Buntingford No 1 & No 2 DCNN 3580/3581 – Pack up the screen and move house.

BUNTINGFORD NO 1 51.95293 -0.02456 No CIMO Assessment Installed 1/1/2003 Closed **6/4/2014**

BUNTINGFORD No 2 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Installed **7/4/2014**

“To ensure consistency of measurements in the records, weather stations must meet strict criteria, in alignment with meteorological organisations across the world. This includes specific standards on the levels of grass-cover within the observations area, as well as having enough clear space for the weather station to be free from the influence of non-meteorological factors on the readings.”

This is a completely false claim. Weather stations regularly are installed wherever and whenever their owner happens to move house to.

Buntingford weather station was relocated for this simple moving house reason. The old location (Buntingford No 1) is now a housing development on the site of the owner’s old home. Rather like Portpatick , and others soon to be reviewed, there are many domestic back garden domestic sites that are relocated simply on the owner’s move of home. The meteorological considerations are quite irrelevant to the relocation as they almost certainly also were not considered on “adoption” of the original site by the Met Office. A volunteer agrees to take readings and has basically adequate equipment (but not an acceptable site) and that is all that seems to be deemed required. Class 5, with no regulated requirements for siting suitability, becomes the norm.

The 10 metre circled area shows the driveway well inside the “exclusion” area for extraneous heat sources. The headline image shows a parked vehicle and there is nothing to stop a reverse parked car’s exhaust directly heating the screen – after all the Met Office claims a reading ability to the 5th decimal place of a degree. Historic site images show the garden trampoline (noted at both sites) regularly moving around the site and also development of the area to the immediate north west and increasing shade from the growing trees and hedges.

If all this detailed observation of a private site seems intrusive then that is certainly not my fault as the reviewer. The Met Office is the responsible body who seem to find the unacceptable by any meteorological standing as acceptable and have complete disregard for any form of quality control. Whether or not it may be felt improper for me to suggest readings can easily be “enhanced” by unnatural “effects” to get one’s amateur site “on the map” with a record temperature reading is not the real concern. The simple fact is such sites have no credibility whatsoever by any scientific measurement. As was discussed in my review of the Scole “Experiment” the Met Office cannot claim any greater validity of its meteorological readings at such sites than that of the “Afterlife” experiments.

“the Scole Experiment lacked many of the standard controls necessary for scientific investigation. The group performed their séances in a private home rather than a controlled laboratory, and there was no way to rule out the possibility of trickery. The mediums were able to choose their own séance room and control who was allowed to attend the sessions. This made it difficult for outside researchers to verify the authenticity of the phenomena.”

Until such time as the Met Office accepts independent scrutiny of an agreed set of premier quality sites in strictly controlled environments, then they will not hold any scientific credibility with these back garden sites.