CET End of Month Adjustments

Posted on by

When we have some exceptional weather I like to check out the Central England Temperature (CET) record for the month (or year) in question and make comparisons with historic data which I have imported into spreadsheets from the Met Office’s CET pages.

The CET record goes back to 1659, so the historical significance of an exceptionally cold or warm spell – a month, season, year or longer – can be judged over a reasonably long period. Long-term trends, such as the gradual, irregular warming that has occurred since the late 17th century, are, of course, also readily apparent. The Met Office bases press releases and suchlike on records for the UK as a whole which go back only to 1910.

The Met Office update the CET for the current month on a daily basis, which is very handy for seeing how things are going.

After watching the CET carefully during a few extreme months – December 2010 and March 2013 come to mind – I noticed that there seems to be a downwards adjustment at the end of the month. I speculated about the reasons for the apparent correction to the figures a week or so ago:

“…I’ve noticed the CET is sometimes adjusted downwards before the final figure for the month is published, a few days into the next month. I don’t know why this is. Maybe the data for more remote (and colder) weather-stations is slow to come in. Or maybe it’s to counter for the urban heat island effect, to ensure figures are calibrated over the entire duration of the CET.”

and, as I mentioned earlier, today emailed the Met Office to ask.

I received a very prompt reply, and the first of the possible explanations I came up with is in fact correct. My phrase “more remote” makes it sound like the data is still being collected by 18th century vicars and landed gentry, but in fact there is a bias in the daily CET for the month to date due to the timing of availability of data:

“Not all weather stations send us their reports in real time, i.e. every day, and so for some stations we have to wait until after the end of the month before [complete] data are available.”

It must simply be that the stations that send in the data later tend to be in colder areas (at least in winter when I’ve noticed the end of month adjustment) – perhaps they really are “more remote”!