Chillingham Barns No 2 DCNN2055 – A station on the move, a mistake of mine, and what will be the consequences?

55.529141, -1.920315 Met Office CIMO Classification not known. Installed 1/7/2025

Firstly a confession – my original report of Chillingham Barns involved a case of mistaken identity – partly! The site I previously reviewed was in fact definitely Chillingham Barns which, by the date of my publication on the 17/7/2025, had in fact closed down. It was replaced by Chillingham Barns Number 2 just 16 days prior thus the daily “extreme” I noted to the original site was, I presume, from the new number 2 site. The cause of this move and possible consequences should be quite interesting to follow.

The original site had supplied manually observed temperature readings from 1998 and was then automated at the end of 2012. The 14 years of manual readings were reliabley taken and the site deemed worthy of the expense of automation despite being in such a terribly shade compromised Class 5 rated location. So why the relocation? The latest data release from the Met Office archives uncovers 2025 data …..and this:

The only reason the Met Office closed this site was because the land owner requested they do, forget the small fact it was formally assessed as Class 5S JUNK. It would still be in use had a request to move not occurred.

And then the admission “MOVED TO A BETTER EXPOSED LOCATION” which required both renaming and renumbing in accordance with their requirement to alter when there is a significant change in measured climatology.

“Where the distance moved is large, or, where the exposure at the new site is sufficiently different that a detectable impact on the measured climatology is judged likely, it is appropriate that observations from the new site are labelled by a different set of identifiers.“

Considering that statement and the fact that just “149M MOVE SW” (i.e 149 metres to the south west) indicates that such a short move has effected a very significant change indeed and is “better exposed”.

The reasons for the landowner request are not known and it would be unwise for me to offer any conjecture. What I do feel is reasonable for me to comment on is that there is NO OVERLAPPING DATA between the two sites publicly available. The data for Chillingham Barns original site ends 1/7/2025 the same day that data starts from the Number 2 site. Logic would state that in order to determine whether the two sites display a different climatology that a set of comparative readings should have been taken to confirm that view. Simple “Transparency” principles should require these be available (if they exist as they should) and I will ask he Met Office if there actually are any. It is, of course, possible that so bad was the original location that the Met Office did not feel comparison was required BUT that would be an open admission of 27 years worth of data from a totally unsatisfactory site.

I will keep monitoring this new site out of personal interest as an indicator of just how much the data drifts from the old one based on hopefully better siting. As it currently stands the above location is only from Met Office supplied coordinates and the site cannot yet be 100% accurately identified. with regard to any reconstruction of a new