Central England Temperature Update (part 5)
Today I continue my probing into the shoddy station sample that goes to make up the HadCET record
A quick word about my climate-related Substack notes… I use them now and then to pop out rapid bake analyses, so please do check on them from time to time. Given the amount of excrement being shovelled on heatwave deaths I’ll be running a free-to-view series on this starting Wednesday 22nd July. And now back to the studio…
Disappointment is the word.
There you are extolling the virtues of the world’s longest running temperature record only to find it has more holes than my garden sieve!
We’ve got a shortlist of eight stations that are supposed to make the HadCET data record what it is (Radcliffe, Rothamsted, Ross-on-Wye, Stonyhurst, Malvern, Squires Gate, Ringway, Pershore College), so it occurred to me to count how many of these eight were operative on any one day, then convert these daily counts into percentages that could be averaged over the year to get a feel for overall completeness of the data record.
What came out of this shocked me somewhat, for the maximum daily count only managed to reach four operative stations out of the eight at best! TBH I had to cross-check my files a few times to ensure I hadn’t made a blooper. I hadn’t, and 50% was thus the best capture rate we could expect.
Herewith a handy little time series plot that reveals how the annual mean capture rate varies from just 12.5% (just one station operative) to 50% of stations operative (largely driven by Rothamsted, Malvern, Squires Gate and Ringway):
