Myerscough DCNN7246 – Mysterious Met Office Preferences.

53.85376 -2.76686 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Installed 1/4/1987

Myerscough College was originally a farming Further Education college established on this site in 1969. Over the intervening years both its size, student roll and subject range has significantly expanded and additionally it now offers a diverse range of Higher Education courses. There was a rain gauge established on the site’s opening and a Screen was added with manual reading from 1987. In 2010 the site was automated.

The first and most obvious issue with this site is the very extensive sun shading. The trees and shrubs are not only very close (the nearest is under 3 metres away) but some are also very tall. The 2017 wide angle Street View image puts the tree height into perspective. Being to the south and west with hedging bordering the north and east this site will create an almost walled garden wind shelter distorting readings. Nighttime minima will inevitably hold up much higher than in a more open site.

The screen is oddly set to one extreme corner of the enclosure as highlighted in the image below taken recently by Dave Woolcock. This newer (autumn time) image indicates the additional growth of the tree cover but also a possible decline is regular site maintenance from the pristine image above.

The Met Office accepts the problematic issues and marks the site as the lowest possible category with the significant additional error margins and unregulated site characteristics of “2.6 Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C)
Site not meeting the requirements of class 4.”

Regarding observation standards, in manual times the site was not especially well recorded with both 1990 and 1996 having large numbers of days with missing readings. Oddly there are frequent gaps since automation which are likely indicative of data transmission problems. In 2021 alone there was one period of over 4 months on no readings at all. Readings are overall somewhat patchy which is ironically often the case with some agricultural colleges notable Hartpury.

At this point having established Myerscough is a low grade site with a poor level of reading frequency I was very surprised at the level of preferential selection the Met Office gives to the site. Myerscough has readings from 1987 whilst just under 6 miles away is Preston Moor Park with a readings record dating back 111 years longer starting from 1876. Whilst similarly only Met Office assessed as Class 5 , at least the Jeremiah Horrocks Observatory has good quality readings in the 1960s, 1970s and up to April 1987 that simply cannot exist for Myerscough…….. or can they?

So here are the rolling 30 year averages from 1961 to 1990 for the “Nearest Climate Stations To Myerscough (Lancashire)” – no doubting where we are specifically using data from Myerscough to anyone studying this is there?

Obviously all the data from 1/1/1961 to 1/4/1987 for Myerscough is artificially derived from data for other stations prior to its own existence and then compared to other sites variously 12,16 and 27 miles away. So what happened to Preston:Moor Park’s data?

Surely it goes even beyond the bounds of surrealism to prefer to use computer modelled artificial data for over 26 years before a weather station even existed in preference to one (Moor Park) that had already operated for 86 years at a scientific observatory. So far the Met Office are either unable, or unwilling, to provide me with which station’s data are used to complete records for sites after their closure so it will be equally improbable they can provide evidence of how they created over 26 years of data prior to one’s origin.

I cannot think of any science that advances artificially derived numbers ahead of real world data. If anyone knows of one, please enlighten me.

In summary Myerscough is an innocent enough but low grade weather station in both siting and observation record. Mysteriously, however, and for no justifiable reason I can imagine, its poor data record has been manipulated to provide data for lengthy periods before it even existed at the exclusion of one that did. Why?

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/06/01/myerscough-dcnn7246-mysterious-met-office-preferences/