40.3°C UK Temperature ‘Record’ from Halfway Down Airport Runway Enters the Long-Term Archive
by Chris Morrison 27 March 2025 9:00 AM
How we laughed when the Met Office declared a UK temperature record of 40.3°C at 3.12pm on July 19th 2022, halfway down the runway at RAF Coningsby at a time when it later transpired three typhoon jets were coming into land. Mirth was unconfined when the ‘record’ that stood for 60 seconds as the temperature briefly spiked by 0.6°C was later declared by the Met Office to be a “milestone in UK climate history”. Now it appears that another nearby and busy RAF station in Lincolnshire is getting in on the ‘joke’ record business. It appears that RAF Waddington also declared a record high on the same day of 40.3°C and this has been entered into the archive run by the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA). This is despite the Met Office itself calling the Waddington reading ‘suspect’ due to an application of weedkiller. Quite why this should disqualify a temperature recording four feet from the ground when jet exhaust does not is unclear, and the excuse has a touch of the ‘dog ate my homework’ about it.
Weedkiller or not, the 40.3°C recording at Waddington has found its way into the Met Office Midas Open dataset. This is said to be one of CEDA’s most popular datasets, containing historical meteorological observations back from the present to the 18th century. Popular with future scientists no doubt who will be able to point to two 40.3°C records, happy to disregard any airport heat corruptions and the even more severe warmth that seems to emanate from an application of paraquat.
Shout out again to citizen super-sleuth Ray Sanders who is undertaking a forensic review of the Met Office’s UK temperature stations (existent and non-existent) along with an examination of the operation’s published readings and data. He recently queried the archived Waddington recording and was told that “at the time” the data point was suspect due to the weedkiller treatment. He notes that the Met Office is clearly in a quandary since it has claimed the reading is suspect but the numbers passed into the archive can only have come from it. Any doubts about Coningsby can be hand-waved away with “‘peer-reviewed scientific’ data proving that such a high temperature was also ‘recorded’ elsewhere”, suggests Sanders.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/03/27/40-3c-uk-temperature-record-from-halfway-down-airport-runway-enters-the-long-term-archive/
