Hartpury College DCNN 4938 – Mean Measurement Mayhem.

51.90437 -2.31251 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 4 Installed 1/11/1998

Hartpury College is a large multi discipline campus that majors on agriculture, veterinary, equestrian and related subjects. Situated close to Gloucester it looks to have one of the most attractive and well equipped campuses of any educational establishment in the country.

Such an emphasis on outdoors related industries naturally led to the installation of a weather station with observations manually taken by a mixture of staff and students. Clearly a site where an understanding of meteorology is a highly relevant part of most curricula. Sadly, weather recording does not seem to be as high on the agenda as it should be………

Firstly the site is rated Class 4 as it is largely surrounded by shrubbery and changeable vegetation typical of agricultural college sites. Shading is not a highlighted issue by the Met Office as the larger trees are to the north and unlikely to cause that problem. Class 4 seems most appropriate, but this does not appear to be a “bad” site and certainly fit for its intended purpose of local conditions reporting.

Problems, however, become noticeable when studying the site’s archived records . There are multiple notes under “Remarks” relating to lack of observations and loss of data. Under Freedom of Information request I obtained mean daily average temperatures for all manual and automatic Met Office weather stations in England for the years 2021, 2022 and 2023. In addition to these (presumably arithmetic) “means”, the number of “observation days” was supplied. For automatic stations these obs days are nearly always 365 with a few sites occasionally missing a few days presumably due to technical issues. For manually reporting stations the number of obs days was entirely dependent on the local observers actually attending. For these latter stations the total obs days were hugely variable as I highlighted in the case of Mickleham. Some sites have abysmal records such as Amersham Field Centre which only managed 149 obs days over the entire 3 year (1,095 day) period.

Hartpury College should have been a good example of high reading frequency given the subjects relevance – it was not. The list below is the start of those manually reporting stations for 2021.

The most notable part of Hartpury’s data for 2021, compared to the others, is not only its poor reporting numbers – just 85 out of 365 – but that the Met Office still saw fit to derive an annual mean from such partial data. Bizarre as this fulfillment of a function was (and regardless of how completely ridiculous the derived figure must inevitably be) it produced the UK highest annual daily mean at 13.7°C for 2021……and the Met Office recorded and subsequently released the data.

And the following year a similar outcome. Just 97 readings and the UK hot spot yet again this time at 14.4°C.

Did nobody at the Met Office consider that this highest UK recorded annual daily mean might not be correct? For 2023 the situation changed – more readings, presumably over different periods produced a completely different result.

I contend that if manual weather stations fail to record on an adequate number of days per year then the limited data that is produced should be disregarded in its entirety. Clearly as demonstrated above partial figures will only produce absurd and completely irrelevant data. Hartpury College weather station, for whatever reasons, is somewhat surprisingly consistently failing to meet acceptable reporting standards. In the absence of any improvement its readings should be expunged from archives where it has previously failed to meet requirements. This represents poor standards and somewhat bizarre statistical (mis)representation from the Met Office and really does need to stop..