Nunraw Abbey DCNN1684 – Another unfortunate waste of a potentially good site.

56.92115 -2.65364 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1971

I have to admit that when I saw the name of this weather station I did a double take – apparently it derives from a few small houses for Nuns and was “Nun’s Raw” or Row. Curiously a similar derivation to the row of small houses on the heath becoming Heathrow before the aircraft took over.

The site is more usually known as the Sancta Maria Abbey though the Nunraw description seems to have been recently adopted by the Cistercian Monks themselves. The Abbey is near Haddington to the east of Edinburgh. Although the CEDA archives show this East Lothian site starting from 1971, the Scottish Red Book of Meterological records has a whole section devoted to “Haddington” with no less than 7 noted sites. I cannot determine whether or not, nor indeed if so, which one it was, but it seems likely that there has been some form of weather station readings here long prior to 1971 possibly as far back as 100 years before then.

The site is marked down as Class 4 by the Met Office presumably on shading grounds. The tecnnical “exclusion” zone for artificial heat sources to meet Class 2 is a 30 metre radius and this site does actually meet that requirement.

For reasons known only to the Met Office inspectors, these types of rural site are always treated quite harshly. Whilst I personally always feel such enclosed areas cannot be truly representative of a wider area, then they should also not be considered worse than a jet blast screen and plastisol cladding enclosed Heathrow site alongside a major road and the small matter of one of the world’s largest Urban heat islands and airports. Again the obvious question – is this site worse than Heathrow? Obviously not so either Nunraw’s classification is wrong or, more likely, the Heathrow class 3 status is way off the mark. {Talkshop note: Will be shortly publishing evidence from Dr. Eric Huxter that indicates, from a statistical viewpoint, that Heathrow should be regarded as Class 5 from its performance characteristics}

The likely case with Nunraw Abbey is that its readings should be good enough to meet Class 3 as none of the 22 google historic images from various times of year going back to 1985 indicate any shade from the trees. The sole potential markdown I can see would be the windbreak effect of those trees, perhaps Class 4 is technically correct, but that would imply many superior assessed sites (nearly always urban ones) are over generously marked higher.

The next issue of observation, however, lets this site down terribly. Although the daily routine of 9:00 a.m. readings seem to be reasonably well adhered to by attending the screen, actually taking down the numbers correctly seems to be a problem for the observers. To derive a daily average requires both a minimum and maximum readings, if either reading is missing nothing can be done and the day’s temperature data is largely wasted. All Met Office screens are now equipped with PRTs including those manually read. These stations do not actually require PRTs as they do not electronically transmit readings. I believe the changeover was for uniformity {more in Dr Huxter’s report to follow}. It is quite noticeable that some manual sites’ observers around the country have problems with operating these systems for maxima whilst being comfortable with the traditional LIGs still used for minima. The Floors Castle observer helpfully demonstrates taking readings in this Youtube clip. Clearly this is not a difficult task but, as with everything, training is required.

Below is a typical example from the archives showing the problems at Nunraw – column I is maximum temperature reading and J minimum. “NA” indicates no reading available, dates when no visit was made such as the first to fifth of March are not shown at all. Both failure to attend and lack of a reading when visited are thus separately recorded/omitted and sometimes even both!

Studying recent years shows the following number of days where one or other readings were missing or no visit made – 2017 – 70 days, 2018 – 63 days, 2019 -142 days, 2020 – 222 days, 2021 – 214 days, 2022 – 31 days, 2023 – 78 days. It is unlikely that Covid 19 restrictions should have caused issues in a monastic environment and years both prior and after are still notably poor.

In this instance the ultimate responsible authority is the Met Office. If they cannot supply adequate advice or training to ensure reliably taking readings then there really is no realistic point in the exercise, partial readings are largely useless despite the Met Office’s remarkable abilities in deriving absurd annual averages from them as at places such as at Mickleham and Hartpury.

Sadly yet again, a weather station such as Nunraw Abbey which should have been a useful source of reliable data is just another waste of expense and time. Sinking the ship for an happorth o’ tar.