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Tim writes
Under can’t make it up comes the Met Office adding Scarborough to Datapoint and Swanage vanishing.
Figure 1, photograph ©2013 Copyright Christopher Hall under CC, annotation, the author, same licence.
Hall’s image legend: –
Springhill Lane
Just above the hedge can be seen the top of a World War II pill box. This was sited to give protective cover to the Royal Navy radio station in Sandybed Lane at the foot of the hill. The fenced flat area in the background is Springhill Reservoir opened in 1928 to augment the town’s water supply at a time when new developments were taking place. Water is pumped to here from Irton Waterworks.
Most of you know I’ve been out of things dealing with cancer, now waiting on surgery. More importantly here I’m kind of getting my brain back after chemotherapy. Through all this I have tried to maintain the archive of hourly Met Office data, even when I was in hospital. Tried does not mean succeeded, I made a serious mistake in a panic to get to A&E when I had a temperature spike, hit all the mains power switches before exiting the lab… including the archival system’s. Ouch. There is an 8 day or so gap.
I am trying to put together a series of articles on temperature measurement. These critically rely on Heathrow data. Keeping up-to-date on the datasets is necessary. Things tend to turn up first.
Today I tripped a data archive import, lots of duplicate data but the software here can handle that. A long number crunch. There are about 15,000 hours in each station record, about 150 stations are used.
Whilst this was going on there is time for idle looking. Remember I’ve been out of things so there are changes I’ve not seen. Immediately I spotted Scarborough, a new site in Datapoint. Data seems to start 22nd March 2016. Swanage seems to vanish shortly before.
As it happens I write code. Also WMO have been pressing members to provide reasonably accurate site location co-ordinates. I open an automatically generally HTML file here, my word, there are links to the Scarborough site for Bing and Google aerial views.
CLICK. Surely not? It’s worked a treat. Oh dear.
I guess right first time, figure 1 legend confirms and adds. Looks like the top of a local water reservoir. This is rapidly confirmed.
So there is a hill. On top are banks, earthworks, reservoir and … a weather station. This is all close to high density urban housing, much of it old and poorly insulated.
Figure 2, annotated, image dated Feb 2009, recent Street View (as arrow) implies no material change today.
Figure 3, area view showing dense urban
Figure 4. Bing (Microsoft) have become obstructive over copyright. This is fair usage. Image appears to show a Stephenson screen and aligned to North.
HTML links to images as produced by automation.
99142 | Scarborough | England | |||||
– | – | .offical==> | 54.273000 | -0.421000 | 110 | Bing | |
– | – | – | NK | NK | NK | NK | NK |
Comment
As a local station most things go, but this site is far short of fair in a climatic or national context.
History
Figure 5, extract from a book published in AD 1829 mentioning a recent very dry year. 60 years since is as common then as today.
Free ebook, requires Google login
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=DphYAAAAcAAJ&rdid=book-DphYAAAAcAAJ&rdot=1
Post by Tim