Brizlee Wood DCNN 2076 – Why would the Met Office make this a climate reporting station?

55.41791 1.76815 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4S Installed 29/4/2021

The first noticeable thing about Brizlee Wood is its unusual location at “Remote Radar Head Brizlee Wood” and the second point is its being so recently installed less than 4 years ago. Quite why the Met Office is assessing this site for climate reporting purposes (they are under no obligation to do so, many are not) is very puzzling or perhaps there are “motivations”.

Being a radar dome the site needs the ability to “see” the largest possible area hence it is located at a high point in the local countryside at the very top of the steep escarpment. The very closely packed contours indicate the steepness of the surrounding slopes.

Of course this immediately classifies the site as “Undesirable” by the Met Office’s own site requirements which state “Top of a hill or steep escarpment where winds will be unrepresentative of the wider area.” Furthermore a good location should meet the following

Ideal site

• Level ground.
• No trees; buildings, or steep ground nearby that might influence the measurements.

Clearly Brizlee Wood is very poor on all counts and looks like this with the screen to the right of the dome in a very bleak but also very high security location.

That this site is actually given any CIMO rating seems a bit odd as it is clearly unlikely to be representative of anywhere other than this isolated hilltop. Or perhaps there is a reason hidden in that Wikipedia link above where it states:

“The area the base is located in recorded the strongest winds during Storm Arwen in November 2021. Wind speeds at Brizlee Wood were registered at 98 miles per hour (158 km/h).”

Again there is no issue at all with recording wind speeds in extremely exposed locations but the suggestion of “record chasing” here is hard to deny. If wind speeds were deemed worthy of recording, again this should not be considered a problem and it clearly was an instant success in achieving records on that count. However, adding temperature data to the national historic temperature record from such an exposed location runs against all representative siting requirements.

The Brizlee Wood site is one to definitely exclude from any temperature reconstruction.