On Friday, November 11, 2016 at 5:26:40 PM UTC, wrote:
Having just read the piece on observation timing on the FAQ pages, I wanted to see what the majority do with regards timings.

10 or so years ago, as a teenager with admittedly not much of an eye for detail, I used to take my readings at 1800 local time each day, noting the max/mins for the previous 24 hours. However, having had a little look on various sites I see 0900 local seems to be a more common time, along with splitting the climatological day into two periods. Or is a "normal" day seen as acceptable (00-24 local)?

Thanks,

Luke

If you want to align with WMO standards 09-09h is the correct way to do it! So many weather station these days use the period 0000-2400, which does make more sense. An example of how errors occur with 09-09h is when minimum temperatures occur before midnight. If for arguments sake a minimum of -2.5C occurs at 2300 this would go down as on the day it occur ed. However on the 09-09 time period a minimum at this time would be recorded on the following day if -2.5C was the minimum. (minimum between 2100-0900h) This situation occurs quite frequently during the winter months!