Met Office Historic Weather Station Data – “What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive”

The Met Office publishes the above web page showing data from what it claims:

“Monthly data are available for a selection of long-running historic stations. The series typically range from 50 to more than 100 years in length.”

I will now demonstrate how if these Met office’s claims were made by a private business enterprise, they would be banned and certainly would not be permitted by the Advertising Standards Authority. I will personally go further and state I consider many of the claims made are Disinformation. For now, I will focus on one weather station for this specific post and return to the multiple issues further in future publications. This is the case of the small print deception, the grotesque distortions this can produce and how the Met Office cleverly uses such data to push a false narrative..

Regular readers will recall my report on Whitby weather station(s), in which I highlighted the seamless bonding of separate datasets from distinctly different sites into one grossly misleading sequence. The Met Office had taken one coastal weather station’s digitally archived data (The Coastguard Station) from a period from 1961 up to 2002 and then simply continued the readings from 2002 onwards from an inland site that actually had data from 1936.

Stop and consider exactly what has gone on here. Data from the clifftop Coastguard Station has been used from 1961 to 2002
and then the representation continued using completely different data from a site at a 20 metre different elevation, 1.6 kilometres away inland and with a completely different climatology. Quite bizarrely there was no real need to do any of this, the site used from 2002 actually predated the coastguard sites available data by 22 years thus it was actually easier to simply use the inland site’s data all the way through. There had to be a reason to bond datasets when the reality is that no such action was actually required for Historic Station data presentation.

Any normal reader checking that Met office web page would surely just be looking for the data and assume that the provenance was good. I invite readers to try this themselves. How many people will actually study the small print (albeit at the top) that looks like this.

Yes it does offer approximate digital coordinates of the two sites used but from the main page one is simply guided towards “Whitby” and who is really likely to query the actual locations apart from someone like me. Most people trust their taxpayer funded authorities to be trustworthy and, in the case of the Met Office, scientifically accurate.

As ever, though, examining the details reveals just how misleading such data can become. In 2026 the Met Office is blitzing the public with comparisons between the summer of 1976 and our current summer of 2026. Where better to go for “evidence” of just how much “Climate Change” has “forced” our current weather to be so much higher than before than the ever trustworthy Met Office and its archives? I shall prove it for you myself. Here is the data for JULY 1976 at “Whitby” from the horse’s mouth.

There you have July 1976 with an average daily maximum for the month of 19.9 °C

And the comparison with the “just in” data for July 2026 is 22.0 °C (the “Provisonal” just means data not yet 100% verified but they will be)

So there you have it , proof positive of a huge 2.1 °C increment guaranteed to demonstrate catastrophic “global boiling” warranting the Prime Minister to convene a Cobra meeting and all manner of drastic societal change. Anyone objecting to the most draconian actions is a “climate denier”, swivel eyed loon and should be locked up.

Looking a bit deeper beneath the “Mannesque” dataset bonding and what do we actually find. Firstly I decided to derive for myself the average daily high from the original raw data of the Whitby Coastguard station of 1976 to see what figure I came up with. Anyone can do this – simply tot up the highs for each day and divide by 31. Here are the numbers daily highs are in column “I” and daily lows are in Column .”J”

There is one proviso that the highest number of the two daily readings should be used. It is not difficult to do though a tad time consuming. I made the total 617.7 which when divided by 31 came to a rounded 19.9°C and exactly in accordance with the Met office data ………for the coastguard station site.

However to get a genuine comparison with the 2026 quoted figure which comes from the Inland site, I have to derive an average from the 1976 data for that site that the Met office has conveniently ignored. Here that data is in a slightly different format. these once daily readings require a “throwback” mechanism. The daily high recordeded at 09:00 on the ist July is credited to the day before i.e. the 30 June thus data is required including the 1st August to get a comparison.

The first thing to note is that this inland site is much warmer recording than the clifftop coastguard station. My total came to 710.7 deriving a 31 day average maximum temperature of………..22.9°C and of course 0.9°C warmer in 1976 when like for like, apples with apple comparisons are made.

There we have it, by misuse of data and making false comparisons the Met office has shown a specific warmer figure when the reality was the reverse way around and everyone must believe them because they are the sole verification of their own contrived figures and marking their own homework.

Am I just picking on one case? Emphatically No. There a huge numbers of discrepancies in this data presentation. Another brief example anyone can try is to go to the data for Ross-on-Wye and check the comparisons between 2026 and 1976. These show similar increments to Whitby, despite the simple fact that Ross-on-Wye weather station produced ZERO data between 1975 and 1985 – a ten year gap through which the Met office simply made up the numbers but covered their backs by putting an asterisk alongside the fiction.

Ross-on-Wye Revisited. – 1976 and all that.

This is no longer a case of inadvertent mistakes on the part of the Met Office, this can only be described as deliberate disinformation.

Whitby School playing field site from Prospect Hill.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2026/08/13/met-office-historic-weather-station-data-what-a-tangled-web-we-weave-when-first-we-practice-to-deceive/