EXCLUSIVE: New Freedom of Information Request and the UK Met Office has to Rewrite its Temperature Explanations Again

The Met Office's excuses for its invented temperature data from non-existent stations get more fanciful by the day

The UK Met Office’s excuses for its invented temperature data from non-existent stations get more fanciful by the day. Explanation after explanation fails to live up to rigorous examination, with statutory Freedom of Information (FOI) requests leading to frequent rewriting and new things to believe before breakfast. Data from non-existent stations are obtained from well-correlated neighbouring stations (WCNS) the Met Office told us, but there were no well-correlated neighbouring stations at Lowestoft, which had itself been closed since 2010. Via a new FOI, the Daily Sceptic sought details about these invisible WCNSs at Lowestoft and has been told, “We do not use well-correlated neighbours in this case.”

Well we kind of knew that all along, due to the fact that citizen sleuth Ray Sanders couldn’t find any in the first place. For closed stations on its historic station database the new FOI explanation is: “We used the gridded value from the closest grid point from our version controlled UK climate data set HADUK-Grid.” The suspicious might note that the HADUK-Grid uses WCNS data derived from the Met Office’s Integrated Data Archive System (MIDAS) in modelling infill data for closed stations. This is said to address gaps caused by stations opening or closing, “ensuring consistent national coverage for monitoring and research”.