Met Office to inspect Hawarden weather station after provisional Wales record
A weather station at Hawarden Airport recorded 32.2C on Monday 25 May, a provisional new all-time May temperature record for Wales.
The figure beat the previous Welsh May record of 30.6C, set at Newport, Monmouthshire, on 29 May 1944.
The Met Office confirmed the reading in a press release on Monday evening.
The reading is provisional.
The Met Office said the equipment at the station and the site itself will go through what it called “a rigorous validation process before a decision is made on officially inducting the figure into the meteorological record books”.
The press release added: “If the figure doesn’t meet the required standards, it will be rejected as an official national record.”
The validation check includes a site inspection and a verification check of the equipment.
The Hawarden reading was the only Welsh site listed in Monday’s Met Office announcement.
Thirteen sites across England exceeded the previous UK all-time May record of 32.8C on the same day.
Kew Gardens reached 34.8C.
The Hawarden record has been questioned online by climate-sceptic accounts, who have argued the Hawarden Airport station is rated Class 4 under the international siting classification system used by the World Meteorological Organization, and that readings from such stations could be wrong by up to 5C.
The Class 4 designation for the Hawarden Airport station, identified by its World Meteorological Organization number 03321, was reported in Met Office freedom of information disclosures published in September 2024 by the website Tallbloke’s Talkshop, and separately by the Daily Sceptic in March 2024.
The international standard those critics are citing, ISO 19289:2014, does set out uncertainty figures linked to the class of a station.
The figure is up to 1C for Class 3, up to 2C for Class 4, and up to 5C for Class 5.
The “up to 5C” figure circulating online is the Class 5 figure, not the Class 4 figure.
The Met Office’s published position on the same standard is that the classification “should not be used to suggest a ranking of station quality”.
It quotes the World Meteorological Organization itself: “The use of numbers can easily lead one to suggest a ranking. This is not the purpose and should be avoided.”
The Met Office operates its own internal grading of its sites, ranking them Excellent, Good, Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory.
Data flagged Unsatisfactory is excluded from official products.
The current internal grade for the Hawarden Airport station has not been published.
The Met Office archive shows weather observations have been recorded at Hawarden since 1942.
The station sits next to Airbus Broughton, and is roughly 11 metres above sea level.
The Met Office said the record-setting heat is consistent with the long-term warming trend across the UK climate record.
Its main climate dataset, HadUK-Grid, goes back to 1884 and averages observations across the full station network rather than relying on any single station.
A Met Office attribution study cited in Monday’s press release found that breaking the previous UK all-time May record of 32.8C was around a 1-in-100 year event in a natural climate, and is now around a 1-in-33 year event.
The validation process for the Hawarden 32.2C reading has not yet concluded.
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