Goudhurst DCNN 5331 – alive and kicking but out of sight

51.07715 0.45954 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4S Installed 1/1/1934

Google maps automatically orient north/south. The shadows above are running north thus the sun is to the due south meaning the image was taken around midday. That little white dot below the red kite mark in the middle of a pinetum is Goudhurst weather station – in full shade. I decided to start this review following on from the Bodiam site as I struggled to understand the bizarre logic the Met Office operates to.

Firstly this site is not Class 4 and for the Met Office to suggest that is just plain nonsense. It sits in the north end of a large plantation forest in west Kent known as Bedgebury Pinetum. Weather stations in woodland clearings are not uncommon at all such as Barwhillanty House, High Beach and many others which are all designated Class 5. Why the Met Office feels Goudhurst should be considered otherwise is a complete mystery or just maybe this is one of mistaken identities.

Goudhurst station has not been relocated since original installation in 1934, however, it has been renamed being originally named just Bedgebury.

All copies of early manual readings returns head the site as Bedgebury and confirm the location. Quite when and why the name changed is unclear but the site has definitely always been in the same location. Records were digitalised and entered into CEDA archives from 1959 onwards. Readings appear to have been reliably taken until 1/2/2006 when readings stopped to then resume 12/8/2009 when the site was automated.

It is worth noting that the site was in the past better separated from trees (image from 2005) than today and it is possible the tree growth is outside the Met Offices control though I would expect a government agency to be able to influence the site’s area maintenance.

The extraordinarily strange aspect of this site though is the astonishing way the Met Office seems to deny its existence. The Met Office supplies “location specific, long term averages” as I have highlighted many times. Obviously Goudhurst is a long term site never relocated and apart from a small blip has a continuous record over the 1961 to 2000 thirty rolling climate averages. An almost perfect candidate – so this is how the Met Office portray its data.

Yes – rather than display Goudhurst’s data you are referred to the “Nearest Climate Station” Bodiam at 7 miles away which (as previously reviewed) was relocated from one site to another and CLOSED DOWN almost half a century ago. The vast majority of the entire world’s human population were born AFTER the Bodiam site died. Bizarrely the Met Office would prefer you saw their crudely manipulated and partial dross figures than the real world ones from Goudhurst – and they might even have been able to supply those missing numbers of air frost days! Even more absurdly there is another automatic Met office station even nearer at Frittenden just 5 miles away but even that one seemingly must not be mentioned.

What is the Met office trying to hide? The suggestion that it is easy to hide falsehoods behind each other – manipulated numbers from non existent sites seems impossible to refute.