjected to similar criticism as the Met Office.
A recent decade-long inquiry by the meteorologist Anthony Watts found that 96% of measuring devices failed to meet acceptable and “uncorruptible placement” criteria by NOAA’s own published standards.
State-run meteorological operations often claim that their data are ‘homogenised’, in other words adjusted, to take account of unnatural corruptions. But there is much evidence, not least that provided by the Met Office’s May and spring figures, to suggest the process is ineffective in presenting a more accurate air temperature.
In the past the Daily Sceptic has featured the work of two distinguished atmospheric scientists Dr. Roy Spencer and Professor John Christy who have attempted to calculate the extent of urban heat corruption in the published record. In a ground-breaking paper produced last year they found that about 22% of the U.S. warming trend in the summer record between 1880-2015 was caused by localised urban heat. Even more surprising, they found that the ‘homogenised’ figures, far from correcting for the unnatural urban heat, actually increased it.
The scientists also found that in the areas with the most concentrated urban populations, the local urban heat warming was a startling 57% of the reported homogenised trend.
There is little doubt that the Met Office figures, which are used to claim ‘records’ with a precision of one hundredth of a degree centigrade, are badly corrupted. The highest temperature recorded last month was at Chertsey with a suggested 27°C. Shown below is the site of the Chertsey station.
The site is near a pumping operation and is Class 3, which means there are ‘uncertainties’ of 1°C. But the class designation is thought to pre-date the installation of a solar farm right next to the measuring device. Solar panels generate large amounts of heat which can radically alter the nearby air temperature.
In a paper published in a Nature journal, scientists found that temperatures over a solar plant, “were regularly 3-4°C warmer than wildlands at night”.
Since March, the Met Office has failed to return calls from the Daily Sceptic. It has made no public statement about the growing public and social media cynicism about its Net Zero promoting figures. Mainstream media have ignored the escalating scientific scandal and continued to publish the figures without question. The general public has been misled about rising temperature trends by notably corrupted information. On a wider front, the Daily Sceptic has reported on the many retrospective adjustments adding warming in the recent past to global datasets.
As one blogger recently noted, these datasets have more fiddles than the store cupboard at the Royal Philharmonic. In the U.K., the Met Office could easily set up a reliable temperature measuring operation by adding a few more stations to its Class 1 pristine collection.
The stations would need to be geographically dispersed and regularly assessed to make sure they are kept away from all unnatural heat corruption.
Of course, there would have to be a pause to gain comparative annual measurements, although it would immediately start providing accurate air temperatures alongside the existing network.
Needless to say, such a project seems unlikely when there is vital political Net Zero fearmongering to be undertaken.
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