Lapford DCNN8801 – Another example of rural sites being inexplicably marked down. Is this really worse than an airport?

50.863101, -3.809545 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Temperature records from 24th July 2009

Lapford is a small village in mid Devon and lies 14 miles west of Tiverton / 16 miles northwest of Exeter. The Met Office itself describes the weather station on its WOW site as “RURAL EDGE OF VILLAGE IN MID-DEVON, EXPOSED ON A WEST-NORTH-WEST FACING SLIGHT SLOPE.” This is one of the many rural sites that I feel the Met Office marks down harshly for no obvious significant reason in stark contrast to many urban locations rated better that are quite obviously highly compromised. I have been unable to find a ground level image so will analyse from other online aspects.

Firstly, there is the question of natural surroundings typical of the area. The farm buildings to the east could br a problem in acheiving Class 1 so I opted to delineate the 30 metres area (old Met Office 100 feet stipulation) for Class 2. There are no problems whatsoever within this area. The trees to all compass points are outside this area and the farm builiding equally distant.

The land is currently grazing pasture so I opted to check its use over time in the past from Google Earth Pro. This revealed not only continuous use as pastureland all the way back to 2002 but also that the weather station was there back then predating from when the Met Office shows archived readings starting in 2009. This indicated this is an adopted amateur’s weather station as part of the Volunteer Climate Network. This image from 2002 also indicates the station had been enclosed – very commendable indeed for an amateur meteorologist’s set up.

Investigating that issue of the “slight slope” I looked firstly at the Ordnance Survey sheet and then identified some spot heghts on the 30 metre perimeter from elevation finder.

The perimeter points indicated a fall of 2.5 metres/8 feet over a distance of approx 60 metres / 200 feet equating to a 1 in 25 slope. I doubt this should make any measureable difference to temperature readings in this location.

As this is a manually observed site I checked the observations records for any ommisions. This is an impeccably well observed station with missing readings an extreme rarity. In the last 3 years that I checked there were a total of just 7 dropped readings and the file sizes for all previous years indicate a full set of readings taken.

All aspects I checked indicate this is actually a very good Class 2 site that is being well cared for. Why the Met office marks this down so low to Class 4 quite baffles me. Rather than quote literally dozens of examples of other locations the Met Office rates better than Lapford , I will simply refer to the image below of a site the Met Office assesses as Class 3 and allegedly much much representative of the natural environment than Lapford. I leave it to readers to consider the motivations that seem to be at play.