Otterbourne Water Works DCNN 5654 – Industrial site location at its finest.

However one considers the supply of fresh potable water to properties in the UK, it is definitely an industrial process on a very large scale. The per capita average water consumption is approximately 140 litres per day and there are close to 70 million of us in the UK. Water companies have historically had tens of thousands of rain gauges around the country as hydrology is a primary interest. Being equipped to take meteorological readings makes water companies valuable to the Met Office as an information source and inevitably lots of weather stations developed around the existing systems’s reporting infrastructure – but you can take things a bit too far.

51.00889 -1.33531 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed as Rain Gauge 1/1/1892 Manual Temperature readings from 1/4/1979 Automatic readings from 7/10/2010.

When researching weather stations it is worth pointing out that the set up dates the Met Office quotes are from whenever the site first exists whatever its function may have been. Whilst many sites seem to have exceptionally long history they were nearly all originally just rain gauge sites that often long predated the Met Office. Knowing precipitation and water availability was actually more important than recording the temperature in days when survival was more than just a basic instinct. In the case of Otterbourne though installed originally in 1892, its temperature record only started in 1979 and was remarkably “patchy” at that. Here is just a tiny example from the archive notes of the hundreds that demonstrate how I define “patchy”.

“my Boss forgot to go!!!!” sums up two important issues. Firstly taking readings seemed to be somewhat low priority but secondly that some archivist felt it important to spend no doubt a long time transcribing issues like this into a digital archive. Quite astonishing on both counts but at least it created work to do. The very poor observations standard led to the automation of the site from 2010.

Addressing the site itself indicates all the problems of the numerous water (and also sewage) treatment plant sites that the Met Office operates. These are industrial plants and in no way represent the real world. The Met Office tape measure standard dictates this is a Class 4 site which, with a +/- 2 degree uncertainty added due to siting, renders the site unreliable for any historic temperature reconstruction. Clearly the screen is effectively in a walled garden of wholly unnatural construction surrounded by buildings, treatment tanks, roadways and virtually no natural vegetation other than probably the square metre the screen stands above. If this were fully certified and calibrated equipment but under private ownership any readings would be ruled out as unacceptable by the Met Office themselves. That it comes under their jurisdiction so they can authorise them is absurd.

That does not stop the Met Office from using its readings (of which only the last 14 years are frequent enough to have any semblance of meaning) to be used in compiling Location Specific Long Term Averages for inevitably non existent locations. With almost boring predictability the Met Office presents this list of the “undead”.

Martyr Worthy closed 2002, Southampton, Mayflower Park closed in 2000 and Solent closed in 2015. At least Middle Wallop (Class 4 Heliport and semi circular car parking Stevenson Screen island) and Boscombe Down (Class 5 aviation site with doubled up data) are still alive/open but one does wonder why anyone would refer to such distant sites.

Despite this poor siting in a completely unnatural location the Met Office are perfectly happy proclaiming the day’s “Extremes” from here. No doubt if someone covertly wafted a hot air blower over the screen on a hot day and produced a new national record it would duly be verified as acceptable. That is just plain wrong.