Saturday afternoon while my son's under 18's were warming up i drove out to the MS Culverden site and had a look at its set up there and just as i thought would be the case the screen sits at the top of a approximately 7m high steel pole, the nearest building is 100m away and there are no tall trees within 300m, its in open grassland other than a shingle driveway that passes close by.
According to WMO this does not come close to meeting the recommended specified height and there for is not providing accurate climate data.
Question now is how many other sites around NZ dont meet WMO specification?
World Meteorological Organization - Instruments & Observing Methods
3.2.1 Air temperature
…At non-urban stations the screen height is recommended to be between 1.25 and 2 m above ground level. Whilst this is also acceptable for urban sites it may be better to relax this requirement to allow greater heights. This should not lead to significant error in most cases, especially in densely built-up areas, because observations in canyons show very slight air temperature gradients through most of the UCL, as long as location is more than 1 m from a surface...