From Tallbloke’s Talkshop

By Ray Sanders

Good friend of the “Surface Stations Project” Dr. Eric Huxter has extensively researched the relationship between weather station siting CIMO classifications and modern temperature reading instruments recording unnatural “Spikes“. He has developed this theme over many sites and raised particular concern over the two neighbouring Met Office stations in the Vale of Evesham – Pershore and Pershore College . I would like to further expand upon his work with a recent observation relative to neighbouring Private Weather Stations (PWS) and how this demonstrates there are almost certainly unnatural conditions affecting the Pershore Automatic site.

The headline image yet again shows the site named “Pershore ” recording the UK highest “extreme” of 14.9°C for the 23rd October. This daily highest for Pershore is quite common. Below are the hourly read outs from weatherobs.com covering the period.

The headline image named “Pershore” has a hyperlink to a site named “Throckmorton”. This is in fact the exact same aviation site formerly known as RAF Throckmorton. The Met Office uniquely uses this “Throckmorton” name for this exercise, with everywhere else in their archives using the Pershore name. No reason is given for this confusing variation. I shall use “Pershore/Throckmorton” for clarity.

Under 6 km from the Pershore/Throckmorton aviation site is the Central England Temperature Series recording station of “Pershore College” with its data also available as below..

The Met Office makes a very big play of its ability to provide estimates for sites when readings are missing by using nearby “Well correlated” sites to fill in gaps……that some of these gaps well exceed 50 years duration rather stretches their credibility into the land of make believe and beyond. Indeed, even when nearby “well correlated” sites show enormous differences, these differences are frequently ignored if their readings contradict the “preferred” outcome. This was clearly demonstrated by the Royal Meteorological Society’s dismissal of the 2003 national highest record at Class 4 (reality Class 5) Faversham site being almost 4°C higher than nearby Class 1 (my assessment) Wye station. The Met Office simply ignored all the real evidence from acknowledged experts in the field. “Well correlated” only seems to apply when it suits the Met Office’s agenda.

This “agenda” seems to also be satisfied by Pershore/Throckmorton in that it regularly delivers those seemingly ever so important “daily extremes” regardless of whatever its near neighbours (and there are lots of them) may suggest. As well as the weatherobs for the College CET site above, below are the daily graphs for local PWS to the west, north and east of Pershore/Thockmorton with the College site to the south.

Firstly “Green Street Weather” 6.5 miles to the west.

“White Ladies Weatherwatcher” 6 miles to the north northwest.

Freyr 7 miles to east southeast.

And here is a wide area map to aid location from the Met Office WOW site. The Pershore highlighted by the blue dot is the College site, with the traditional “A Frame” layout of RAF Throckmorton seen to the north east.

A brief tabulation of all the site’s on the hour readings around the daily maximum period are very illuminating. {n.b. times rendered to GMT, weatherobs records in GMT but WOW as BST}

Station…………………………………….11:00GMT……………………12:00…………………………..13:00

Pershore/Throckmorton…………..11.3°C……………………….14.0°C………………………….11.9°C

Pershore College………………………11.1°C………………………..12.8°C………………………….12.2°C

Green Street……………………………..11.8°C………………………..13.4°C………………………….10.7°C

White Ladies…………………………….11.0°C………………………..13.3°C………………………….11.4°C

Freyr…………………………………………11.1°C………………………..13.0°C………………………….12.5°C

What is quite apparent from the above “on the hour” readings is that whilst all sites were in very close agreement at 11:00GMT (4 out of the 5 within 0.3°C) a significant variance opened up at the 12:00 reading. The two neighbouring Met Office sites showed a discrepancy of 0.2 °C widening to 1.2°C in just 1 hour to 12:00 and every PWS recorded a lot lower than Pershore/Throckmorton.

The latter point of the PWS all recording cooler is a very important one to note. A general criticism of PWS is that they are frequently poorly sited in domestic gardens and prone to over recording temperatures i.e. they “run hot” but none of these are demonstrating that potential issue. Another notable point is the much quicker temperature decline at the aviation site.

Pershore/Throckmorton went on to record the maximum reading of 14.9°C for the day, a remarkably high “spike” relative to the others and well over a degree celsius higher than noted as daily peaks for any of the surrounding PWS.

Since starting this post another day’s daily extremes has been posted and, yet again, our star performer is on stage.

Clearly, as Dr Huxter has extensively detailed in his posts, there are compromising issues with the Pershore/Throckmorton site that are elevating this site’s readings. Rather than fill up this post with more graphs I will allow readers to examine the data from the above links – the same pattern is indicated for the following day.

I would also like to ask if any readers in the vicinity of the Vale of Evesham or likely to be travelling that way could assist me and the project by supplying additional site photography. The station is literally alongside the public road named “Long Lane” and “should” be readily visible at the end of the NW/SW runway from the little lay-by there. The image below is from Google Streetview of May 2011.

However the most recent image of the same time of year (May) in 2024 from the exact same spot looks remarkably different.

I suspect one of the possible reasons for this site running “hotter” than its near neighbours may be from a significant deterioration of its immediate surroundings. Any imagery to confirm the current position would be most welcome – my email address is visible here in this post for anyone to contact me.

In conclusion Dr Huxter is demonstrating multiple discrepancies with this site and I feel I have also produced further straight forward circumstantial evidence that something is wrong. {Hopefully readers may be able to provide more.} The most remarkable problem, though, is that the Met Office are deaf to our inquiries, all of which supports my view that the Met Office are not overly concerned with producing wholly accurate data providing whatever they can produce supports an agenda rather than impartial science. They could easily prove me wrong if I am, but they seem unwilling to engage and even try.