The oldest MIDAS climate stations

[xmetman]

After a considerable struggle I've managed to piece together the latest list of stations that appear in the Met Office MIDAS database. 

MIDAS is the Met Office’s permanent archive of surface observations from conventional in situ instrumentation.

You can't download the complete list as a single file as far as I can tell, but you can interrogate the list from the CEDA site, that's what I did.

Here is a list of the oldest although you will only find monthly data and not daily climate data for the majority of these.

You can download the daily data from Armagh as far as I know, but unfortunately I've never managed to access the Oxford series, despite numerous requests by emails, who knows, perhaps Weather Rescue can get them to release it.

There are currently 3,322 active in a list of 17,780 stations as of January 2018.

[John Hall]

I'm wondering about Stornoway Airport and Wick Airport. Obviously the airports weren't there when the stations opened in 1873, and it seems unlikely that the stations would have been in just the right locations not to require moving to be of maximum use to the airfields when they began operating.

[eddyweather]

Hi John

Many greetings from the Stornoway desert (really! we're on our 22nd consecutive day without any measureable precip here: It's a 1-in-30 year event)...

Now, you are correct... the Stornoway Airport record stretches back to 1942~ only, when it was opened during the war. Previously, thre have been at least 5 or 6 different sites, all around Stornoway town (some 2-3 miles inland). Infact, the site has even moved around the Airport at lot, from sandy frost hollows near the NATO buildings, to its current site on top of a dune.

It is all a bit of a detective story, and one for the homogenisation folks, but I'm getting there slowly- as it's one of longest continuous records in the UK (the records back to at least 1855 at Lews Castle). Unfortunately, most daily stuff before 1930 is undigitised... and contrary to popular mainland belief - Stornoway does has considerable local variation in climate in both precip and air temperature (see Graham, 2012)

All the best, Eddy 

Ref: Graham, E., 2012. A Hebridean frost hollow made visible. Weather, 67(2), pp.45-47.