All data reported by these sites is stored in a permanent archive providing robust and reliable observations that are vital to climate science. The data also helps inform climate policy, and the long-term partnerships between these sites and the Met Office has resulted in additional information about the observations for the majority of records.
As such, historical understanding of any changes at the sites, and types of instrumentation used, all help to ensure an underlying quality and consistency of the records. Over the past century, our centennial sites have captured information on all of the major UK weather events that have affected the UK, from the exceptionally harsh winters of and , the drought of and the Great Storm of Data collected reflects the regional realities of those occasions, as well as providing a memory bank of more localised weather.
All these sites are being recognised for their contribution with a plaque celebrating their achievement. There are many other sites with long and dedicated records within the UK and their contribution is crucial to the way that we observe and record the climate around the UK.
It is hoped that the continuation of this scheme can lead to further sites being awarded this status in future years. While Armagh Observatory was founded in , its meteorological records were started in and have continued uninterrupted ever since.
The Armagh record forms the longest run of meteorological data in Northern Ireland and one of the longest daily records in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. Data from onwards is held in the Met Office database. Temperature and pressure were recorded from the start, and rainfall has been continuously recorded here since A Stevenson Screen was installed in , providing a recognised environment for temperature measurements from this date onwards.
In , Armagh was established as one of only five first-order stations in the British Isles at that time, taking continuous or hourly readings. The station changed from a first order station to a second order station in , taking daily observations at and often also at GMT.
To this day, the site is hosted by Armagh Observatory and Planetarium and manual measurements are still taken at 9am GMT everyday. Support from the Northern Ireland Government allowed an automatic weather station to be installed by Met Office engineers in to ensure that this record continues into the future. JLE Dreyer, the 4 th Director of the Armagh Observatory, standing beside the weather station in front of the Observatory building in On the roof can be seen a Robinson Cup Anemometer, as invented by the 3 rd Director, Romney Robinson following his recording of the great storm on in the Armagh weather log.
Established in on an excellent site in open parkland, the station was moved in to an area of kitchen garden. All the records for Balmoral are held by the National Records of Scotland. Historically the observer at the station was always the head gardener, usually assisted by the other gardeners. And there were some very long serving head gardeners indeed! Often the role of observers became a family affair. One gardener, Alex Stuart, helped the previous head gardener to collect observations before rising to the position of head gardener himself in Sadly he died during World War II and so his brother took over his position as head gardener and continued to take observations until his retirement in Eskdalemuir Observatory was established in to record geomagnetic observations.
The Met Office says this is the only reliable one and it gives a picture of the UK as a whole. But if records go back less than years, can we really set much store by so-called freak events such as the floods this summer? The fact that we do irritates Philip Eden, a weather historian. It is not unprecedented. Prior to , temperature measurements were made with instruments like thermometers.
The oldest continuous temperature record is the Central England Temperature Data Series, which began in , and the Hadley Centre has some measurements beginning in , but there are too few data before for scientists to estimate average temperatures for the entire planet.
Data from earlier years are reconstructed from proxy records like tree rings, pollen counts, and ice cores.
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