A photo montage of some of the Met Office Class 1 sites that will not be used in any historic temperature reconstruction.

The CIMO regulations place Class 1 sites as the highest possible “Gold Standard” of top quality and totally accuracy. So how reliable are the Met Office assessments? The above image includes the 100 metre and 30 metre circled areas with the aerial image oriented north to the top. Obviously this is not a Class 1 site, after all you would not want 70,000 square feet of poly tunnels warming up any south easterly breeze. Well actually, avid readers will have spotted this is, in fact, (alleged) Class 1 East Malling in Kent.

I have already challenged the Met office to defend this site as Class 1 back in February. They responded by simply confirming it is class 1 so I would just like to add some dated images. Firstly from 14th May 2025

Secondly, a two dimensional perspective looking south east over the screen dated 6th August 2025. This site is continually compromised – no wonder it is one of the hottest sites outside of London.

I am confident that everyone will agree that this site in practice is most certainly not Class 1 by any stretch of the imagination and the Met Office is not monitoring its standards acceptably. East Malling is not a gold standard and with such ongoing and historic dubious provenance cannot be included in any historic temperature recreation.

The next contestant to be suitably “ditched” is one of World Weather Attribution’s favorites to mislead with. Sitting directly alongside a 900 square feet diversion/settlement chamber up to 20 feet deep and designed to collect the hazardous wash off from the airfields main apron, we have alleged Class 1 RAF Cranwell.

Has any Met Office site inspector really checked this one out – I find that incredibly hard to believe.

So that is another one ignored as totally unsuitable even before we consider the very busy aviation training activity at this site.

On an entirely different level, or rather significant slope, I do wonder whether any site inspector has ever fully evaluated a site that boasts the entirety of a hydro electric power station and external transformers within its Class 1 100 metre exclusion area. That the site is also subject to known regular and extreme Foehn Effects despite being almost submerged in the dense gorse undergrowth is seemingly irrelevant.

It must be remembered that Cassley (above) simply must be Class 1 because the author of “The Indisputable Truth” about Climate Change – Karl Shepherdson – told me so and then refused to discuss anything……at all. An upcoming addendum to my original post (currently going through “Peer Review” – well better than anything the Met Office does) will demonstrate some double digit over/under recording at this site. Another supposedly Class 1 bites the dust.

Before moving on to more candidates for the waste bin, it is worth remembering that when I restarted this project in August 2024 both Hastings and Edenbridge were shown as Class 1 and were only downgraded to Class 4 when I challenged them. Cassley was obviously too much for the Met Office to keep admitting their appalling standards, or lack of, so they dug their heels in and shut up shop refusing to engage with me.

I was not going to include the Isle of Man in any temperature record as I feel such island sites whilst very good for forecasting purposes are only likely to represent a localised micro climate. Probably just as well given that the Met Office must have either got Class 1 Ronaldsway spectacularly wrong or yet another “Human Error” default mistake. At least they missed the taxiways but that is rather a lot of apron included there.

Apart from immediate settings for claimed class 1 stations, it is useful to actually know where a site is and was in recent time. Weather stations do regularly get relocated but these moves are supposed to be documented when the move is anything more than trivial. It took me several days of deep delving to finally locate a completely undisclosed relocation of Cambridge NIAB the small matter of 1.4 miles on 2009. I have no realistic way of evaluating the former site which is under new buildings.

Despite the new site potentially being good (though it does have Histon electricity sub station uncomfortably close) it is of such short verifiable location to be of limited use. It also makes the other NIAB site at Bramham (formerly Class 1) rather an annoyance as it is difficult to be sure if its current downgrade to Class 4 is an error or not. It too went on undocumented long distance travels recently.

Perhaps the biggest shock of all came from Class 1 Weybourne. Both Tim Channon in his reviewing days and myself more recently had noticed sudden and seemingly meteorologically unexplained temperature spikes. Bearing in mind the propensity for meteorological averaging to exaggerate on the extremes, such spikes needed understanding. It fell to Talkshop friend and aviator Dave Ward to direct me to video clips of the aircraft on the previously unseen grass strip taking off and landing exactly alongside the screen.

Luckily there are still several good quality Class 1 sites left and many more Class 2 reliable ones. In addition I feel there are some suspect downgraded sites that warrant inclusion in any temperature reconstruction. For example, I am very surprised at the Stowe site below being class 4 when I feel it is probably as good as it gets and merits Class 1. But then again it is very rural and records “cool”.

Similarly Levens Hall below looks far too good to be rated Class 5 and could well make Class 1.

I guess it all comes down to which sites the Met office wants to chose to conjure up their required figures….after all they do rate this as Class 3 and everyone knows what a sad joke it is. No guesses where this major international airport site this is!

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/11/13/__trashed-3/