Frittenden DCNN 5332 – Inconvenient Truths.

51.14169 0.59570 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Allegedly Installed 10/2/2011

This site regularly appears in the daily Met Office listings as recording both the regional and national highest temperature. Despite being a lowly Class 4 site in a back garden a surprising amount of credibility is given to this and other similarly amateurish appearing sites. Why “amateurish”? Because that is exactly what it is.

The reasons why such sites have been brought into use by the Met Office have often puzzled me. The Met Office tries to portray an image of “high tech” and “cutting edge” scientific integrity and computing excellence but the actual reality is far from their self portrayal. Where does Frittenden come into this?

Firstly why “install” in 2011 such a low grade site as this? Answer: They didn’t!……. Although the CEDA archive suggests a “start” date for Frittenden for Met Office purposes it predated that by a long way.

In the same way I discovered a pattern emerging at Baintown, the Google Street view image of Frittenden dates to prior the quoted start date.

Aerial imagery from Google Earth Pro indicates a late 20th century origin possibly before the 1990s. This site was originally a private weather station run by a local amateur meteorologist. This begs the question of why the Met Office chose to “adopt” this site.

Frittenden site is under 4 miles from the long established site at Goudhurst opened in 1934, just 12 miles from the flagship site, Class 1, East Malling (1925) , 17 miles from Faversham (1957) and 19 miles from Hastings (1934). It is important to note that none of these stations recorded within half a degree of Frittenden on the 27th November highlighted above. In similar fashion to Maulds Meaburn it is hard to identify any real meteorological imperative to adopt an additional low grade site in this area.

A sceptic might conclude one possible reason for this adoption is that this weather station certainly appears to “run hot” and – again much like Wiggonholt and Santon Downham – almost on demand. In close proximity to this official Met Office site there is a Private Weather Station (PWS) that reports on an archived hourly basis to the Met Office Weather Observations website . N.B. this is not the official Met Office Station – perversely the “official” site does NOT report its hourly readings on official Met Office websites and its readings are not freely publicly available direct from the Met Office.

It is quite apparent from imagery that the official station is in a poor quality, artificially sheltered rear garden site close to a poly tunnel with regularly changing vegetation and NO secure compound at all as at Banff. Conversely, the nearby PWS is noted as “Situated 1 Mile North of Frittenden village in the open countryside” A regularly quoted reason from the Met Office for not using PWS data is (somewhat ironically) the lack of quality control and regulation. They also claim that PWS use non standard equipment not in Stevenson Screens and likely to over record temperature. Whenever the Frittenden official site records the regional or national highs it is noticeable that the Frittenden PWS consistently records lower temperatures as it did on the 27th November.

Despite the Met Office declining to freely supply data from their official site, it can be third party viewed at

https://weatherobs.com/

So who actually runs this Frittenden website?……..”Kent’s amateur weather man, Lester Gosbee….” Not only does he offer detailed whole monthly weather forecasts , he also offers “If you would like a free copy of my next six monthly weather forecast…….” Is he really claiming he can predict half a year in advance?

A possible clue to the inclusion of Frittended comes in this article of 2010 (prior to the Met Office adopting his site) regarding the ridiculous Gravesend site.

Further illumination comes from this commentary of the Gravesend closure from the now “promoted” owner of the Frittenden now “Official” back garden.

{Clearly Nicky Maxey never got the WMO headline mantra  “every fraction of a degree temperature increase has a real impact on our lives and our planet.”}

Yet another local news article regarding the closure of Gravesend (the local media seemed obsessed with it) also revealed potential “motivations” for having a local weather station that will additionally be raised regarding the 2003 record setting Faversham shortly.

“Gravesham councillor Mick Wenban (Con) was shocked to learn the news.He said: “It’s a real shame because it always put Gravesend on the map by recording the highest temperatures in the country. It’s been there as long as I can remember.” {Talkshop comment: the site ran from 1995 to 2018}

The “famous for five minutes” tourist brochure “hottest evah!” record claims seem to justify poor quality inaccurate sites.

From all the above, at Frittenden the Met Office has taken on an insecure and low quality, inaccurate back garden site with only a small range of equipment run by a very vocal amateur meteorologist who claims proficiency in forecasting both monthly and even up to 6 monthly ahead. It is in close proximity to long standing sites that already geographically cover the area well……and it gets “on the map” regularly.

This is not acceptable practise by the Met Office. Frittenden should have remained the amateur site it always was. I find it disgraceful that the £multi million taxpayer funded Met Office operates so demonstrably poorly.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2024/11/28/frittenden-dcnn-5332-inconvenient-truths/