Bank Newton No 2 DCNN 4030 – Another Motherwell?

53.97558 -2.13376 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 5 & Satisfactory Installed 1/1/1972 but temperature readings only archived from 1/2/2006.

A neighbour told me he had seen a terrible weather station about 10 years ago on a barging trip but could only remember the rough area as in North Yorkshire and that it was by a lock gate. Always up for a challenge I set about looking and found a genuinely terrible site. “That’s it….piles of building rubble all around it” he confirmed on seeing the street view image.

Although site records claim an installation date of 1972 it was only as a rain gauge site. Temperature records start from 1/10/2006 and the screen does not appear on historic aerial images before then. What this indicates is yet another modern site paying little regard to being a representative location for historic temperature record purposes. There may be other reasons for a siting a weather station here (a rain gauge by canal and river is fairly obvious) but I am unsure why any temperature readings are of any merit outside immediate hydrology purposes.

The site clearly fails all distance measurements required to meet even Class 4 and has to be classed 5.

The roadways (with apparent regular vehicle movements) and particularly walling are clearly problems, indeed the canal and all its site modifications themselves can be seen as negative issues.

However, over and above the question of why the Met office chooses to include such low grade sites to contribute to its historic climate record is the issue of ongoing maintenance of these sites. The one-off dated “street view” images above indicate “Jumbo Bags” of building materials literally dumped alongside the screen – this conforms to my neighbour’s original comments about “piles of rubble” on a different occasion. “Google Earth Pro” historic images, though, reveal a very enigmatic history. Many show almost pristine surroundings, others more akin to a building site obviously indicative of a “working” site appropriate to a canal lock. However, most striking is the infringement on the original site of a new vehicular route – the 2008 image below shows the recently installed screen.

Whilst the 2018 image indicates the new route and more “cramped” nature of the screen’s surroundings.

Subsequent images show further building development to the east of the screen, more extensive tree growth leading to significant shading effects and overall a general degradation of the quality of the site.

Overall another modern poor quality site. The entire area seems to be reminiscent of the Motherwell: Strathclyde Park – the only thing missing is probably the ice cream van (as below)!