Bognor Regis DCNN 5411 – A demonstration of the arts of wasting taxpayer’s money and virtue signalling.

50.78186 -0.67662 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4S Installed 24/7/1897

Bognor Regis Weather Station was installed by the Bognor Regis Climatological Society in 1897 at its present extremely ornate site. The society used its own stationery reporting forms and ran independently of the Met Office for many years with funding support from the local town council. One of the many “municipal” run sites established at resorts to show off civic pride and highlight favourable weather conditions to attract tourists.

This site was never going to meet the demands of wider area climate reporting even on original construction but neither was it intended to. It was always in an (albeit modest) built up area even in the 19th century. When the motor car arrived on the scene, its seafront location between the busy roads of Waterloo Square leading to the esplanade and pier, rendered it in the middle of a heat retaining island. It is now rated as the second lowest Class 4 and obviously subject to shade as shown below.

Clearly this is very much a non standard enclosure with railings, hedging, stone walling, paving and even palm trees surrounding it. It is, however, unquestionably well cared for and ostensibly well maintained – or is it? For reference, here is a standard of those early days diligence and reporting

The purpose of a weather station is to record details of weather measurements such as air and ground temperature, air pressure, precipitation etc. and all have to be noted at specific times. A station not being read is, in fact, the same as one that simply does not exist – non reading or even only partial reading renders the site data worthless. This simple notion seems to be lost on those in modern day Bognor but extrapolations of the effectively worthless readings seem to preoccupy them very much.

In the last archived year, 2023 only 239 attempts were made to take the observations – the data below is from the Met Office under Freedom of Information Request. Note how the Met Office still managed to contrive an annual mean daily air temperature from only 65% of the required data. {Yes Amersham only managed 72 readings}

2022 indicated an even worse reading frequency at just 221 attempts – staggeringly only 17 attempt were made at Amersham – perhaps the electricity sub-station was too daunting an area to approach.

2021 was slightly better but still only 266 days readings

I stopped researching at 2020 (pre FOI supplied numbers) when I found just 155 satisfactory days readings. Clearly this is a long term very poorly read site rendering any production of mean data a totally futile exercise. On this basis alone the expenditure on the maintenance of this site is a pointless waste of money other than possibly as a Victorian tourist feature. The original members of the Bognor Climatological Society have been seriously let down by their successors. Viewing those early days archived readings showed 100% infallibility.

There are, however, further instances of pointless expense. The local Bognor Regis Town Council bears responsibility for the site and promotes it on their website (more expense loading another page) that is clearly reporting a falsehood.

“The Town Council employ two part-time observers to undertake the readings according to a set rota, this is carried out daily 365 days per year.” Really? No! That is demonstrably just not true. Assuming “employ” equates to paid work then the Town council is clearly wasting money providing unusable data.

The situation becomes more surreal. In 2019, presumably based on data from a weather station in a terrible and inappropriate location for climate reporting that seemingly few people can even be bothered about actually taking observations from, the Town council declared a “Climate Emergency“. {paid for yet more web page services et alia}

Studying the above page and all the multiple links and “council funded initiatives” indicates staggering levels of virtue signalling. Drastic lifestyle changes and modifications to their society are demanded on the basis of numbers from a site whose basic function (supplying real world useable data) was not even achieved. Even the header claim of “sunniest” is bogus – nobody was taking the measurements!

This Bognor example is typical of very many sites I have highlighted many nearby such as Eastbourne , Amersham, Mickleham and many others. Even the very close Hayling Island site missed almost 100 days readings in 2023.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that science, real data and honest representation is effectively non-existent in this whole Met Office “Climate Change” arena which has been taken over as a quasi religious process. The Met Office, as ever, is producing long term averages from sites not even recording worthwhile data in addition to sites that do not even exist. Surely this nonsense has to be stopped.

I will forward this report to Bognor Town Council requesting their views.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/04/17/bognor-regis-dcnn-5411-a-demonstration-of-the-arts-of-wasting-taxpayers-money-and-virtue-signalling/