58.06344 -5.01612 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Installed 1/9/2007
Resallach is one of a cluster of weather stations in north west mainland Scotland with a combination of 9 sites running from Aultbea in the south to the most northerly at Altnaharra. This area is essential to forecasting in providing early information of advancing weather fronts. Scotland tends to have a much higher percentage of manual reporting stations than England and Wales but in this area the majority of stations are automatically reporting. Resallach started its recent life as manual in 2007 but was automated less than 4 years later – most odd for what is notably a very poorly located station.
The Met Office portrays itself as a high technology organisation of the utmost scientific rigour and integrity. The public assumes all those weather stations house sophisticated instruments, carefully maintained as depicted in the Met Office websites as above. Whilst the view below is a wonderful example of rugged Scottish scenic beauty, I doubt many of the public would expect the little white box in the centre was a key part of the Met Office’s network.
Locating weather stations in such sparsely populated areas is never likely to be an easy task and it is easy to see why so many had to be manual recording in private gardens. However, that really should not be a reason to relax basic standards – this site is on a significant slope in the extreme corner of the site close alongside the boundary fencing presumably to shelter from the wind. The Met Office assesses this site as the lowest possible Class 5 for obvious reasons. This earlier and better close up below shows the close board fence just 1 metre from the screen.
The Royal Meteorological Society produced a siting guide for Guide for amateur meteorologists just 2 years after Resallach was originally installed.
Resallach does not meet even the minimum requirements that the RMETS recommend which makes it all the more surprising this site was chosen for automation. The reading record was, rather unusually for a back garden site, not particularly good. The CEDA archive remarks section notes 105 “Missing Data” events in the 3 years 9 months of manual operation with most of them reading as below.
Closer inspection of those manual years indicates further frequent omissions of either tmax or tmin or both and renders a daily average impossible to calculate. This is particularly disappointing and I often wonder at the potential accuracy level of reading observation from such potentially not fully committed observers. Columns I and J are tmax and tmin respectively.
Whether for lack of reading consistency or other strategic forecasting readings, the site was automated in 2011 but still only producing a very narrow range of readings with notably no anemometer which is highly relevant for forecasting purposes. Even more surprisingly this automation did not ensure entirely perfect readings. In 2023 there were no readings from 2nd April to 4th November. In 2022 no readings for almost all of December. in 2021 there were 37 missing days. The record is patchy at best throughout the site’s history. Here is an example:
In summary, Resallach is in such a poor site that were it an amateur hobbyists owned one it would be dismissed out of hand as unsuitable. It has been automated for a limited number of uses but does not seem to be any more reliable than its previous partial manual reading phase. To repeat a question I often make – if the general public were aware of how unfit for purpose so many of Met Office sites actually are, would they be willing to accept all the “consequences” of the conclusions drawn from such observations?
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June 7, 2025 at 08:14AM
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