Manby WMO 03395 – A weather station or a figment of the imagination?

Met Office supplied coordinates 53.36138  0.09696(incorrect.) No CIMO Assessment. Claims is currently operational but………

Manby weather station was installed in 1946 close to the end of the runway at RAF Manby. The RAF ceased operations there in 1974 and the station was relocated and came under the auspices of the Lindsey Marsh Drainage board. Water Authorities are usually only concerned with the rain gauge aspects or weather reporting so from 1974 onwards there were no temperature records taken. The story should have ended over half a century ago but this is the Met Office we are reviewing here.

Firstly is this site actually closed down for temperature readings? A glance at the CEDA Archive suggests it is still operational.

The “station end date” clearly states that it is “current”. Further more the link to available data reads as below

The letter codes at the end indicate what readings are taken i.e. DR/Daily Rain, DT/Daily Temperature etc and again it is shown as “Current”

Interrogating the Weather Observations Website for Manby helpfully brings up its location so it is there after all……surely?

Furthermore when I first started this reviewing process, the Met Office supplied me under Freedom of Information request with a list of all their “Climate Averages” reporting stations and that clearly showed Manby was “open”.

So why persist down this silly line of investigation – I must be wrong in thinking it is long closed or the people who told me it was long closed must be wrong. After all the Met Office could not be wrong because here is the data to prove it is still operational.

There we have it, the nearest “Climate Station” to my search request of Manby is indeed…..Manby. The Met Office has detailed figures (impressively to the second decimal place from measurements only recorded to the first decimal place) that run for 30 year averaged periods from 1960 to 2020 and ongoing. Nobody could possibly make up 51 years worth of readings. Who of sane, rational mind would dig any deeper as there would be no point or is there?

Okay, so who told me this site was closed down over half a century ago? Well the Met Office of course – who else would? Going back to that WOW site and looking for the data shows you

Seeing this I contacted the Met Office and they confirmed closure. So then I looked back at the archived readings and saw this.

Things finally became clearer, the site is still open but only as a rain gauge – no Stevenson screen was installed at the new location when the airfield closed down, so it is still “open” but any temperature reading is “closed” . Temperature data ended 31/5/1974 – “end data” is somewhat final or maybe not.

The coordinates supplied by the Met Office for this site only link to the office address of the Lindsey Drainage board and there certainly is no compound or screen possible there.

For temperature readings Manby is as dead as the famous bird in the Monty Python dead parrot sketch and almost as old. Thus the Met Office really does feel it is acceptable to be fabricating numbers for over half a century with the pretence that the site exists. Perhaps they should read this web page on tackling climate misinformation.

https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/tackling-climate-misinformation

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/03/25/manby-wmo-03395-a-weather-station-or-a-figment-of-the-imagination/