On 08/07/2015 08:54, Norman wrote:
Vidcapper wrote:

On 07/07/2015 15:01, Scott W wrote:

Puts to bed my criticisms from last week

http://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2015/07...ng-a-heatwave/


I wonder whereabouts on the airport the weather station is actually located?
Yes, I could check Google Maps, but the area is so large, it'd be a
needle-in-a-haystck search.


The meteorological instrument enclosure is on the north side of the airport.
It's about 130 metres north of the edge of the northern runway and about 20
metres south of the northern perimeter road. It is about 180 metres ESE of the
northern entrance to the tunnel at the south end of the M4 spur. Co-ordinates
are 51°28'45"N 0°27'2"W. It's probably broadly representative of the airport
environment but if the area was farmland rather than an airport no doubt the
temperatures would be somewhat different at times. Not only are there areas of
airport concrete in the vicinity there are also very large expanses of car park
nearby.

I used to work at Heathrow in the 70s and was one of the observers. The
enclosure is still where it was then. Looking at the Google satpic, the
tarmac in the enclosure's vicinity doesn't appear to be that different
to nowadays (perhaps less in the immediate area) and the nearby car
parks have been there since the 70s as well. So not a lot of change
there. The road just to the north (colloquially called the peri track)
wasn't as wide though. One thing to note is that the taxiway just to its
west (now has a big X on eh entrance to the runway) was live in those
days. There's obviously been a few changes as aircraft could be taxied
along that and in front of the enclosure (where the now narrow strip of
road is heading west/east). So jets could be much closer to the screen
than nowadays. I have photos which show this.

Even the hotels along the A4 were there at the time (though some have
been replaced AFAIK).

And the airport centre has always been a heat island - I've seen fog
drift in from the west and just dissolve as it got to the centre and in
a NEly, slight showers of snow being beefed up and dropping a lot of
snow to the Airport's SW.

No doubt there have been changes which may have been significant, but
then don't the climatologists make allowances for this. I know that even
such mundane things as SST measurement had to be adjusted by the method
and material of actually measuring the sea temp - the buckets used to
get the water had different characteristics and work was done to
homogenize the results.

Just my 2 pennyworth