By Paul Homewood
Cambridge University Botanic Garden measured 38.7C (101.7F) on Thursday beating the previous UK record of 38.5C (101.3F), set in Kent in 2003.
A Met Office official was sent to check the equipment before verifying the new record on Monday.
Staff working at the garden on Thursday tweeted: "No wonder we all felt as if we’d melted."
Daily temperatures have been measured by the weather station at the site in the south of the city since 1904.
Cambridge University Botanic Garden director, Beverley Glover, said: "We are really pleased that our careful recording of the weather, something that we’ve been doing every day for over 100 years at the Botanic Garden, has been useful to the Met Office in defining the scale of this latest heatwave.
"Our long history of weather recording is very important to researchers analysing climate change.
"However, we can’t help but feel dismay at the high temperature recorded and the implication that our local climate is getting hotter, with inevitable consequences for the plants and animals around us."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49157898
In fact, Cambridge’s new record tells us very little about “climate change”, but an awful lot about the Urban Heat Island Effect, or UHI.
Just to recap, the Botanical Gardens are situated in the middle of the city of Cambridge, which at the last count had a population of 123,000. Furthermore, the winds on the day in question were from the south east, meaning that the air reaching the Gardens had blown right across a heavily built up area.
The claimed new record is only 0.2C higher than the previous one for Faversham, yet the latter is little more than a village. The difference in UHI between the two is certainly likely to be much more than 0.2C.
We might also consider that there is a second official Met Office site in Cambridge, at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB). This, as can be seen below, is away from the city, although gradually being encroached upon by developments.
Cambridge NIAB
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/homr/#ncdcstnid=30110845&tab=LOCATIONS
The NIAB site only registered 38.1C. Given that there is no other significant differences in siting between the two, it can only be the effect of UHI which explains why the Botanical Gardens were so much hotter last week.
To cap it all, there are two large buildings close to the weather station, the Sainsbury Laboratory to the NW, and the Plant Growth Facility to the north. They were built in 2011 and 2004 respectively, and clearly could be influencing the local micro climate.
The Sainsbury lab, for instance, houses 120 staff, so the heat footprint must be significant.
The late Tim Channon took the screenprint below of the Botanical Gardens site back in 2008, for a Tallbloke story. As you can see, the Lab is still under construction.
But note the radius scale which Tim added, set to 100m. Clearly both buildings are well within 100m, probably around 30m.
https://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/image-424.jpg
The World Meteorological Association has strict guidelines for siting classifications of weather stations. They have five classes for thermometers, and Class 1 is reserved for the most reliable sites. These are the criteria:
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/IMOP/SitingClassif/CIMO_Guide_2014_en_I_1-2_Annex_1B.pdf
Both buildings are well within 100m, and certainly occupy much more than 10% of the area.
So we know that the Botanical Gardens site is at best Class 2. Very few sites are perfect, but surely only high quality, Class 1 sites should be used for climatological purposes, particularly of this sort?
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July 30, 2019 at 08:45AM
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