East Bergholt DCNN3141 – Another weather station to add to the 103 Missing Met Office mystery?

51.95958 1.02317 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1952 Temperature records from 1/1/1959 – claimed current but no records from 20/3/2020.

The current list of operational Met Office Climate and Synoptic weather stations includes East Bergholt as below {n.b. this list is so up to date that it includes stations opened as recently as May 2024 such as Whitesands}

So it is clearly an operational weather station…….yes? Well maybe, maybe not!

The CEDA archive shows East Bergholt as “current” which reinforces its inclusion in the list of “all” those weather stations. Further proof comes from the Met office’s site grading list of stations I obtained under FOI from August 2024 when it was assessed as “Excellent”

Three official sources show this as an operational site. Google Artificial intelligence goes even further with the following contributions.

It goes on, under further interrogation, to give precise figures and a forecast.

This second claim of current readings is quite remarkable given that the “East Bergholt weather station” is/was a manual reporting climate station reporting once daily only and with no anemometer. It would be impossible for it to report such details in real time. Artificial Intelligence really does not have a rational brain.

As I have stated many times before, almost everyone just accepts all this “data” as true, it is from a UK government agency after all, why would any sane person dispute any of this? East Bergholt is a current Met office operational weather station – “It’s a no brainer”

The only problem with all this is that……....it has not been operational at all in over 4 years. Welcome to the birth of a Zombie and an “Excellent” one at that.

This “Constable Country” weather station is located near Flatford Mill and operated by the Field Studies Council. Where FSC sites are still manual and not automated, to put it bluntly, the readings record rank as atrociously bad. Readings are in many cases so sporadic that if not automated the sites end up being closed down such as at Malham Tarn. The Met Office are fully aware of this problem though seem unable to remedy the problem. When Talkshop associate, Dave Woolcock, queried the irregularity of readings from Mickleham this was his reply:

“Good Morning Dave,

Looking at Mickleham it is a Field Studies Council site.

This means that it has a high turnover of staff usually with a new observer each year. They tend to need to have one committed member of staff to keep engagement going, even if they are the supervisor not necessarily taking the readings. When they move on engagement drops off sharply. I would guess that is what happened at this site.
Over the last 10 years or so, there has been a general drop off in observations from all of our FSC sites. We get peaks when a new person starts and is enthused, then it drops off again as they get busy with other duties.

I hope that helps answering your query.

Kind regards,

Marc

Weather Desk

Met Office  FitzRoy Road  Exeter  Devon  EX1 3PB  United Kingdom

As Dave wryly observed at the time “Feckless modern students then !”

The FSC are responsible for a large number of climate reporting sites and not only is the lack of readings a concern, the accuracy of those that are manually taken is highly questionable. Though not overly complex, there are skills required in taking readings accurately that require training. Casual, uncommitted observers can readily make mistakes. This Facebook video shows the (very good) observer at Floors Castle explaining the process. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1893457610801591

The latter years readings at East Bergholt were

1. 2020 Of 79 days only 56 viable readings taken to derive a daily average (i.e. both t.max and t.min) 70%
2. 2019 296 days viable readings just 81%
3. 2018 257 days viable readings just 70%

Whether or not this unreliability in fulfilling the sole purpose of a weather station in producing readings was the cause of this site’s demise is not clear. Usefully, though, East Bergholt did have records from 1/1/1959 to 20/3/2020 covering almost the entirety of the 60 year climate averaging period from 1960 to 2020 that the Met Office highlight on its 30 year rolling climate averages page now renamed Location Specific Long Term Averages. For reasons only fully known to the cabal of anonymous peer reviewers who oversee Met Office procedures, this is how East Bergholt’s figures are (not) portrayed.

What logic is there in referring to Levington which is 11 miles away, only opened in 1977 and closed in 1996? Is a site that was only open for 19 of those 60 years and requiring a total of 41 years of numerical fabrication (with 17 of those even prior to its existence) somehow superior to a site that was actually open with readings for ALL of those 60 years?

What is the attraction that makes Walton-on-the-Naze some 14 miles distant, similarly as long closed as Levington and again in need of a computer modelled mathematical conjuring trick to fabricate numbers that makes it so much more “credible” than East Bergholt?

I cannot think of any real world claimed “scientific approach” that opts to use artificially derived numbers in preference to hard real world numbers readily available. Furthermore, can anyone give credibility to an organisation that, having opted to use fabricated numbers in lieu of actual readings, then REFUSES to provide the (alleged) real world data from which those fabricated numbers were derived on the grounds that it has not retained them……………………the dog ate my homework!

East Bergholt did actually die over 4 years ago despite all the above claims from official and derived sources claiming otherwise. However, its somewhat partial (and likely inaccurate data) will have been used (despite Met Office refusals to acknowledge) in the compilation of other Zombie stations. The ongoing likelihood is that when the next 30 year set of rolling climate averages are published to 2030, then East Bergholt will appear on them. Such weather stations never die when the Met Office finds them “useful” in their data misrepresentation.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/05/24/east-bergholt-dcnn3141-another-weather-station-to-add-to-the-103-missing-met-office-mystery/