From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
The Met Office has claimed that a new Welsh temperature record for springtime was set in Cardiff last month.
The place where it was recorded, Bute Park, is a Class 5 junk site and is arguably one of the most inappropriate places to measure temperatures.
The weather station at Bute is just yards away from the large plant nursery, full of greenhouses and banks of solar panels on the roof of the visitor centre.
As the Bute Park information video relates, all its greenhouses are very carefully temperature controlled during hot weather. This means the venting of hot air.
If that was not bad enough, the weather station compound is surrounded by concrete on three sides and high vegetation on the other, which appears to have grown considerably since the 1978 photos below were taken.
Any one of these factors should disqualify Bute Park as being representative of temperatures in the locality. No wonder then that the Met Office themselves have categorised it as Class 5, the worst of the WMO’s five categories.
The WMO, World Meteorological Organisation, rules state that a pristine temperature reading site must meet the following criteria:
Bute Park is so poorly sited that it does not even meet Class 4 criteria, itself a junk designation. Instead, Class 5 covers all sites that don’t meet any criteria at all.
The WMO states that Class 5 sites can overestimate temperatures by as much as 5C. The WMO are perfectly clear that junk sites like Bute Park should not be used for climatological purposes and cannot be regarded as being representative of the surrounding environment.
But that is exactly what the Met Office are doing when they declare record temperatures at sites like Bute Park.
