Built in 1913 as a naval radio station, the Shetland Isles’ Met Office at Lerwick provides the temperature reading you see on the top right-hand corner of the UK weather map. The site became part of the Met Office network in 1921 and began regular meteorological and magnetic recording, which continue today – capturing more than a century of atmospheric history.
Experiments with specialised measurements of atmospheric electricity started in 1925, using a clockwork recorder housed in a wooden hut at the edge of the site, with an oil stove to ward off damp. Inauspicious as that small hut near a Loch in Shetland might seem, those and later recordings are among the most important atmospheric electricity measurements made on the planet.
