The Met Office uses two types of sunshine recorder. How does this affect the sunshine grids?
The majority of the stations in the Met Office network that record sunshine duration use a Campbell-Stokes recorder. However, a significant proportion of the stations that report in real time now use a Kipp & Zonen sunshine sensor (the first such sensors were installed in 2000). The characteristics of the two instruments are not identical and therefore some adjustment of the observations to a common standard is required. Currently, Kipp & Zonen monthly totals are adjusted to Campbell-Stokes equivalent values prior to generating the sunshine grids. The correction methodology is described in a paper by A. Kerr and R. Tabony: ‘Comparison of sunshine recorded by Campbell-Stokes and automatic sensors’ (Weather, April 2004, vol. 59,90-95), but additional overlapped data was used by M. Perry in 2007 to produce improved monthly adjustment factors (study to be published).
