Serious questions are now being raised about the accuracy of Met Office temperature datasets, following its announcement that the UK has just had the hottest summer on record.
The claim will come as a surprise to anybody who was around in 1976! It is also contradicted by its own, world renowned Central England Temperature series (CET), which still shows the summer of 1976 to be the hottest on record. The CET is very carefully put together using rural weather stations so as to minimise the artificial warming caused by increasing urbanisation, known as the Urban Heat Island effect or UHI.
The CET, of course, only covers central England, but this is not some sort of regional anomaly, because the Met Office’s UK dataset also shows record temperatures this summer in that same part of the country.
Indeed, this anomaly between CET and the Met Office data is even worse than it appears – according to the Met Office, the summer of 1976 does not even appear in the top five hottest.
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