Introduction
These daily, monthly and seasonal temperatures are representative of a roughly triangular area of the United Kingdom enclosed by Bristol, Lancashire and London (view
map). The monthly series, which begins in 1659, is the longest available instrumental record of temperature in the world. The daily series begins in 1772. The seasonal series also starts in 1659.
Manley (1953,1974) compiled most of the monthly series, covering 1659 to 1973. These data were updated to 1991 by Parker et al (1992), when they calculated the daily series. Both series are now kept up to date by the Climate Data Monitoring section of the Hadley Centre, Met Office. Since 1974 the data have been adjusted by 0.1-0.3 degree C to allow for urban warming.
The Met Office have also been compiling Maximum, Minimum and Mean Daily Central England Temperatures data files since January 1878. The following stations are used by the Met Office to compile the CET data: Rothamsted, Malvern, Squires Gate and Ringway.
But in November 2004, the weather station Stonyhurst replaced Ringway and revised urban warming and bias adjustments have now been applied to the Stonyhurst data after a period of reduced reliability from the station in the summer months.
Access Restrictions
The Met Office wish to monitor the use of these analyses and require an acknowledgement of the data source if they are used in any publication.
The application for access to the Met Office Central England Temperature data includes the Met Office Agreement to be completed online. Please note that the Met Office data sets are available for bona fide academic research only (sorry no undergraduates), on a per person per project basis (i.e. all members on a same project who will be using the data must individually apply for access to the data). If you wish to access the Met Office data for commercial or personal purposes, please contact the Met Office directly.
Your application for accessing the Central England Temperature data will be processed within a day of receipt and you will receive a confirmation email. Provided your application is complete and fully meets the Met Office conditions, a web account will be activated to allow you access to the HadCET data directories via your login account from the BADC WWW Browse Archive pages.
Please read the 00README file available under /badc/ukmo-cet/ directory to guide you through the tree structure and the data directory.
Data file format and units
The data held at the BADC, are stored in a simple ASCII format (plain text and "human" readable).
The monthly data is tabulated with each row corresponding to one year's data - one month per column. The daily data is tabulated with each row corresponding to one day's data - one month per column. Full details are available from the BADC Documentation.
Citation
UK Meteorological Office, Hadley Centre. Historical Central England Temperature (HadCET) Data, [Internet]. NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre, 2006, Date of citation. Available from http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__dataent_CET
Who to contact
If you have queries about these pages or about obtaining the Met Office Central England Temperature data from the BADC then you should contact
BADC Support. Your query should be answered within one working day. When follow-up work is required, the BADC support will carry out the work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in any case, the user will be kept informed of progress.
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