the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 11 Nov 2025
Continuous meteorological surface and soil records (2004–2024) at the Met Office surface site of Cardington, UK
Abstract. A continuous meteorological and hydrological observational record is described of the Met Office semi-rural field site of Cardington in southern England between 2004 and 2024. The site was designed to carry out boundary layer, fog and air-surface exchange research to improve the representation of process-based physics within the Met Office Unified Model. The site lay in a flat river basin and was laid mainly to cropped grass and was surrounded by arable fields intermixed with small trees and shrubs through most wind sectors. Observations utilised flux masts at various heights, visibility, radiosondes, very near-surface and subsoil in situ sensors in addition to more specialist remote sensing instruments to retrieve atmospheric properties. In addition to boundary layer and surface data, soil properties such as temperature, moisture and water table depth were obtained. All components of the surface energy balance could be determined. Availability of data based on 30 minute time steps over 20 yr, for the combined components of the energy balance not flagged as either bad or missing, amounts to 77 %. The momentum roughness length as determined at the 10 m height for the prevailing wind sector increased from 3 cm to 8 cm over the period predominately due to 52 ha of woodland growth within 1 km of the site. An overview of the site, instrumentation, data availability, quality control, data storage at the UK CEDA repository, and potential uses of the dataset are described. A set meteorological forcing files have also been compiled suitable for driving standalone land surface models configured for a single point.
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Status: open (until 27 Dec 2025)
- RC1: 'Comment on essd-2025-486', Norbert Kalthoff, 25 Nov 2025 reply
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Continuous hydrometeorological record (2004–2024) at the Met Office surface site of Cardington, UK Dataset Collection McGregor, J. Kerr-Munslow, A. Price, J. Osborne, S. Brooke, J. https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/5487380511084413a502c4b229273bc6/
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- 1
General comments: The paper describes a meteorological and hydrological observational record of the Met Office semi-rural field site of Cardington between 2004 and 2024. The paper is well written and structured. I therefore recommend publication after minor modifications.
My main concerns are: a) the introduction could be improved (see detailed comments below) and b) the advertisement for modellers to use the data could be improved. E.g. showing some nighttime data with fog – as fog forecast is still a big issue for modellers. This example could also include the CBL evolution after the fog night. c) I understand that the operators of the flux station don’t want to prescribe which corrections on sensible, latent and soil heat flux should be applied. But they are the most appropriate persons to suggest – at least - “accepted” algorithms.
Detailed comments
1 Introduction
This is a very long paper and not all seems to be so important. It feels like there is a break in the flow (lines 54 – 69, history of the site). I would remove that part.
An introduction should “introduce” the intention/aim of the paper. Here, you mainly focus on the energy balance closure problem – the problem not best/possible solutions. Do you need this in the introduction or could you even move it to section 3? Instead, I missing some information regarding Section 5. I.e., what was the intention for using/installing the non-score instrumentation.
Obviously, there was an aim to install the station: the site was designed to carry out boundary layer, fog and air-surface exchange research to improve the representation of process-based physics within the Met Office Unified Model.
Finally, you should address the reasons why the data set was published and for which model comparisons the dataset might be most relevant. A little bit advertisement could be done.
Table 1: table caption says period 2004–2024 but in the table you already start in 2003.
RAF should be explained – as abbreviations in general.
Line 79 – 80: “….. partition the surface energy balance via the fluxes of heat, moisture and
momentum ……”. For me, momentum is not part of the surface energy balance as net radiation, heat, moisture and soil heat flux are.
2 Site description
Lines 124 – 125: You mention: “An investigation by Grant (1994) showed that the terrain surrounding Cardington can influence the wind field by channelling surface flow along the ridge in a south-west to north-east direction for a stably stratified boundary layer.”
The wind rose shows mainly south-west to north-east directions. So, does stably stratified conditions dominate the wind rose? Do you have separate wind roses for day and night or stable and unstable stratifications?
3 Site set-up and data logging
3.1 Site set-up and data logging
Section and Subsection should not have the same title.
Line 173: Was the raingauge really positioned at surface level which would be very unusual (splashing water).
3.2 Core dataset instrumentation
Table 2: I would not use RH as in the column “Measurement” and “Variable” at the same time (see Rotronic sensor). Otherwise one column in the table could be removed.
Anyway, the title of the first column does not fit all the time. E.g. “Tri-axis sonic anemometer” is not a measurement but a measuring device instrument.
Also: what is the difference between specific humidity as variable and derived property.
Where do you give the units of the different variables (this concerns also Tables 3 and 4)?
3.2.1 Sonic anemometers
Could you say something about the ultrasonic measurements at 0.4 m. The height is close to the distance between the transmitter and receiver, i.e. a lot of the turbulence spectrum is probably not resolved.
General comment: so, no corrections were applied as described by Mauder’s TK3 software?
Line 237: Abbreviation PRT should be explained. Is it pressure, relative humidity and temperature?
3.2.2 Relative humidity
Lines 297 – 299: Have you measured dew point temperature higher than the air temperature? Data flagged or removed? Or indicated as fog detection?
3.2.3 Licor high speed hygrometer
Perhaps I missed it, but did you mention where - in relation to the sonic anemometer (distance and direction) - the Licor is installed?
Line 311: Same question as above: how are the covariances calculated - just from the raw data without any corrections?
3.2.7 Radiation
Line 385: why not just W m-2 instead of (J s⁻¹ m⁻²)?
Line 393: could refer to the WMO report
3.2.8 Subsoil sensors
Lines 553 and 564 (and elsewhere): is there any difference between ground and soil heat flux. I would suggest to use the same wording throughout the text when the same variable is meant. Otherwise it could be confusing.
Table 6 seems misplaced in this section
4 Land surface model forcing data
A general comment on the flux data (sensible, latent and ground heat flux). I understand that you don’t want to prescribe which possible flux corrections. But for model comparison: those who generate the data are normally most familiar which algorithms should be applied to derive the best quality data (while modellers are not and would be happy if the data producer would do the job). So, why not provide raw and corrected values? Or at least mention a program which could be applied.
Lines 538 – 555: I understand that the observation – modelling comparison is just meant as an example. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to know, whether the fluxes shown in Figure 3 are just the covariances derived from the raw data or corrections have been applied? And if yes, then which?
The comparison of the sensible heat flux at 0.4 m would be of interest, too. Just for me to know as I mentioned the problem of using a sonic at that height. Or just explain why you didn’t include the data in the comparison.
I would prefer to see some vertical profiles of the sensible and latent flux (although only two levels are available), e.g. averaged over some hours (around midday). These profiles should also give a hint whether data are trustful or maybe outliers. And if the fluxes are not constant (by ± 10%) in the surface layer some explanation would be helpful.
5 Non-core remote sensing instruments
Table 8 includes several acronyms. I suggest to explain them also in the table caption because the table is already referenced in Section 5 but the acronyms are only explained in section 5.1 and 5.2. What exactly is radial turbulence. Could you be more precise.
One general comment: the detailed descriptions of the remote sensing systems listed in Section 5 are quite different. E.g. in section 5.1 equations are given how the wind vectors (u,v) are calculated. The description of the ceilometer is more general. I would harmonise that. Perhaps a reference to books like Atmospheric Measurements (Foken Editor) could be useful where detailed measurement principles and algorithms of most of the remote sensing systems listed in Sections 5.1 to 5.4 are presented.
5.1 Halo Doppler lidars
Line 604: Add signal-to-noise ratio to SNR and replace signal-to-noise ratio by SNR in line 624
Line 635: what is qe and qn
Line 649: here you use φ but in the equation in line 647 you use 𝜑. Anyway, I suggest to use either elevation angle 𝜑 or zenith angle α.
Line 647: if you number the equations, this should be (5)
Line 650: if you introduce u and v, you should do it already ahead of eq. 3 and 4.
Line 655: AT instead of just T.
As mentioned above. Perhaps you just refer to the appropriate literature because section 5.1 is the only one which presents equations.
7 Example of turbulence data⎯ roughness length
The shown example on roughness length and it’s changes over time is interesting. However, I could imagine that some results from CBL and NBL observations in combination with energy balance data would encourage researchers to use the data for model comparisons.
8 Data availability
8.1 File formatting
It’s unusual have only one subsection in a section. I.e., two separate section would be more appropriate. I had problems to access some sources:
Line 869: “Page not found” for http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government870
licence/version/3/I got an error message
Line 939 - 946: “DOI Not Found” for wind radar data https://dx.doi.org/10.5285/eb352545ce1b4476b2580a3e5885c00d/
Line 878: I suggest to add the time zone – probably UTC
Line 885 and elsewhere: Does timestamps marks the beginning, center or end of the intervals?
References
I have not checked the references in detail but some inconsistencies are quite obvious.
etc
Miscellaneous
Line 33: If it is “well known” you could omit the sentence. Otherwise remove “well known”.
Line 35: On the other hand, …. . Shouldn’t you better say “additionally, …” because it isn’t in contradiction to something mentioned before.
Line 88: be careful with wording. Do you really mean energy budget or energy balance as discussed before (line 82)? A budget contains a storage term. Try to avoid mixing it up.
Table 1:
The way you list the entries in the table are somewhat inconsistent, e.g. Semicolon, comma, dot, Full stop at the end or no full stop:
In situ; turbulent fluxes
In situ, radiation.
In situ. Fluxes
Line 494: Normally, references should be listed in chronical order.
Typos
Figure 1c: Wind rose: m s-1 correct to m s-1
Figure 2: the labelling (data completeness) is too small.
Line 372: µ instead of u in 0.85 µm.
Line 374: It should be Koschmieder’s law instead of Koschmeider’s law.
Line 478: A dot is missing at the end of the sentence, i.e. after for NO2.
Line 665: Depolarisation instead of Depolarization?
Line 981: remove the second dot.
Table 7: Soil hydraulic conductivity in kg instead of Kg