Massive Cover-up Launched by U.K. Met Office to Hide its 103 Non-Existent Temperature Measuring Stations

 WUWT

Last month, the Daily Sceptic highlighted the practice at the U.K. Met Office of inventing temperature averages from over 100 non-existent measuring stations. Helpfully, the Met Office went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites. Following massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of the Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office has amended its ludicrous claims. The move has not been announced in public, needless to say, since drawing attention to this would open a pandora’s box and run the risk of subjecting all the Met Office temperature claims to wider scrutiny. Instead, the Met Office has discreetly renamed its “U.K. climate averages” page as “Location-specific long-term averages”.   .....As a result, Sanders discovered from a freedom of information request that 103 of the 302 sites marked on the climate averages listing – over a third of the total – no longer existed. Subsequently, Sanders sought further information about the methodology used to supply data for both Folkestone and Dover. In reply, the Met Office said it was unable to supply details of the observing sites requested “as this is not recorded information”. It did however disclose that for non-existent stations “we use regression analysis to create a model of the relationship between each station and others in the network”. This generates an estimate for each month when the station is not operating. Each “estimate” is said to be based on data from six other stations, chosen because they are “well correlated” with the target station."