Banagher, Caugh Hill DCNN 9042 – Gross negligence.

54.88553 -6.96646 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Installed 1/1/1969

Banagher is one of the many weather stations located at water treatment works such as Caugh Hill that even offers guided tours of their very modern facilities. The original readings and communication of them to the Met Office was by staff at the water works themselves – a standard practise in such situations. From 9/12/2009 the manual reporting was replaced by an automatic unit thereby obviating the need for daily visits to the screen. And therein started the problems.

One advantage of manually reporting stations is that they are (should be) visited by a human being on a daily basis to take readings. A daily observer visit will also enable observation of the site and any conscientious observer would note anything detrimental and hopefully ensure remedial action taken. A dirty screen absorbing excess solar radiation would hopefully be cleaned, a screen door inadvertently left open would be closed the next day and so on. Caugh Hill was automated 9/12/2009 so from then on human site visits are far less frequent and any detrimental meteorological issues often go unseen.

In the case of Caugh Hill the immediate history prior to automation was not good. In 2009 there were 186 missing readings, in 2008 – 83 days readings were not correctly made. This poor reading frequency renders data from such sites completely meaningless for climate reporting purposes, but of course the Met Office always has a work around for lack of data by simply homogenising an “average” and filling in the blanks with “numbers” of some sort. Perhaps the oddest thing about such poor readings records in this case was that taking them was as much relevant to the site owners (the water company) as it is to the Met office – very oddly lax on the part of paid employees.

What becomes more ridiculous is the way that this site is treated as a dumping ground for supplies to the water works. The headline image is the latest aerial view from Google indicating large “rounds” of supplies to the water works completely enclosing the site from the east and south. This is not unusual and historic imagery has numerous views of materials surrounding and compromising the site since automation such as below from 2020.

Whilst this sort of problem will unquestionably distort readings, it is possibly not such a major issue with less “important” stations such as Banagher which really are poor sites even before such abuse. The bigger problem relates to higher profile sites such as East Malling which is claimed to be Class 1. The automation of readings and absence of a daily observer means that huge encroachments on site quality go unnoticed and the Met Office clearly does not seem to be overly concerned. I advised them on the 4th February 2025 of the encroachment of greenhouses degrading the East Malling site, however, they declared no concerns whatsoever and despite my asking they reassess their opinion (in light of evidence supplied on the 11th February) they have not responded.

In summary Banagher, Caugh Hill is a poor site that is being badly neglected and cannot supply reliable data. That this is becoming the norm for so many sites is unacceptable.