Oxford

The Oxford Radcliffe Observatory have finally decided to release their daily climate readings they’ve been making since 1815, you can download the CSVCSV A data file using Comma Separated Variable format. file for it from here. I tried emailing them for many years urging them to do this, but I never got a reply. It seems bizarre to me that in a warming world like ours why they would be so protective of what is one of the longest temperature series in the world. They’re not giving that much away just 75,726 days of maximum, minimum, grass minimum, rainfall and sunshine values, but if you like me love climate data, then it’s like you’ve stumbled on the mother lode. They could have included snow days, even perhaps days of thunder, gale or fog. I see that Ed Hawkins has now got a load of volunteers to digitise and add daily pressure readings from 1828 and 1856. It will be interesting to see whether that spurs the observatory on to updating the latest CSV file beyond the 30th of April 2022 to include MSLPMSLP Mean sea level pressure is the pressure at sea level, or, when measured at a given elevation on land, the station pressure reduced to sea level assuming an isothermal layer at the station temperature., I know my recent email has fell on deaf ears once again. I’ve kind of worked up with the coding because it’s very disappointing that the data is not updated on a regular basis. Here are some screenshots from some of the other viewers in my Oxford Climate Viewer windows application, it’s amazing what you can do with such little data.😉

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These three images from Google show how the enclosure at the observatory looks these days. It appears that they may have been hosting the Great British Bake Off in that marquee when Google came snooping around for these picture. It’s no wonder the temperatures that day were so high, especially when Prue Leith thought she would demonstrate how to flambe one of her deserts. Seriously though the observatory has been surrounded by houses and streets from early Victorian times, so I acn’t see that urbanisation of the immediate site has ever been that big a problem because it’s also been urbanised.