56.214342 -3.4129058 Met Office CIMO Assessed CLASS 5 Installed 1/11/1967
Kinross lies to the west of the M90 on the shores of Loch Leven midway between Dunfermline to the south and Perth to the north. Kinross Golf Club has two courses, one of which is home to the weather station. As would be expected from the nature of this site, the Screen and surrounding areas are well kept and the observation record of this manual site is very good.
Again the issue here is with the nature of the site but this is now actually unclear. The CIMO list I was supplied by the Met Office was from February 2025 and the Kinross site was shown as Class 5. However on deeper research I have discovered the site was actually relocated 8/4/2024 and I cannot verify if the Class 5 assessment took the move into account though I would expect it did/should.
Notes in the CEDA archives indicate:
The headline image is the relocated new site. The original long term site is as below much nearer the building and obviously subject to heavy shading. As can be seen the current site is 30 metres to the south, south west but realistically is still prone to heavy shade from the east blocking morning sunshine.
A further somewhat ironic point is an earlier archive note from 2010 stating
: SUNSHINE RECORDER WAS ADJUSTED TO READ CORRECTLY. IT HAS UNKOWN HOW LONG IT HAD BEEN PORLY ADJUSTED” {Ed note: interesting spellings}
It is difficult to see how accurate any sunshine recorder could have been in the heavily shaded location former location.
Again this site is almost certainly producing “well correlated” data for use in concocting data for long closed weather stations in the “gridded cell” such as Perth (closed 25 years ago) and Kirkcaldy (closed in 1979 – a mere 49 years ago). In fact despite showing Kinross itself as the nearest “climate station” on selecting the site, no information is available.
Another useful tool (though now out of date presumably through lack of upkeep since 2018) is an interactive map of Met Office sites that the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) offers. For the Kinross area, on selecting daily temperature recording sites, it offers this map. clearly the Met Office has several sites locally and currently operational that they can choose from over the 60 year rolling climate averages period. Why they refuse to divulge which ones were used can presumably only be to avoid divulging that they use data from unacceptably poor sites such as Class 5 Kinross.
In conclusion, though whilst a well observed and instrumentally well maintained site, Kinross suffers from a poor location compromising its readings. not a suitable candidate from which to reconstruct a national historical temperature record.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
August 4, 2025 at 03:01PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 