Earlier this month the Met Office declared the hottest day of the year so far in the U.K. with the temperature reaching 34.8ºC in Cambridge. The Met Office claimed it was only the eleventh time since 1961 that the temperature had reached that level, with six of these occasions having been recorded in the last 10 years. Needless to say, missing from the account was a note that the station in Cambridge’s National Institute for Agricultural Botany (NIAB) is located just metres from a massive heat-generating electricity sub-station complex.
Electricity sub-stations give off so much heat into the surrounding atmosphere there are even plans to trap it for commercial use. The Cambridge station at Histon has recently benefitted from a £5 million upgrade including the installation of a third heat-pumping transformer. It is difficult to think of a worse place to locate an instrument to accurately measure nearby uncorrupted air temperatures, other than favoured Met sites at international airports and solar farms.
