Chillingham Barns DCNN2056 – Can official weather stations get worse than this?

55.52991 -1.9183 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5S Temperature records from 1998

Chillingham Barns was originally installed in 1998 as a manual reporting site 11 miles north-west of Alnwick in Northumberland. It should be obvious to any impartial viewer of the above image that this is a very poor site even by the lowest yardstick. The Met Office themselves rate the site the lowest possible and effectively unregulated Class 5 and then add insult to injury by the suffix of “S” representing extreme shade.

Despite this lowly rating the Met Office are unashamed in proclaiming daily “extreme” highs on an almost monotonous basis. Chillingham Barns regularly records the North East England regional high despite being in a notoriously cold location. Clearly this site’s unregulated siting and inaccuracy is the determining factor

“2.6 Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C)
Site not meeting the requirements of class 4.“

What is even more surprising is that in 2012 the Met Office fully adopted this former amateur contributor installation and fully automated the site. This was neither an inexpensive nor easy option – did the Met Office staff not think to consider the quality of the site before investing taxpayer’s money. This is an image from just before the upgrade.

The acute shading was equally obvious back then. The screen is not far in front of huge barns representing a south facing heat holding front. The trees to the east and west are deliberate windbreaks. The only possible breeze that might penetrate into the manicured garden suntrap is from the southerly direction of those long shading trees.

I am not going to overly dwell on this type of site. The aim of the Surface Stations Project was to identify long standing good quality sites to reconstruct a genuinely accurate national historic temperature record. In order to achieve that end I have to review all sites to justify ruling them in or out of any such re-assessment. However, I feel it is appropriate to simply state that this Chillingham Barns site is an exemplar of all that is wrong with the modern Met Office. No self respecting meteorologist would consider this site representative of anywhere other than its own garden setting. For climate reporting it is totally unacceptable and, though whilst outside the scope of this project, it is difficult to see what possible forecasting benefit this site can offer to warrant automation. If the Met Office saw fit to automate Chillingham Barns then they really should equally automate every site of theirs nationally.

In conclusion and straight to the point – this is a junk site and will not be featuring in any new climate record…….and then literally the day after I compiled this report this yet again.