Faskally DCNN1467 – Appallingly bad site, barely ever read, irregular conversions and even Met Office rated “Unsatisfactory” – a typical site then!

56-71794 -3.76969 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Temperature records from 1/12/1953

Faskally weather station is in Perthshire close to the banks of the River Tummel and also to the offices of the Marine Scotland Freshwater Fisheries Laboratories. In his seminal trilogy work of “Titus Groan”, Mervyn Peake described the character “Fuschia” as “gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful?” I think this rather aptly describes Faskally, it is really not very good as it is but could so very easily have been an almost perfect site.

Faskally is rated as Class 5 simply because it is heavily shaded – no other reason. The surrounding area is quite flat and open, the area appears to have always been pasture, (certainly throughout the era of aerial imagery going back to the 1980s) and with the laboratories nearby there are plenty of skilled observers available. The Surface Stations Project aim is solely to review what exists, has existed and the data quality. In this case, however, I shall briefly deviate and ask the obvious question – why didn’t the Met Office just move it a bit as shown in the option below? For the effort of a 100 metre move a very poor site becomes all but perfection as below.

To further confirm the point here is the Ordnance survey sheet of the area indicating no sloping issues or unnatural effects anywhere – Class 1 in a matter of hours at surely minimal expense.

Sadly this was seemingly beyond the wit of the Met Office who were probably not overly concerned with the long term accuracy of “Climate Averages” and trying to bend data to “prove” Anthropogenic Global Warming back in the 1950’s when installing Faskally. This below, basking in the shade and wind shelter, is what has ensued over the last seventy years. A very attractive, almost idyllic site but really not fully fit for the purpose of recording long term climate averages.

Somewhat ironically the Met Office presents this site for the purposes of “Education”

The site representation itself may have deteriorated over the years as the surrounding trees grew but simultaneously the observations standard declined much more rapidly. Back in the 20th century this site had a good readings record. In recent times though basic observation frequency (like so many other sites) has fallen off a cliff. I started checking from 2016 when just 248 days readings of both tmax and tmin were taken. That is appalling bad and pretty much worthless for any aspect of climate reporting. I was rather shocked to discover that it was actually quite a good recent year. In 2017 the effort to derive a daily mean was only successfully completed on 143 day’s attempts (under 40%) . Checking more years and getting yet more poor results (2108 was just 271 etc .,etc) I remembered that under FOI in August 2024 the Met Office had supplied me with a list of their weather stations by their own rating standard.

Faskally was officially rated as “Unsatisfactory” and although it only states on the grounds of “assessment of screen temperatures on departure” I do wonder if the terrible observations record was taken into account.

To summarise this current site, it is basically complete junk. That any of its data is even worth archiving seems yet more of a pointless exercise. Nonetheless I did wonder if Faskally’s older data was of any merit – and this brought up seem truly bizarre findings. Referring back to Swanage and the conversion factors associated with readings taken in Fahrenheit to Celsius demonstrated the rounding principles used. It seems, however, that was not always adhered to. Faskally recorded in the same way as Swanage to the nearest degree Fahrenheit representing 0.55°C – but it does not appear all data transcribers held to that view!

How is it that now 33°F at Faskally is made to be only 0.5°C whilst at Swanage it was 0.6°C? How is it that 31°F at Faskally is -0.5C but at Swanage it is -0.6°C. There are lots more similar discrepancies such as 2.7°C never appears at Swanage but regularly does at Faskally.

This makes a complete mockery of Met Office accuracy claims. I personally find it almost comedic for an organisation to claim “Climate Averages” to the second decimal place of degree celsius when they cannot even consistently convert numbers from one historic recording scale to another. The difference between 31°F and 33°F is optionally 1°C or 1.2°C dependent on where it was recorded? YCMIU but then again it appears the Met Office are becoming remarkably good at just MIU.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/06/21/faskally-dcnn1467-appallingly-bad-site-barely-ever-read-irregular-conversions-and-even-met-office-rated-unsatisfactory-a-typical-site-then/