A reproducible audit of a cumulative zone of theoretical visibility with open data: Scout Moor II and Calderdale Energy Park

Working paper, data and code. Scout Moor II (12 turbines up to 180 m to blade tip, Rossendale and Rochdale, applications 2025/0267 and 25/00680/FUL) and Calderdale Energy Park (34 turbines in its April 2026 preliminary environmental information report) are proposed on the South Pennines with their nearest turbines 15.7 km apart. The paper builds a cumulative zone of theoretical visibility for the two schemes entirely from open data (OS Terrain 50 at 50 m, eye 2 m, refraction coefficient 0.075, 45 km from each turbine, a single blade tip counts) and checks it against the applicants' own figures and software. On bare earth, 698.9 km² of land sees at least one turbine of each scheme; the applicant's own QGIS plugin, given the same inputs, gives 685.4 km², and one sight line per cell gives 664.4 km². Where both models compute, the applicant's own combined map (Further Environmental Information Figure 11.16) agrees with the model (intersection over union 0.88). The paper then tests what screening does. On the Environment Agency's first-return LIDAR surface, the combined view is lost at 49 of the 51 highest-scoring settlement points at the point itself, and kept at 17 on a small grid of observers around the point (12 counting only observers within 100 m). On the applicant's own screening rule, rebuilt from the notes on its Figures 11.7 and 11.8 with the observer on the ground, 174.9 km² of the 206.7 km² of its "both may be visible" class within 20 km keeps the view, and 35 of the 62 settlement points in that class. What went against the author is reported in the main text: the cell rule, the ground-level rule, a re-sited viewpoint, the screening results, the roof-observer error found by a hostile read, the errors of the first-round objection and their correction, and four errors of wording in the round-two documents, one of them corrected on the site. The deposit contains the paper (Markdown), the model and its tests, every model output, the representation and articles as sent or published, the audit, review and method records, and a source manifest citing every applicant document by URL and SHA-256 rather than copying it. reproduce.py checks the inputs, can rebuild every grid from the open data in three tiers, and recomputes 408 figures, some a second way; tools/check_paper.py checks every model figure quoted in the paper, the representation, its appendices and the article against that output. Run "uv run python reproduce.py", then "uv run python tools/check_paper.py". The author objected to the Scout Moor II applications in a personal capacity and as county councillor for Padiham and Burnley West, Lancashire County Council, and is the council's Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care; see the Declaration of Interests. The applications are live; the paper describes a method and its checks and takes no position on the decision. The research and checks were carried out by AI agents (Anthropic's Claude) working for the author; no human peer review has taken place. Version 1.0. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23138011. Licences: CC BY 4.0 for text, figures and data; MIT for code; OS, Environment Agency and Natural England data under the Open Government Licence v3.0; OpenStreetMap data under ODbL (see LICENSE.md in the package).