Quite a lot of things annoy me about the Met Office as regulars readers of this blog will have no doubt picked up over the years. One of the worst traits that they have, is when talking about climate statistics for the UK, they use the following phrase:
“When records began in 1910…”
When you know full well that detailed records existed much earlier than that. What they ought to say, which is much close to the truth, is:
“We’ve only managed to digitize records back as far back as 1910, and even though we hold detailed climate records that go as far back as the early 1850’s, we can’t be bothered to do anything with because we’ve already spent the money on a big new shiny supercomputer.”
There is a classic example of that on their website today concerning the occurrence of frost in the UK during April.
“Detailed frost recording in the UK began in 1961”. What a shocking admission for the national weather service of a country that was established in 1854. That must mean all of the sterling work done by meteorologists before 1961 was all in vain and a complete waste of time. What happened to all the temperature records between 1854 and 1960? At random, I picked out a copy of the DWR for January 1917 just to see if there were any extreme temperatures reported back then, and unsurprisingly there they were, for thirty-three stations across the British Isles (fig 2). Of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because like today, many more climatological returns from stations remain unpublished and go straight into the archives.
Absolutely no excuse
The Met Office were one of the first big users of computers and still are, here is a list of the computers that they’ve used down through the years (fig 3). I realise that looking forward with NWP model is vital, but so is looking back, and treasuring the climate data that previous generations have made since 1854. But why is it that climate records have always seemed to have been neglected, and climate data limited and inaccessible when there seems to have been no lack of one of the world’s fastest supercomputers at their disposal?
The Met Office have the resources, both in terms of staff and computing power to digitize the rainfall, temperature and sunshine records of the past and extend the gridded data series that they already have, back at least 50 years before 1910, but they have chosen to leave that wealth of old climate data untapped, and for the life of me, I just can’t understand why?