Lingwood:Strumpshaw Hill Addendum – When is a “Record” not a Record? When it’s from an official Met Office site……or maybe not!

Image courtesy “X” copied from post by Marco Petagna Media Advisor & Senior Operational Meteorologist UK Met Office.

Can any reader name an observational scientific body that would so dramatically sensationalise a “Provisional” figure (i.e. one that nobody has been to the site to actually check and verify) when, if it proves incorrect, leaves them with egg on their face? I certainly cannot. However this is the might of the taxpayer funded Met Office boosting figures from a CIMO rated Class 5 JUNK weather station in an amateur meteorologist’s atrocious garden site.

The garden of Sunny Cottage, Wood Lane, Strumpshaw, Buckenham is the location of the official Met Office weather station known as Lingwood:Strumpshaw Hill – the home of an amateur meteorologist Ernest Hoyos. I make no apology for providing these details as they are all already in the public arena from Met office files. These types of sensationalist headlines and procalamations from the Met Office (the responsible body) have taken this issue well beyond the personal restriction of my being “polite and kind hearted”. Major government policy decisions are public opinions forming are being made based on data from locations that are completely unsuitable and unreliable. The time for gentility is long gone in the face of what is such unscientific nonsense. Most worryingly, even if this reading is not ratified (it definitely should not be but more on that in a while) this extreme headlining will stick in the memory long after any, inevitably small print, correction.

I will firstly re-examine Lingwood, then show that other vastly better equipped Met Office stations actually EXCEEDED this “record” figure and then demonstrate why none of them are acceptable. My information is NOT controversial, all unbiased meteorologists both know and fully understand this and why none of these records should actually stand in comparison to historic records.

My original Lingwood report was written in 2025 and, at the time, I was in sheer amazement at how the Met Office was actually using such a poor site, but it was at least better than its quoted nearest climate averages stations all of which were non-existent. As I have highlighted many times (examples such as at Somercotes and Bewcastle ) official weather stations often seem to be sited in places simply because a motivated individual asked for one – no observational quality stipulations appear to have been made. This is not some historic quirk, the previous two examples are both relatively new sites as is Lingwood and this process is ongoing. In March this year yet another weather station was added that is sited in a walled kitchen garden which I will be reviewing soon.

So a more up to date satellite image firstly to check if anything has changed – it has, the site is even worse.

Talkshop reader and intrepid phootgrapher Dave Ward has gone out of his way to assistd with quality photography on many occasions – some a bit risky! After my post last year he tried to get some close up imagery of Lingwood. From the above image there is a footpath running to the east of the garden coming as near as under 10 metres to the screen. Firstly Dave took a long view from the road to the north of the site.

Somewhere very close to the branches of that large tree just to the right of the pole mounted electricity transformer is the screen. As Dave put it

“I went for a short drive this afternoon and parked on the lane north of “Sunny Cottage”. I took a couple of pictures from there to give an overview of the location…….. I then set off down the footpath, but as I approached the cottage it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get any shots of the screen. I did manage to get a glimpse of it through a small gap in the hedge, but wasn’t successful in getting a picture.”

Dave does not give up easily but it was quite apparent that this screen is completely surrounded by high trees and hedges not only making it invisible for outside but ensuring 100% that not a breath of wind was likely to penetrate its wooded fortress enclosure.

“I did get shots of the hedges surrounding this property to the East, North & West and you’ll see it’s well over 6ft – and probably over 8ft in places” This shows that big tree visible from the road and the garden hedging.

To push the matter further and to overcome any claim that I may be biased in my site assessments, I provided Grok A1 with all the coordinates and aerial imagery of the site without detailing it was an official Met Office site, simply an amateur one and asked for its opinion. {my bold}

Assessment for This Location

From the satellite image (rural property with houses/buildings nearby, surrounded by dense trees/woodland on multiple sides, fields beyond but immediate vicinity wooded):

• Heavy tree cover → Significant wind shading/sheltering and sun shading (projected shade likely for large parts of the day/year, especially in a UK latitude ~52.6°N where sun angles vary seasonally). This violates Class 1–3 shading rules and likely pushes it to Class 4/5. en.wikipedia.org
• Wooded/sheltered microclimate → Reduced ventilation (key for Stevenson screen accuracy), potential for stagnant air, localized humidity/ frost effects, and influence from trees (transpiration, different radiative properties).
• Proximity to buildings/trees → Radiative influences (reflected heat, blocked cooling) probable if screen is close to the cottage or woodland edges.
• Positive aspects: Rural/grassy surroundings overall (better than urban), but the immediate wooded setting dominates for siting class.

This setup is common for personal/amateur observers (like Ernest Hoyos’ local reports), where the goal is often site-specific monitoring (e.g., garden conditions, microclimate trends) rather than WMO-compliant regional data. For that purpose, it’s “acceptable” with caveats—the data would still show useful relative changes over time. However, it would not qualify as a high-quality climatological or synoptic station per CIMO standards due to poor exposure. Professional networks avoid such sheltered/wooded spots for temperature records precisely to minimize biases.“

I then confirmed with Grok that not only was this a Met Office climate reporting site but also I revealed the record claims made here.

“Would you think it would be acceptable for a national meteorological agency to be using data from such a site for historic climate reporting purposes?“

“No, it would generally not be acceptable for a national meteorological agency to use data from this Class 5 site as a primary or unadjusted contributor to official historic climate reporting or long-term climatological records.

Why Not Ideal for Official Climate Reporting

National agencies (like the UK Met Office) aim for high representativeness and homogeneity in their climate networks. Key reasons this site falls short:

• Class 5 limitations: By definition, it has significant siting biases (shading, poor ventilation, local microclimate from trees/woodland and nearby buildings). This can introduce non-climatic trends or offsets — e.g., cooler daytime temperatures due to shade, warmer nights from reduced radiative cooling, damped wind effects, or altered humidity. These are problematic for detecting subtle long-term climate signals (e.g., regional warming trends). eoas.ubc.ca
• Homogeneity issues: Climate records require consistent exposure over decades. If the surrounding trees have grown, been pruned, or if land use changed, it creates artificial “breaks” or trends in the data that are hard to correct perfectly.
• WMO/CIMO standards: Official networks prioritize Class 1–3 sites (or well-documented higher classes with adjustments) for reference climate stations. Class 5 sites are typically flagged as unsuitable for broad-scale climatology without heavy quality control, homogenization, and metadata transparency.

Main Issues in Stagnant/Sheltered Air

• Poor ventilation — Stevenson screens rely on natural airflow through louvers to keep the air inside representative of the outside. In a heavily wind-sheltered spot (trees/woodland on multiple sides), under calm conditions (light winds), airflow inside the screen drops dramatically. This leads to:
  • Stagnant air that heats up more than surrounding air.
  • Reduced mixing, allowing localized heat buildup from any residual radiation or ground warmth.
• High solar insolation + shading interactions:
  • Even with some tree shading, on clear, high-insolation days the screen and immediate surroundings (grass, trees, cottage) can absorb and re-radiate heat.
  • In low wind, the screen itself can warm internally more than an open, breezy site. Studies show that insufficient ventilation in screens can cause positive biases (over-reading) in maximum temperatures, sometimes by 1–3°C or more depending on conditions.
  • Main Issues in Stagnant/Sheltered Air
  • Poor ventilation — Stevenson screens rely on natural airflow through louvers to keep the air inside representative of the outside. In a heavily wind-sheltered spot (trees/woodland on multiple sides), under calm conditions (light winds), airflow inside the screen drops dramatically. This leads to:
    • Stagnant air that heats up more than surrounding air.
    • Reduced mixing, allowing localized heat buildup from any residual radiation or ground warmth.
  • High solar insolation + shading interactions:

Overall Reliability for Maxima

• Under calm + sunny conditions: Least reliable. This is when biases are maximized. The recorded Tmax could be noticeably higher than at a well-exposed site nearby.
• Better conditions: More reliable on windy or overcast days, when ventilation improves and radiative effects are reduced.
• Typical real-world impact: For amateur/garden sites like this, Tmax errors of +0.5 to +2°C (or occasionally more) are common in light wind/high sun scenarios compared to Class 1–2 stations. Night-time minima (Tmin) are often biased the other way (too warm due to reduced radiative cooling).

And in notable conclusion and to confirm as I originally stated all of this is well known to meteorologists –

“This is a well-known limitation of sheltered screens — one reason professional networks avoid such locations for climate reference purposes.“

I consider it perfectly reasonable to state this site should never have been considered, even provisionally, for any record as all of the site characteristics will be known to the Met Office though quite probably not in the detail than I have given here. Lingwood is not the exception, with in the region of 120 Met Office sites being Class 5 junk status meeting not regulatory requirements whatsoever i.e .the one line requirements from CIMO – anyone’s garden can meet this!

2.6 Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C)
Site not meeting the requirements of class 4.

OTHER SITES THAT RECORDED HIGHER THAN LINGWOOD

It is important to realise that other sites recorded higher than Lingwood. The World Meteorological Organisation has a numbering system for those stations deemed worthy of reporting data to their international database. I quote the WMO numbers for all the operational sites I review and for others their UK only District County Network Number (DCNN) for non WMO reporting sites. Details for WMO03577 are shown below.from Weatherobs.com which collates data from the Met Office reports.

At 13:26 GMT 26th June 2026 WMO03577 Synoptic station at RAF Lakenheath posted a reading of 38°C. Surely not even the Met Office can deny this. They certainly have no problem proclaiming records from operational airfields – there are literally well over 120 of them. The previous 2 days records were variously recorded at Royal Naval Air Station (RNAS) Yeovilton, RNAS Merryfield, and RNAS Gosport. Anywhere else breaking records?

Remember the days of Ian McCaskill reporting from the Norwich Weather Centre announcing (in front of a green coloured screen marked with temperatures of 30 °C+) “On Monday even hotter – enjoy!” Notably the BBC recently did a “Verify” report claiming colour schemes had not dramatically changed to reds even almost black.

At 15:20 GMT a temperature of 38°C was recorded at Norwich WMO03492 shown in the image above as “METAR: EGSH SYNOP: 03492”.

On the previous days of declared “records” other sites recorded higher than the “records” claimed for those days, notably RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.

So what on earth is going on here, don’t the Met Office want to proclaim even higher recorded temperatures from their own official sites?

The answer is very simple and confirmed by the Met Office themselves – many of their sites are deemed NOT suitable for climate reporting and should NOT be used for that purpose as detailed in my report of Plymouth:Kinterbury Point. {Again note the big “H” as in Helipad in the imagery and remember all those RNAS sites.}

“This is a customer-only site and as such is used to inform the customer’s specific decisions rather than being used for public records. As this site is used to provide very specific customer information, which is not climate related, it therefore does not have a CIMO rating and should not be available for our external website for extremes. The issue has now been resolved and will no longer be seen in any of our products“

Thank you for making us aware of this.

Nicky

Nicola Maxey BSc (Hons) Senior Press Officer”

Thus by the same Met Office logic that many of their own sites are not suitable for “Climate Reporting” so neither should any Class 3,4, and especially completely unregulated Class 5 sites. These sites are only recording distinct micro climates and do not reflect the wider environment. Lingwood:Strumpshaw Hill is no more representative of the real world climate than any one else’s back garden hobby – in reality I would trust many parked car thermometers in an open field rather than Ernest Hoyos’ pastime. For a government agency, from whose data the entirety of Net Zero (and many other) policies, are derived’ , to operate in such an unscientific and cavalier attitude in producing distorted and then sensationalised low grade data is completely inexcusable.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2026/07/01/lingwoodstrumpshaw-hill-addendum-when-is-a-record-not-a-record-when-its-from-an-official-met-office-site-or-maybe-not/