Hot Record in Cardiff’s Bute Park

The Met Office announced that a new spring temperature record was set in Cardiff, but the measurement site is far from ideal. Bute Park’s weather station sits next to a large plant nursery, where greenhouses keep their own climate under strict control. The station’s surroundings add to the problem: concrete walls on three sides and dense vegetation on the fourth, both of which can trap heat. Because of these conditions, the site is rated as Class 5 by the World Meteorological Organisation, meaning it fails to meet basic standards for accurate weather data.Class 5 stations can show temperatures that are up to 5 °C higher than the true outdoor value. The WMO explicitly states that such “junk” sites should not be used for climate records or comparisons. Yet the Met Office is still using Bute Park’s readings to declare record temperatures, which raises questions about the reliability of the data. If a location is not representative of its surroundings, any record set there may be misleading for scientists and the public alike.