[email address]
Mr N Leaton
Direct tel: +44(0)1392 884036
Request-24804-
Direct fax: +44(0)1392 885681
[email address]
Our ref: 18-12-2009-121913-001 5 January 2010
Dear Mr Leaton
Re: Freedom of Information request
Your email dated 17 December 2009 has been considered to be a request for information in
accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Firstly, I must apologise that your email was answered directly by one of our departments and
not within the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I am sorry for any inconvenience this may
have caused. I will address your questions below in accordance with the FOI Act. If you still
wish to apply for an independent internal review please let me know or contact the Head of
Corporate information, whose details are in the last two paragraphs of this letter.
You stated: From the press I read that the Met Office will not release raw climate data
because of confidentiality agreements.
1. Can you please supply a summary of which temperature records are subject to
confidentiality agreements and which are not?
2. In the case of those subject to confidentiality agreements, the name of the other party to
the confidentiality agreement.
3. When confidentiality agreements have been made, the agreements themselves.
4. Details of the requests to have the confidentiality agreements removed.
Save as discussed below, the Met Office does not hold this information because the
temperature records are owned by the University of East Anglia which manages the
confidentiality arrangements in respect of such records. The Met Office has always received
temperature records from the University of East Anglia on the proviso that they would not be
released. This proviso is based upon a verbal arrangement and a practice which has been
adhered to since the early 1980s. We understand from the University of East Anglia that
such an arrangement is necessary because the various organisations contributing to the work
of the Climatic Research Unit have imposed restrictions upon the use and disclosure of their
specific data. Please see the Climatic Research Unit’s website at
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/availability/ for further information in this regard.
The Met Office holds a copy of the terms for the supply of data through NERC Data Centres
to bona fide research programmes. These terms govern the data that are owned by the Met
Office and which are supplied to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and
are publicly av
ailable at http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/surface/met-nerc_agreement.html.
The Met Office is facilitating the Climatic Research Unit to gain explicit permissions to release
station data records. On 8 December 2009, the Met Office released station temperature
records for over 1,500 of the stations that make up the global land surface temperature
record. These records can be found at
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20091208a.html.
Data which the Met Office has quality controlled for the purpose of performing near-real time
updates and which are not governed by any restrictions are made freely available (since
2000) at
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/crutem3/data/station_updates/.
I hope this answers your enquiry.
The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988 (the Act). Unless specifically permitted by the Act, any reproduction of the
information, in whole or in part, requires the permission of the copyright holder. Most
documents supplied by the Ministry of Defence will have been produced by government
officials and will be Crown Copyright. You can find details on the arrangements for re-using
Crown Copyright from the Office of Public Sector Information at:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/click-
use/index.htm
Information you receive may also include third party owned information. Such information
must not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without first obtaining the permission of any such
third party rights holder.
If you are not satisfied with this response or you wish to complain about any aspect of the
handling of your request, then you should contact me in the first instance. If informal
resolution is not possible and you are still dissatisfied then you may apply for an independent
internal review by contacting the Head of Corporate Information, 6th Floor, MOD Main
Building, Whitehall, SW1A 2HB (e-mail
[email address]). Please note that any request for
an internal review must be made within 40 working days of the date on which the attempt to
reach informal resolution has come to an end.
If you remain dissatisfied following an internal review, you may take your complaint to the
Information Commissioner under the provisions of Section 50 of the Freedom of Information
Act. Please note that the Information Commissioner will not investigate your case until the
MOD internal review process has been completed. Further details of the role and powers of
the Information Commissioner can be found on the Commissioner's website,
http://www.ico.gov.uk.
Yours sincerely,
FOI Manager
