Liscombe WMO03710 – An introduction to McDonalds syndrome – I’m not “lovin it.”

51.08682 -3.60907 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1993

Liscombe is one of only two weather stations within the Exmoor National Park in Somerset. The other is the manual site at much abused and only intermittently read Nettlecombe. Liscombe is a fully and expensively equipped World Meteorological Organisation reporting site that is very far from any urbanisation effects. It should be a good location to represent the nearly 700 square kilometres of the National Park, but unfortunately it is a poor “Class 4 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 2 °C)” Is this by accident or design? Introducing a possible problem – “Mcdonalds syndrome”

I have come across numerous exampIes of such highly equipped sites that have been allowed, through what I suspected was neglect, to fall from what originally must have been good quality locations to rather poor ones that the Met Office itself has to downgrade to Class 4 levels of inaccuracy. Prime examples are Shobdon and Glasgow Bishopton but there are very many others. Further studies of so many of these prime sites has made me wonder if it is just a case of neglect of are there other motives.

One issue that always perplexes me is why so many official sites are alongside fences and walls when these are obviously known problems. Why does nobody at the Met Office insist on overgrowth around sites being kept in check – the situation at Poolewe reached absurd proportions when the option to move it into a walled garden was preferable to simply managing the vegetation. Why was Culzean Castle station relocated only for young saplings to be simultaneously planted alongside it?

Liscombe weather station is very remote and there is no street view option available. Looking at the aerial image in isolation it actually appears to have been established with its own “walled garden” effect set in the centre of a square of trees. Then I found a close up image.

Taking both all the available aerial images over time and this close up lead me to one conclusion – this is not neglect, it is deliberate. This 2001 image below indicates the enclosure hedging was planted on the original installation of the site. It is no wonder the wind mast is so tall to catch the wind, those surrounding trees to all compass points are progressively dwarfing the screen whose base starts at 1.2 metres from the ground.

The Met office has literally hundreds of acronyms they use regularly for all manner of adjustments as can be seen from this site’s CEDA archive, such as “CARLOS”, “WADRAIN” and “MODELRAD” . The meaning of a new one suddenly dawned on me –

Micro-Climate Distortion Of Natural And Local Data-Sets…………….a.k.a McDonalds.

It is a long term process of setting up a weather station together with the means to progressively convert an open site into an artificially warmer micro climate, filter out winds, enhance Aitken Effect and retain collected daytime warmth overnight. This tactic gets over all the major problems of open rural sites stubbornly refusing to play ball and record runaway warming. If anyone has a better explanation of why this taxpayer funded Government agency has quite deliberately “walled in” so many of not just its lower rated sites but even its top equipped synoptic ones as well, I would be responsive to hearing it. For my part this is not some jokey conspiracy article, I am genuinely starting to detect motivation behind so many sites being reduced to known lower graded CIMO Classes. This is in addition to so many new sites starting their life being lowly rated – it is not just small manual sites such as Whitesands starting as Class 4 (more realistically Class 5) but even new automated sites in government owned facilities such as Neatishead at Class 4S (effectively Class 5).

This sort of irresponsible asset management has to be stopped or the Met Office stands open to an undeniable accusation of deliberately seeking to corrupt the historic temperature record – I’m not lovin it.