Watts Up With That?

You know your presentation was successful when:

1) Nobody threw rotten fruit

2) People came up to me afterwards and said “I have photos I can get to you”

3) A high level official at NCDC requests a copy of my presentation “as soon as you can get it to me”

Ok the next session is starting in a few minutes, less than 2 hours from now I’m going to know if the work I and all of the volunteers at www.surfacestations.org has been scientifically fruitful, or if I’m going to get pelted on the stage with rotten fruit.

My presentation is updated with some late breaking photos Russ Steele got yesterday from St. George, UT, loaded into the presentation laptop, and my remote control has been tested. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

At the very least, after sitting through a bunch of Powerpoint presentations, my use of the same software I use for doing TV weather presentations should break the mold.

This afternoon there will be several presentations that embrace the measurement systems used for the near surface temperature and precipitation records.

Of great interest to me is a presentation outlining the new US CRN (Climate Reference Network) by Bruce Baker of NCDC. Another is by Glenn Conner, former Kentucky State Climatologist whose talk will be about the role of station histories in identifying biases in climate records.

My presentation follows those two – it should be a lively afternoon.

I just watched a presentation Elsi Sertel from a university in Turkey showing how easy it is to introduce true land cover data into a climate model. Her study area was around the Black Sea near Istanbul, and used LANDSAT imagery along with a pixel by pixel truthing technique to determine the type of land cover, sea, forest, urban, etc and apply it to use in a GCM.

Her premise was that current GCM’s use land surface info that isn’t fully representative, out of date, and in some cases just plain wrong.

Her study showed a technique that allowed for a significant amount of automation to the process, to allow improved and current land surface types to be easily integrated into the grid cells of a GCM. Unfortunately, some GCM gridding schemes are too coarse to handle such data.

From what I’ve seen in this conference so far, and I’ve seen presentations now from Europe, Turkey, China, Australia and the USA, it is becoming more clear that land use is a major driver of climate change, and perhaps dwarfs even GHG effects. That’s just a hunch. One study from Australia showed the effects of removing a woody type bush over a large area over the past century, and the results on rainfall and temperature were profound.

I’m sitting in a presentation by William R. Cotton, of Colorado State University where he’s talking about the effect of Urban Heat Islands (UHI) on precipitation. He’s making a convincing pitch showing how the UHI factors into downwind delayed convection initiated by the city UHI along with a significant contribution of aerosols and ice nuclei that seed the precipitation. He’s been able to demonstrate that in St. Louis, downwind from the city (typically NE to SE based on prevailing winds) there are increased precipitation from thunderstorms by as much as 160% during the life cycle of the storm.

Yesterday, I saw a very similar study done by Indiana State Climatologist, Dev Nyogi, where he studied Indianapolis, IN and came to similar conclusions. The midwestern cities make good case studies because they are singular islands of urbanization (as opposed to sprawling cities like Los Angeles and Chicago) that essentially become point heat sources at the mesoscale level.

The summary is this: Urban and-use has the biggest control on locations and amounts of precipitation and that condensation nuclei added by the city also have a significant effect. Heat and particles contributed by the city can make bigger, more precipitating thunderstorms.

Of course studies by Parker tells us there is no significant UHI effect, so this presents yet another challenge to what is looking ore and more like a flawed study by Parker.

Russ Steele is out on vacation and doing several surveys while traveling. This one below is from St. George, UT. Here we see an MMTS measuring the temperature near the surface of an elevated parking lot. The effect of the asphalt and vehicles that park near it, engine forward, probably dwarfs the effect of the nearby a/c unit. The shading may help daytime temps some, but the asphalt likely biases Tmin the most. The complete photo survey is available on surfacestations.org