Kinbrace Hatchery DCNN03984 – A well cared for site by Meteorologists with its data manipulated by “Climate Scientists”.

The above images are supplied by the site owners themselves from their “Facebook” page. This site is very reminiscent of Lyth No 2 in that it is clearly being very diligently maintained and observed by people keen on doing a “proper job” of their meteorology. They appear proud of their weather station and rightly so. The problems occur when the Met Office climate scientists get their hands on the data to demonstrate their agenda. Using the same data from Kinbrace I will evaluate the level of distortion created.

58.230338 -3.922083 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Temperature records from 1/7/1979

Kinbrace follows the example of weather stations like Wick and Tulloch Bridge which were originally installed in conjunction with the opening of the local railway station, in this case in 1874. The original site was elsewhere at the local Lodge, close to the railway itself though records are not continuous nor fully comprehensive. Some early examples were very basic records as below.

The current site as viewed from the streetview image below is certainly not subject to any urban encroachment but neither is it the best it could be by strict CIMO standards thus is down rated to Class 4.

It is always very difficult to judge whether or not such sites in reasonably open countryside will be adversely affected by local conditions as they are surprising remote. When a 10 metre radius circle is added for context the site looks more reasonable. If this site were judged class 3 I would not dispute it – it is certainly a lot better and less likely to be compromised than the likes of Class 3 Heathrow or Chertsey.

The real issue here though is that this site was solely once daily manually reporting up to 29th November 1999. From 1st April 2000 it was solely automatically reporting with the 123 day period in between having readings taken by both means. This is again a critically important overlap period that can demonstrate exactly what happens when the recording regime changes.

To recap, manual observations are taken once daily at 09:00 GMT when the manual Liquid in Glass Thermometers (LIGT) are then reset. This timing of reading and resetting is at what is often the coldest time of day particularly in winter. When the station converts to automatic reporting a Platinum Resistance thermometer takes reading every 15 seconds with each 4 being averaged to provide 1,440 minute by minute readings per day stored in a Data Logger. These latter readings are archived twice daily at 09:00 and 21:00 and due to the twice daily reporting effectively “reset” the thermometers at 21:00 avoiding the known problem of over recording cold weather events.

I opted to manually check the first period readings from 30/11/1999 to 31/12/1999. This uncovered no fewer than 14 days out of 32 where the manual readings recorded were lower than the automatic readings – on no occasion did the reverse situation occur. The range of difference was from 0.2°C to 3.9°C. All these can be checked from the public records held here which I extracted into the table below. All other overlap months were similarly tabulated.

What this is showing is that the change of reading protocol has resulted in a very significant uplift in mean minimums where no warming whatsoever has occurred. The two different systems are showing a monthly mean increment on site automation of 0.86°C for this specific December.

To put more context into this point, Kinbrace Hatchery is one of the sites quoted as a “Climate Station” giving 30 year rolling averages from 1961 (18 years before it was installed) to 2020. Firstly, here are the quoted averages for 1961 to 1990.

And here are the same figures for the period 1991- 2020

It is worth contrasting the shown annual mean minimum increment over the 60 year period of 0.78°C with the 0.86 increment achieved solely through the change in reading protocol for the month of December 1999 alone. Clearly these averages derived to the second decimal place are more concerned with how data is actually represented rather than the actual temperature.

I then went on to examine the remainder of the overlap period. Hopefully I will be able to supply graphics on this shortly but, for now, the raw numbers continued the exact same trend as those of December 1999.

January 2000. 10 days automatic readings were higher with none lower. Variances ranged from 0.2°C to 3.5°C. Manual readings monthly mean minimum was 0.32°C with the automatic readings 0.31°C higher showing a monthly mean minimum of 0.63°C

February 2000 11 days automatic readings were higher with none lower. Variance ranged from 0.1°C to 5.5°C. Manual readings monthly mean minimum was -0.36 °C with the automatic readings 0.47°C higher showing a monthly mean minimum of 0.11°C

Example: 18/2/2000 Manual recording numbered 240 showing -5.2°C whilst the automatic reading (239) shows 0.3°C. This was a classic “carry over” from the previous day when both sensors recorded the same low of -7.1°C. The resetting of the LIGT was probably when the temperature was only just above the previous day’s low and the weather continued to warm.

March 2000 7 days automatic readings were higher with none lower. Variances ranged from 0.1°C to 3.8°C. Manual readings monthly mean minimum was 1.2°C with the automatic readings 0.35°C nigher showing a monthly mean minimum of 1.55°C

Overall out of 123 days overlap readings, the newer automatic system recorded an archived higher reading on 42 occasions despite the two different sets of thermometers ALWAYS recording as accurately as each other and there NEVER being any real variance in the temperature.

Meteorologists at the Met Office fully understand this issue. The diligent observers carefully maintaining the weather station at Kinbrace Hatchery will fully understand this issue. It is the “climate scientists” at the Met Office who may or may not fully understand this issue but chose to play games with notional “adjustments”, homogenisation or nonsensical “algorithms ” attempting, and inevitably failing, to rationalise totally stochastic variations.

Worse still though, is that not only has this issue arisen over past years when manual sites are automated but also that 40% of all current existing weather stations are manually reporting with PRTs and data loggers for maximum readings but retaining an LIGT for minimum recording that are not a necessity – see Shirburn report.

{Image: Whitesands Stevenson Screen showing PRT/Call Logger with horizontally mounted minimum LIGT}

The Met Office fully understands that converting these manual minimum readings from the LIGT to the PRT/Data Logger (a stroke of a pen instruction to effect) will immediately raise mean minimums and thus raise mean temperatures with no actual warming required. Obviously if this were done en-masse there would be a very noticeable step change hence over the next few years this change to reading protocol as well as full automation will roll out progressively around the network and the “Trick” will continue to unfold of rising temperatures unnoticed.

This deceit has to be stopped.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2026/01/24/__trashed-4/