Wattisham WMO03590 – “we do not attribute unmodified values from one station to another station.” Oh yes you do. 

52.12393 0.95735 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 2 Installed 1/1/1959

Wattisham is a military airfield west of Ipswich in Suffolk. It has variously been used by the USAF, RAF, and British Army with the RAF returning to the site to operate its Sea King and Apache helicopters. In researching this site I uncovered deliberate transfers of readings from one site to another which re-opened this whole issue and cast serious doubts on the Met Office claims that this is never done…….IT IS.

To consider the site by CIMO regulation basics, I agree with both Tim Channon’s and the Met Office’s assessment of Class 2. Tim’s meticulous area delineation and area calculations proved that point from this post imagery below.

My location issue with this site, however, sits outside the tape measure mentality of the Met Office and is more with the transient extraneous heat issues with the changed use of the site. Fixed wing aircraft (most) have a remarkable habit of taking off and landing in straight lines along the runways. Helicopters are quite different of course and can hover all around an aviation site, especially at a training ground. In exactly the same way as at Shawbury there are literally dozens of YouTube clips of helicopters hovering over the site and inevitably causing distortion of readings at Met Office PRTs whose continuous output readings are only averaged over 60 seconds rather than the WMO 5 minute recommendation. Here is a past example though I understand the site is now primarily for “Apache” helicopter gunships.

{As an aside, when Chris Morrison and the Daily Sceptic highlighted my Shawbury report there were an astonishing number of apologists for the Met Office posting on X (formerly “twitter”) that these helicopter flyovers would not make any difference. I do have to wonder at some people’s motivations especially when one was discovered to be a former Met office observer – clearly he had never been anywhere near a helicopter in his life.}

The point I am emphasizing here is that whilst the Met Office can make weasel word claims of being “an internationally agreed distance from the runway” that is of even greater irrelevance when the aircraft are helicopters regularly within a few metres of the screen directly fanning heated air at it. This site may be Class 2 in some aspects but totally unacceptable for climate reporting a lot of the time in other ways. Modern PRTs definitely pick up transient spikes to distort the crude meteorological averaging.

It would come as no surprise to me at all if a new “record” was established here in the warmer East Anglia region – who needs Typhoon Jets when you have got plenty of helicopters to surreptitiously “do the business” for much less expense. Wattisham weather station is in a highly restricted area so the public cannot easily check.

This then comes onto the much more serious issue of the Met Office simply “moving” readings around different weather stations – this is an issue they CANNOT DENY nor REFUSE TO ANSWER because they have already, unwittingly, admitted to it…….and more than once.

Over 22 miles from Wattisham and over the county border between Suffolk and Essex there is former RAF Wethersfield which later became an MOD Police Training centre and thence an Asylum Seekers housing compound. In Wethersfield’s RAF days it had its own official Met Office weather station though this site was never used for climate reporting purposes and thus no temperature readings were ever publicly archived – or perhaps in part they were. Below is a map showing how different this site would have been bearing in mind what the Met office itself declared in its Factsheets about differing locations.

So what has Wethersfield got to do with Wattisham? Returning to my earlier contacts with the Met Office regarding Dungeness and all those 103 missing undead Zombie weather station sites the following comments were made. {my bold}

“By way of further advice and assistance as part of this internal review, I can advise you that
the Met Office is unable to supply specific details of the observing sites requested, as this is
not recorded information. We would advise you that we do not attribute unmodified values
from one station to another station. We use regression analysis to create a model of the
relationship between each station and others in the network. We use these regression models
to generate an estimate for each month when the target station is not operating or missing
data within its period of record. Each estimate is based on data from up to six other stations.
The chosen stations are well correlated with the target station and have data for the missing
month. The choice of predictor stations will change as the network evolves (for example, when
stations open and close). Unfortunately, this means that there is no single answer to the
question of which stations have been used to create the estimates for Folkestone and Dover,
as it will vary from month to month and from variable to variable. The climate averages on our
web page are the mean of the original observations (where available) and the estimates for
the specified station and averaging period. Further details of the analysis method can be found
in section 2 of the following paper:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/joc.1160.”;

In my review of RAF Waddington I picked up the fact that the Met Office had very definitely attributed data from one site to another – the issue of whether or not these “values” were unmodified or not I will address later in this post. The Met Office archived notes very definitely stated

” “NO DAILY DATA : CLOSED 8/1953-5/1955; 7-8/1968. DATA FOR SCAMPTON SUBSTITUTED”

Examining the CEDA notes for Wattisham I first noted a significant data gap from 31/7/1961 to 1/11/1961. Such gaps are not unusual in the archives and in this case were explained by a “Remarks” section note stating the following and their excel spread sheet showing the gap:

NO DAILY DATA : CLOSED 8-10/1961

This period was at the height of the Cold War between the Bay of Pigs incident and Cuban Missile crisis which may or may not be relevant though I do know security was much heightened in the UK with military bases moved to higher alert levels.

Clearly not archiving this period’s readings even if they were taken is no great problem in the vast scheme of things, therefore what was incredibly strange was a subsequent note:

OBSERVATIONS DONE AT WEATHERSFIELD BETWEEN APRIL AND NOVEMBER 1977 DUE TO RUNWAY RESURFACING

For the period above readings from Wethersfield {Ed note:amusing the transcriber spelt the station name wrongly} the Met Office chose to just insert readings with a different observation regime of once daily only onto Wattisham. This is clearly indicated in the excel files by the changing reading recording frequency from “12” to “24” for the period. For brevity, firstly the change from Wattisham to Wethersfield readings on 18th April:

And then the change back from Wethersfield to Wattisham on the 1st December

What possible reasons could the Met Office have for attributing readings from a distant station to Wattisham into its archives in 1977 that they were not particularly concerned about in early 1961? How can a historic climate site record be taken seriously if readings from otherwise unrecorded sites are casually transferred around different locations?

This prompted me to further investigate those transferred readings from Scampton to Waddington mentioned above. Remember that Met Office claim of not attributing “unmodified” values….could I test that? The first period of attribution from Scampton was August 1953 to May 1955. Whilst obviously the WW2 originated airfield Scampton would have had an operational weather station, the archive, however, indicated a different story:

The quoted “Station start date” of 1/1/1963 seemed somewhat improbable and obviously how could they use data from the 1950s at Waddington if Scampton did not exist – though non-existence does not normally present problems for the Met Office. So yet further trawling was required to discover the original records. Not only do records exist, as if by magic they also coincidentally start in August 1953 i.e. the date of attribution to Waddington.

And this below is what they look like in detail. Four observations per day with readings to the tenth of a degree Fahrenheit (0.055°C) that requires professionally trained observer standards.

And also as if by magic these manual records end in May 1955 i.e. the end of the cross attribution period to Waddington. No other copy manuscripts appear in the archive and furthermore digital archives of temperature readings for Scampton do not commence until 1984.

So comparing these manuscript notes with the Waddington archives revealed that after allowing for rounding they were, indeed, directly implanted into the Waddington records. {Interestingly this also revealed that quite bizarrely the transcribers firstly rounded the Fahrenheit to the nearest whole degree before conversion to celsius and then that second rounding effect. This loss of accuracy is quite absurd given the claims of averages to the second decimal place of a celsius degree.}

The July and August 1968 transfers cannot be compared as Scampton’s readings do not appear anywhere until 1984. How often at other times have such readings transfers occurred is impossible to ascertain but then consider the issue of the 2022 national highest temperature record. Despite the Met Office admitting the following

“Dear Mr Sanders,

The 39.9C value on the map in the link you provided is not Waddington but it Cranwell or Scampton, both of whom recorder maximum temperatures of 39.9C that day.

At that time Waddington was having its temperature data marked as suspect as the grass under the screen had been treated with weed killer.

Kind regards,

Weather Desk”

Despite known suspect readings, the Met Office still managed to enter the UK all time “record” highest temperature reading at Coningsby into the records for Waddington. Coningsby’s data was straight transferred to Waddington. I have asked for clarification under Freedom of Information Act and all I got was a Refusal to answer on the alleged grounds it was not retained information – seemingly “records” are not “recorded”!

What I do know is that the Met office is persistently also refusing to answer my questions regarding which stations variously were, are or even, will be, used in the compilation of “climate averages” or ongoing “monthly estimates” for non existent sites. In the cases of Wattisham and Waddington it has taken me a deep inspection to find these attributions, but the Met Office cannot deny them as they are proven by their own admissions and evidence.

Does any of this actually matter? Returning to Wattisham (in the same manner as Waddington) it is one of those Location Specific Long Term Climate averages stations being used by the Met Office to “prove” alarming levels of anthropogenic climate change.

Given the now proven transfer of unmodified readings from one site to another how authentic are the Met Office claims? The quoted nearest “climate stations” include Levington (closed 29 years ago) and the absurdity of Scole born 1971 and departed 45 years ago in 1980. With the Met Office refusing to prove how their data is derived by supplying their input stations how does anyone know they are not either artificially fabricating the numbers or using unacceptable stations?

The Met Office really has to start answering valid questions and stop hiding being false legal protections. They must be accountable.

As a codicil, I was unable to find any good ground level imagery of Wattisham but I did stumble across this simulation of the control tower from a flight simulator. It actually is so precise that it included the weather station to the mid extreme left. A little white box in its very own compound!

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/07/08/wattisham-wmo03590-we-do-not-attribute-unmodified-values-from-one-station-to-another-station-oh-yes-you-do/