The UK Met Office has lurched into conspiracy theory territory in a desperate attempt to rescue scientific credibility in its Net Zero-weaponised ‘junk’ temperature measuring network. In a recent public pronouncement, it claimed: “The efforts of a small number of people to undermine the integrity of Met Office observations by obscuring or misrepresenting facts is an attempt to undermine decades of robust science around the world’s changing climate.” The astonishing outburst relates of course to the recent revelations of the Daily Sceptic and a number of citizen sleuths. In March 2024, the Daily Sceptic disclosed that nearly 80% of all UK measuring sites are so poorly located they have massive temperature ‘uncertainties’. Meanwhile, Ray Sanders and Dr Eric Huxter have provided convincing proof of the lamentable state of the unnatural heat-ravaged network and its tendency to produce elevated temperatures and short-term heat spikes.
Narrative-obsessed mainstream media has been on its best behaviour and kept quiet about the growing scandal, but the shocking state of the Met Office recording operation, and its continued use to raise climate alarm, is widely discussed on social online media.
“Despite online speculation,” said the Met Office, “much of which demonstrates a clear misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the facts, Met Office weather stations are subject to stringent national and international guidelines.” The Met Office team is said to carry out hundreds of site inspections a year. “A rigorous quality assurance system, including a long-standing and well-honed site inspection methodology, ensures that data produced at our sites are as accurate as they can be,” it observed. Ray Sanders recently discovered that 103 sites providing long-term data did not actually exist and measurements were being invented/estimated from “well-correlated related neighbouring sites”. Alas, subsequent efforts to discover the identity of these vital well-correlated inputs drew a blank with Freedom of Information requests denied as “vexatious” and not in the public interest.
The ‘uncertainties’ mandated by the World Meteorological Organisation mean 48.7% of the network, based in junk Class 4, is subject to errors up to 2°C, while an almost unbelievable 29.2% in super-junk Class 5 could be out by up to 5°C. One-minute heat spikes, such as that behind the 40.3°C all-time UK record at RAF Coningsby at a time of nearby Typhoon jet activity, are common. Despite international guidance, the Met Office insists on using 60-second data recorded by recently installed sensitive electronic devices to declare individual records and higher average daily totals. Dr Huxter’s recent work indicated that daily ‘extremes’ declared throughout last May were on average 0.8°C higher than the two recordings made at the before and after hour mark. At Kew Gardens, the Met Office claimed a national May Day record high of 29.3°C at 2.59pm, but this was a massive 2.6°C higher than the 2pm recording and 0.76°C above the 3pm reading.
Like many self-important and unaccountable bureaucracies, the Met Office has a marked tendency towards supercilious arrogance. “We understand that the data from thousands of independent global weather stations (over the last seven decades) which shows a warming trend may be an uncomfortable reality for some.” Nobody, of course, denies the world is in a warming phase and that humans may have contributed by using hydrocarbons. This arrogance is a silly red herring. The Met Office has a basic temperature network that has grown from a largely amateur base in response to the needs of specific groups such as the military. It was never designed to provide an ambient, uncorrupted air temperature of the UK, let alone be utilised to help provide a global figure. It was good enough for the rough-and-ready purposes for which it was designed, but it is unable to show, as the Met Office claimed, that 2023 across the UK was 0.06°C cooler than the record year of 2022. The Met Office is simply pulling the public’s chain if it thinks it can claim recordings accurate to one hundredth of a degree centigrade using its current crappy nationwide network.
The science journalist Matt Ridley recently laid his finger on what has gone wrong at the Met Office. It has been ”embarrassingly duped by activists”. It believes that most of the recent warming has been caused by humans, even though the evidence for this statement arises mainly from simplistic climate models. Net Zero has died in the United States and sceptical voices are increasingly being heard. Decades of politicised settled science are being replaced with a broader wish to understand how the atmosphere works. The role of natural variation is being discussed and the ‘greening’ benefits of higher temperatures and carbon dioxide are being considered. The idea of a ‘settled’ anthropogenic climate opinion is starting to look rather dated. The scare/scam was useful for promoting the hard-Left Net Zero fantasy, but that fantasy is rapidly falling apart as hydrocarbon reality sets in.
Stuffed with activists, the Met Office continues on its deranged course of political Net Zero fear-mongering, turning weather maps purple in summer and issuing constant weather warnings to the amusement of grown adults. The only “uncomfortable reality” is that suffered by the Met Office with its inability to counter the charge that it is using junk statistics to claim that warming is higher than it actually is.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
H/T strativarius
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Whenever government agencies claim the science to be “robust” is the first clue that it’s not. It’s no different than claiming government housing projects are “low cost” housing.
Absolutely, ‘robust’ was the word favoured by the Post Office to describe the integrity of its Horizon software.
The Titanic was “robust”.
unsinkable, they said!
robustly unsinkable!
“Robust” is a truly stupid word to use to describe any science.
The little men who can’t wear the shoes of the truth because they are a captive of political ideology that demands compliance in following a scamming narrative that is based on controlling people to build control over their lives and steal their money one drip at a time
That is the signature of the leftist/Marxists endgame.
We were never meant to get a glimpse of what’s behind the curtain.
Especially if there are naked women hiding from public gaze….
Interesting way to land that aircraft on the runway! AI is so great!
The pilot suddenly realised where he was landing and desperately tried to return whence he came.
Actually the AI image is accurate. Crosswind landing technique crabs into the wind for the approach and then just before touchdown, you straighten to align with the runway. Watch this to see this common practice in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NglxhkfP1ds (Extreme Crosswind Landings – Airplanes Landing in Storm)
Yes, I have performed crosswind landings. I’ve never experienced such a landing, either in a private or commercial aircraft, with that much crab that close to the ground. But the film clip shows some pretty extreme crosswind landings.
Also, there is a winglet on the port wingtip, and there doesn’t appear to be one on the starboard wingtip.
AI still needs to learn a lot about aircraft design and their operations.
The winglet is there, just faint.
Only to a limited degree. The attitude of the plane would be nearly flat to minimise profile into gusting wind. A high angle of attack implies engines on full power to climb for a go around, for which you would see heat haze. Also, if the wind is severe enough for such a sharp crab approach you would see the grass streaming in the wind direction. Plus you wouldn’t likely have a clear blue sky.
Dang, this runway is short.
Met Office:
No.
The efforts of a small number of people are an attempt to correct decades of the Met Office misrepresenting facts.
The thing that really undermines the MetOffice is the sheer INCOMPETENCE of their employees, past and present.
Totally incapable of maintaining a reliable and usable system of surface stations.
Well over half those installed this century are class 4 or 5.. ie totally unreliable.
How the **** does that even happen !!
Incompetence.. or agenda driven and deliberate ?? Only they know.
I suspect incompetence. How many of the employees can tell you what the JCGM documents are, let alone what they say about metrology? How many have ever completed an uncertainty budget to meet ISO measurement requirements? Do they have a trained metrologist on the staff to audit how measurements are done and analyzed?
My guess is that there is no employee requirement to meet a defined test score on a test about metrology. I suspect that they don’t even know about resolution uncertainty and are unknowingly:
It can be both.
I would say that anyone driven by an agenda at the expense of honesty is, by definition, incompetent.
I would call it evil. But again, it can be both.
Or a statistician to review their methods for combining many different readings into a single number, with an appropriate error estimate.
Half of the workforce is below average intelligence. Somebody has to employ then to bypass the dole. When I was a school kid, the local council was the main go-to. We all knew it.
These days, Parliaments are getting a new population of such. DEI. Geoff S
Your tax pounds at work.
The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Measure ever higher temperatures in order to support the incomes of those who designed and run it.
There might be unknown limitations to siting – most land with good road access owned and used so unavailable?
‘misrepresenting facts’ ???? Lying???
“…ensures that data produced at our sites are as accurate as they can be”
That phrase applies to any level of accuracy, same as saying they are what they are.
Simple question for the MO, if the above is true, why is it unable to engage with the sceptics and explain the value of measurements that might be as much as 5C out, why is it creating data for wholly fictional sites and how does it calculate it.
If they were on solid ground, they should have no problem, the fact that they refuse to engage suggests they’re not.
how does it calculate it
Licks finger and holds it out….
Actually, “… and stuffs it in….”
They do …. here illucidated by Climate feedback.
It’s just that the repeated attempts when it’s been/is explained are understandably not appreciated.
“The ‘WMO Siting Classification for Surface Observing Stations on Land’ provides rules for the exposure of different weather sensors. According to the presence and nature of nearby obstacles (e.g., trees casting shadows) which could affect weather measurements, classifications of Class 1 (low) to Class 5 (high) are assigned. Meteorological readings from lower class sites are more likely to be representative of a wide geographic area than readings from higher class sites.
As explained in the guidance (linked here), a Class 5 site suggests that there are nearby obstacles that create an inappropriate environment (e.g., shade) for the station’s meteorological measurements to be representative of a wide area (i.e., tens of square kilometers [km2] or more). But, contrary to the blog’s claims, higher classification ratings do not necessarily mean the data is ‘junk’ for climate reporting purposes.
In fact, the WMO explains that “[t]he numbers should not be taken to mean that higher class stations are of low value, as there may be very good reasons for the site exposure depending on the purpose for which that station was established”. They continue, explaining “we acknowledge that the use of numbers can easily lead one to suggest a ranking. This is not the purpose and should be avoided.”
Regarding the Met Office specifically, they clearly explain on their website that many of the stations are of higher classes (e.g., Class 3 or 4) and why that’s the case:…]
” the criteria for a Class 1 rating for temperature suits wide open flat areas with little or no human influenced land use and high amounts of continuous sunshine reaching the screen all year around, however, these conditions are relatively rare in the UK. Mid and higher latitude sites will, additionally, receive more shading from low sun angles than some other stations globally, so shading will most commonly result in a higher CIMO classification – most Stevenson Screens [weather stations] in the UK are Class 3 or 4 for temperature as a result but continue to produce valid high-quality data. WMO guidance does, in fact, not preclude use of Class 5 temperature sites”
As you can check for yourself in the WMO guidance (linked here), it is true – the guidance does not state that Class 5 temperature sites cannot be used for climate reporting purposes. However, it is not for that reason alone that the Met Office still uses higher class stations, but also because they have their own long-standing inspection standards which they use to ensure data quality and minimize uncertainty.
In a comment to Science Feedback, a spokesperson for the Met Office explained:
“In order to provide advice and assistance, all Met Office weather stations are inspected by trained expert Met Office Regional Network Officers at a set interval. Each weather station is assessed against both the World Meteorological Organization inspection standards and Met Office inspection standards.”
No matter how much some whinge about it – is is unavoidable that the UK’s geography/ecology/societal distribution and farming practice is as it is …. and as such anything higher that 3/4 classification is necessarily hard to find.
But as the WMO says …(again):
“Meteorological readings from lower class sites are more likely to be representative of a wide geographic area than readings from higher class sites”.
Hey, a conspiracy theory requires no evidence – someone just has to say something that meets their ideological paradigm and the like-minded will preserve it in aspic for perpetuity.
Oh, and another thing – the oft recurring myth of the 3 Typhoons.
Can someone provide the ATC log that reports these aircraft “landing” at 1512UTC on the 19th July 2022 given that the temp log shows (From an RMS article) …
“The temperature first reached 40°C at 1334 utc, and the highest 1-min mean temperature, 40.3°C, was reached at 1512 utc. In all, ten 1-min values surpassed 40°C.”
Those with observational experience well know that dips and spikes of screen temp occur naturally on a sunny day with some sort of breeze as pockets of thermals pass by. The boundary layer is not homogeneous due it’s mixing and passage over ground of different roughness and albedo. (the natual state of the UK countryside).
‘WMO guidance does, in fact, not preclude use of Class 5 temperature sites”’
So sites which could be out by up to 5 degrees Centigrade can be used to show precision of 0.01 degrees in your reports?
“Meteorological readings from lower class sites are more likely to be representative of a wide geographic area than readings from higher class sites.”
You don’t understand, they are declaring that low class, IE highly contaminated sites, are actually better than high class, IE accurate sites.
So Anthony, if all that the taxpayer funded Met puts out is totally on the up & up, why do they have a problem with providing the details about the weather stations they were asked about?
No one is saying that the measurements can’t be used. However, the measurement uncertainty of each station must be propagated properly into a final measurement value stated as XX.X ±0.3°C. “±0.3°C” is the uncertainty for a USCRN station. Look closely at the ±0.3°C value. Do you really think that a temperature of 20.04 has a lot of meaning?
Your screed never mentions the term “measurement uncertainty”, not once. It is a glaring omission and illustrates very well your lack of knowledge of measurement uncertainty and how it should be propagated into determining a measurement.
The different classes of station each have a progressive value of uncertainty. Do you know what UNCERTAINTY means in terms measurements? It means you DON’T KNOW and can never know what the true value of a single measurement actually is. You can only quote the point value and an interval within which the true value may lay.
Proper mathematical techniques outlined in the JCGM documents, that are internationally agreed upon practices so the whole world KNOWS what a statement of a measurement means, tells you that uncertainties add, always. What do you think the uncertainty of averaging a 20.1 ±0.3°C and a 22.4 ±5.3°C will be? You have no clue do you? Tell what metrology classes you have taken. Did you keep your metrology textbook? What is the title and edition?
BTW, the WMO classification documents describe the uncertainty for each classification to be additive to the station uncertainty. In the U.S. that means a Class 5 ASOS station would have an uncertainty of ±6.0°C.
Here are the actual recommendations from:
ANNEX 1.B. SITING CLASSIFICATIONS FOR SURFACE OBSERVING STATIONS ON LAND (The text of the common ISO/WMO standard 19289:2014(E)
2.4 Class 3 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 1 °C)
2.5 Class 4 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 2 °C)
2.6 Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C)
As relative uncertainties, 20±0.01°C versus 20±6°C:
20°C = 293K,
±0.01K / 293K *100 = ±0.003%
±6K / 293K * 100 = ±2%
Which one is more reasonable?
In science, there are situations where relative uncertainties are more informative and some situations where the absolute uncertainty is more important. When framing a house, a board cut 1/2″ too short is still 99.5% of the desired length (96″ in this example) but still completely unusable. Ambient temperature is a case where the absolute deviations are the more proper expression since the climate alarmist report everything in terms of absolute changes.
In other words, the effects of urbanization are well demonstrated. The measurements are valid, within a varying and often large margin of error, for that place at that time only. The point that the measurements are unsuitable for reference regarding general climate change and the attendant “crisis”, or for homogenizing into any larger construct, seems valid.
“Meteorological readings from lower class sites are more likely to be representative of a wide geographic area than readings from higher class sites”.
What does that mean? Infilling?
I think it means that if you average a bunch of garbage, you get a picture of the entire landfill.
It means they are using all the JUNK data to create FAKE data, and still trying to pass it off as “accurate”.
DENIAL of the fact that many of those junk sites may not have been quite as “junk” in their earlier life, and could now be adding large amounts to their fake temperature calculation.
Its not science.. IT IS AN AGENDA
However your gobbledegook doesn’t mention that a class 5 site may be useful for local purposes e.g. runway temperatures at an airport, or agricultural frost risk,while being quite useless for assessing climate. That is in the guidance, but your link was to a wmo sign in page.
Seems this comment a particularly applies.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/09/uk-met-office-flirts-with-conspiracy-theory-as-it-slams-critics-of-its-junk-temperature-measuring-sites/#comment-4104037
Never mind the MO bollox…
BP defies Ed Miliband to reopen North Sea oil field
Energy giant says the site has enough oil and gas to keep it open for another decade – Telegraph
Perhaps BP could block Miliband’s credit cards at all their petrol stations??
The Hastings ukmo weather station posing as the man in tiananmen square with the plastic shopping bags holding back the Globalist tank
I think it’s fair to say that during the eighties to nineties ukmo erred on the side of caution to cover themselves now they are total instruments of the globalist lies and plans. Their staff profile has gone from people with a genuine interest in meteorology to now uni brainwashed we’re all doomed merchants who have bought the lies. So in essence ukmo have gone from possible litigation to full throttle faux carbon mitigation. Admiral Fitzroy would turn in his Norwood grave.
Have a look at the Met Office daily forecast for your area. This also regularly shows daily maxima 2 °C higher than any of the hourly temps.
Absolutely right, sometimes 3C. And the max forecast for the region is often another 3C up again. (I’m about 30 miles south-west of London).
UK Met Office “feelings” hurt – not badly enough yet
Few contrarian writers are able to pack in the number of lies per minute that Chris Morrison achieves. It really is remarkable.
Ho hum, just another Ad Hominem attack. Have anything to contribute about the issue? Thought not.
It is not worth my effort to respond to. The article from the Met Office more than adequately addresses the misinformation being spread about station quality, and Morrison’s lies do exactly nothing whatsoever to even attempt to counter any of it. If anyone here is actually able to read through the Met Office piece and point out specific errors, we might have the basis for a productive discussion, but I won’t hold my breath.
And yet the quoted Met Office text doesn’t address the recordings from phantom stations.
The “recordings from phantom stations” (i.e. standard infilled estimates) are already addressed in the peer reviewed literature, which Morrison and, presumably, Sanders, are unfamiliar with.
Yes, they are MADE-UP data. !
And should NEVER be used for scientific or “climate” work.
Only fit for climate propaganda.. which is exactly how the MetOffice uses them.
They are not “made up” data, they are estimates, and very clearly marked as such in the data files. This is simple stuff, all detailed in the published papers you guys have never looked at.
What is the uncertainty expected from the “in-filled” data. THAT is not included in the data file!
The “data file” is a public-facing summary, not a dissertation on methodology or uncertainty. That’s all in the HadUK-Grid and MIDAS methodology papers. Y’know, the primary literature I keep telling you to actually read for once in your lives.
If you know what is in the papers that discuss the uncertainty of infilled temperatures, then show the pertinent text here. I have neither the time nor inclination to “find” what you apparently already know but refuse to post here.
You are a grand master of using Appeal to Authority. Yet you don’t recognize, that it requires you to also quote the evidence from that Authority. I can tell you that “the sky is royal purple as told in the Narnia Chronicles and if you don’t believe me, go read them”. That is not a valid argument.
Go read some scientific papers. When data, information, or conclusions from other documents are stated, they are annotated with a reference number that takes you to the document where they originated. Why do you not quote the information that supports your position?
You’re critiquing a methodology you clearly haven’t studied in any meaningful depth. The infilling process for long station records isn’t some secret, it’s documented across decades of peer-reviewed literature, from Perry & Hollis (2005) through Hollis et al. (2025) and the HadUK-Grid methodology papers. Without reading and understanding that body of work, you’re not in a position to make credible claims about “what must be happening.” If you want to engage seriously, immerse yourself in the literature first, and stop arguing from a position of ignorance.
Great way to get around errors of omission, require only what was said to be eligible for discussion!
Here is a error of omission. Pick a station with a monthly average and tell us what the uncertainty of the average is. Does MET quote the uncertainty for each station’s average so researchers can properly propagate the uncertainty?
Translation, the Met Office reports what I want to know, therefore it must be correct and everyone who disagrees is evil.
Boilerplate response of someone who has all the float of a butterfly but no sting in his bee.
Translation: I have no evidence against the article itself to support my worthless personal attack.
The article remains unchallenged.
So when did this summer reach the 35 degrees of 1976?
Temperatures exceeded 32°C somewhere in the UK for 15 consecutive days, from 23 June to 7 July 1976.
How many consecutive days in 2025 did the temperature get over 32 degrees?
Remember, the official line is that this summer is as hot as 1976, and anybody who says otherwise is a liar.
That all depends on how you define ‘hot’. If you just get a consistent period of warm sunshine for a month, with nights not dropping very low, then the monthly average will be very ‘high’ aka hot. That’s very very different to having days of extreme heat.
This summer in the SE has been very sunny, with much less rain for several months than the average. Earlier in the year, that means colder nights, but come late spring and summer, that means much hotter average temperatures.
The real question is whether the 2020s have just been a run of warm hotter summers in the UK and Western Europe, or whether geoengineering is at play.
‘Earlier in the year, that means colder nights, but come late spring and summer, that means much hotter average temperatures.’
It gets fairly cold in the Sahara at night.
People generally consider the Sahara to be hot.
And once again, AJ demonstrates his amazing ability to attack strawmen and go after those who report things that he doesn’t want to know.
The limp lettuce effect. !
AlanJ
It’s been a great summer thus far. Cheer up, mate.
Crop yields in some cases have been well down (50%) due to lack of precipitation though.
Is that unprecedented though? Here in the Great Plains of the U.S. that’s a fact farmers have always lived with.
as depicted in that great literary classic “The Grapes Of Wrath”
“… in some cases …” In how many “cases” have crop yields have been well up? What is the annual variance of yields up and down regionally?
Not possible for leftists.
I have to agree. My wife and I crossed Central London on June 18th, during a “heat wave”. It was 86F. We then took the train down to Kent, where the temperatures for the next couple days were around 80F. We then went to Somerset, where, again, the temps were around 80. Beautiful summer days. And yet, it was a heat wave!
To be honest, some of the ‘Net Zero’ budget should be removed and reassigned to setting up, maintaining and monitoring a 21st century Uk temperature measurement network.
You know, making 100% of the measuring sites of Class I standard.
Ensuring uniform coverage over the country, including the mountains of Wales, the Western Highlands of Scotland etc.
The network should be split into large city sites, small town sites and rural stations where no significant population resides within 2 miles (sites on working farms would seem pretty obvious as they will already have transport access).
It can be run by a newly constituted body and audited by those who are not politically active.
Won’t matter. They’ll still average them all together into a nonsense number.
Very difficult to get Class 1 – 3 sites in urban areas.
Getting good sites in suburban areas is almost as hard.
Then don’t use them as “climate” sites. !
Only long term Class 1, and maybe Class 2 sites should be used for “climate”
If a site, or the area around it, has changed significantly… It should not be used for “climate” calculations.
I doubt there is anyone in the MetOffice competent enough to do that. or that they even WANT a reasonably decent system.
They “could” have made sure all recent sites (this century) were Class 1 if they wanted to…
… seems that wasn’t the aim.
There is a missing link about temperatures at airports. It is not enough to state the obvious, that air temperatures will be higher around aircraft burning kerosene. You need to measure AND calculate how much.
A decade ago I started this, trying to get volume of jet fuel shipped into our local busy airport. Next step was to define a volume, like a 50 metre high layer over the area inside the perimeter fence. You can see where it was going. I was warned off as a terrorist seeking confidential stuff, but others might have better access
We DO NEED such numbers before weather stations at airports can be criticised properly. Geoff S
The amount of kerosene delivered to the airport is a meaningless number, since the vast, vast majority of that fuel will be burned far away from the airport.
You can get some idea of numbers by looking at the aircraft and numbers of movements. Take engine power ratings, and assess the consumption during a takeoff roll for major types. You can also make a reasonable estimate of consumption during taxiing. Easy to calculate the kinetic energy of the aircraft after takeoff to subtract from the energy delieverd by the engines. The rest is heat. I had a go at doing this for a variety of types for Ray Saunders at NALOPKT a couple of months ago or so: can’t recall which post though, but it was one highlighting his research on bad weather stations IIRC.
Of course wind will dissipate the energy to surrounding areas, and convection will take it to heights.
If the Met Office disagreed with Ray Sanders’ findings, they would show why.
The fact that they cannot, or do not, is pretty good proof that the Met Office knows that Ray Sanders is right.
Thus, we can all see that they know they are being misleading. Knowingly misleading.
Having got into that position, how can they get out of it?
Carrying on bluffing is the safest option.
Each person who knows that cannot defend their actions also knows they can retire eventually.
Just keep quiet and carry on.
You’re mistaking a refusal to indulge in nonsense for a refusal to respond outright. The Met Office has published the science in full view. Sanders’ act is to ignore it and flood them with repetitive and redundant demands, and then claim the silence he’s engineered is a confession.
The Met Office science shows that yes, they are faking the numbers. Well done. !
The fact that the Met Office cannot answer Ray’s questions .. because they don’t know…
.. and have changed the “class” of sites because of his queries, shows he is very much on the right track.
He is exposing their utter incompetence.. and they don’t like it. !
What is the job?
When the job is collecting and presenting info, the colletor and presenter can handle repetitive and redundant demands with a repetitive and redundant responses
That’s not how FOIA works. The Met Office’s “job” is running the UK’s national weather and climate service, not being an on-demand personal research assistant for one individual making dozens of overlapping requests. When a small team is spending more time copy-pasting “redundant responses” than doing their actual work, the law explicitly allows them to shut it down.
The problem with that argument is that it assumes the Met Office are lying about their previous responses.
It only becomes vexatious if they now have to do what they said they had done in the first place.
This argument assumes that when the Met Office said they were using “well-correlated related neighbouring sites” they had not actually done that. If they done it they could just release the science.
They must know what they are using.
Remember, these are still being used every day to re-calculate the results. They must be readily available.
It never occurred to me that they hadn’t done that. That they were fabricating the results and lying about it. I assumed that they had done a shoddy job and were embarrassed.
Your argument is that the Met Office would now have to do the work as it is not done already… is also an argument that they have committed fraud. T
hat’s worse than I imagined.
And, for the record, worse than I suggested.
No, the argument doesn’t assume fraud, it assumes you don’t understand how the data pipeline works. In many automated infilling systems, the “well-correlated neighbouring sites” aren’t a fixed list that lives in a spreadsheet somewhere; they’re dynamically selected by the algorithm each time it runs. The program produces the final value, not a tidy month-by-month donor log, so there’s nothing “readily available” to just email. Generating that list now would be new work, and FOIA doesn’t compel an agency to create new datasets on demand.
But does compel them to provide the algorithm so that investigators can determine how the final value was determined. Otherwise, what was done, and what will continue being done, is hidden in secrecy with no ability to audit what is occurring.
FOIA compels disclosure of recorded information, not a full software environment with source code, proprietary models, and all dependencies. The Met Office’s algorithms are described in detail in the HadUK-Grid and related methodology papers, which are public and peer-reviewed. Published documentation and reproducibility of approach is how the scientific community audits methods, not by demanding an agency hand over its internal production codebase. Claiming “secrecy” when the methodology is already documented in the literature just confirms you haven’t engaged with that literature.
Documented methodology is totally different than the written algorithm that implements it.
What you are arguing results in no one being able to audit what is occurring. It sounds like the MET has never performed even one audit to verify that their algorithms work properly. Otherwise, they could provide those at a moments notice.
When I wrote billing software at the phone company I had to provide a copy of a test script and the output. Once a year that had to be resubmitted to insure proper operation. I can’t believe that an entity charged with providing scientific data does not have this immediately available when a request is made. It doesn’t speak well of the MET nor yourself for attempting to justify slipshod operations. Typical of bureaucrats that have no accountability to anyone!
That’s a false equivalence. Billing software audits involve a closed, proprietary system where no one outside the company can see the logic, hence the test scripts. Climate data infilling at the Met Office is the opposite: the methodology is openly documented in peer-reviewed literature and the code’s behaviour is reproducible from that documentation. FOIA doesn’t require handing over internal production code or every ephemeral runtime log, and pretending it does is either ignorance of the law or deliberate misrepresentation. If you haven’t read and understood the published methodology, you’re in no position to talk about “secrecy” or “slipshod” operations, you’re just speculating from the sidelines.
Handwaving again. The billing software I wrote was not proprietary, the Public Utility Commission had access to it anytime they wished to audit it. The issue was not protecting software design, it was to insure correct operation. Maybe you don’t understand what quality assurance is all about!
The MET says they can’t publish what stations are used to determine the infilled value because they don’t know.
You say they shouldn’t have to divulge their software. (BTW, who “owns” the software? The taxpayers or the bureaucrats?).
So, it all becomes secret and no one knows whether it is operating correctly, NOT EVEN THE MET! Sounds typical of a deep state operation to me.
This isn’t about “not knowing,” it’s about how the system works. The donor stations aren’t stored as a fixed list because the algorithm dynamically selects them based on current availability and quality control, then outputs the final interpolated value. That’s standard in climate data processing, and it’s documented in the HadUK-Grid methodology. FOIA doesn’t require producing internal production code or ephemeral runtime logs that don’t exist in a stored, queryable form. Quality assurance is done; the algorithms and outputs are validated against independent datasets and published in the peer-reviewed literature. The fact you keep ignoring that literature and defaulting to political conspiracy tropes tells me this isn’t about auditing, it’s about not evading answers you’ve already been given.
Runtime logs that don’t exist! Why don’t they exist? Coding for storing the stations in a log file for each infilled temperature is childs play. It should also be part of any SCIENTIFIC endeavor.
How do you do quality assurance on everyday output if you don’t even know what stations the algorithm chose?
You are continually hand waving and using Appeal to Authority justification. Your goal appears to be to prevent any third party verification of the infilled results.
BTW, how does the infilling calculate the uncertainty of result? You have failed to answer that fron before.
One expects a claimed false accusation to follow by corrected data and if it is not it retains its value. Either party A is lying or party B. If party A accuses party B party B cannot simply accuse party A of lying without going into details. To claim authority is admitting the crime. But that is what institutions often do..
“said the Met Office”
Spooky. Usually people talk and offices don’t say anything at all. Unless there’s a PA system. Did it start with “Now here thIs” or “Testing, 1, 2, 3”?
The Met is a disgrace. They should be given 24 hours to stop using stations that don’t exist, 48 hours to stop using class five stations, 72 hours to stop using class four stations and five minutes to stop using hundredths of a degree. We have pink slips and we will use them