Watts Up With That?

One of the most surprising things I’ve learned from the surfacestations.org project is that for some odd reason, there are a number of climate monitoring stations of record in the USA at sewage treatment plants. If you’ve ever driven by one of these in the wintertime, they tend to look like steam saunas. They are localized heat bubbles from the waste-water processing.

At Orangeburg, SC not only is the official USHCN climate station of record at a sewage treatment plant, it’s also a nonstandard thermometer (a climate station normally looks like this), and strapped to the side of a telephone pole. I don’t know about you, but experience with creosote treated telephone poles tells me that they’d tend to create a hotter local measurement environment.

Photo by www.surfacestations.org volunteer surveyor Don Kostuch. See the complete image gallery here.

Then there’s the brick building to radiate heat at night, the asphalt parking lot, the effluent channel running nearby, and the overall sewage treatment plant waste heat to consider. I doubt there is an easily applicable set of equations which can untangle the myriad of potential microsite biases.

Then there’s sewage. As population growth occurs, sewage plants add more vats and equipment to handle the increased volume. The increased volume of effluent loses some of it’s heat at this location during the purification process.

Click graph for larger version, data from NASA GISS

The real question is: What are we actually measuring at this location? Are we measuring temperature as an indicator of climate change or are we measuring waste heat from increases in sewage processing that mirrors local population growth?

UPDATE and CORRECTION:

I made an error, this is not a sewage treatment plant. It does treat water, and the description in the site survey from the surveyor was “water filtration plant” which I mistook to mean “sewage treatment” since so many other locations have been at sewage treatment facilities. For example, one of the worst is Titusville, FL, which has been highlighted in this blog in Part 31 and also surveyed by the same volunteer. I looked at the photos he provided, and did not discern initially that the tanks were not for sewage treatment.  Some sharp eyed readers have pointed out the identification problem, which I’m happy to correct.

The questions about the validity of the temperature measurement environment in the midst of a sewage treatment plant are still valid, but do not apply to this location.  So the question we now have for this location is; do the large water filtration pools on this site provide an evaporative cooling effect or do they release heat?

The water vapor impacts at the facility are likely a factor, possibly for Tmin overnight, which is more prone to such effects. Note that there has been new construction at this location, and given the apparently new water filtration pools added on site, there may still be an effect of measuring the local population increases by proxy.

In our last episode, we looked at a COOP station on a roof of a fire station operated by the NWS in San Diego. Moving north, we have another COOP station operated by the San Francisco/Monterey Weather Service office that is also on a rooftop. You can see the MMTS sensor in the photo provided.

This station, COOP number 04-1838 is in Cloverdale, CA is just a few feet away from a chimney flue and an exhaust stack of a diesel generator. Note also the rain gauge placement. This station, while not a USHCN station, is part of the “A” network, which does report climate for NCDC.

Photo from NWS SFO/Monterey

For those unfamiliar at spotting NOAA issued MMTS temperature sensors, its the post on the leftmost portion of the lower roof, directly beneath the satellite dish.

To see other stations, try my blogs “weather_stations” link under the categories at right. To see stations in your state see www.surfacestations.org and click on the online image gallery link. You may even wish to signup to help survey a station in your area.

The National Weather Service office in San Diego, CA operates a cooperative observer network of weather stations, as do all NWS offices. The station in Coronado, CA, is particularly interesting since it is located on the roof of the Fire Station there.

Given that the MMTS sensor shown below is only about 2 feet above the tar and pea gravel roof, which is known to be a hot environment during the day, and a source for re-radiated heat at night, you have to wonder: “What were they thinking?”

Photo from NWS San Diego, click photo for larger image

The NOAA’s credit, this station is not part of the USHCN climate station network, but still, of what possible value could an air temperature measurement just 2 feet off the rooftop be to anyone?

Surfacestations.org volunteer surveyor Russ Steele brings us this gem of a climate monitoring station from Panguitch, UT. I’ve seen stations over asphalt, such as the University of Arizona station in Tucson, but this one has a special feature; they made a concrete traffic island especially for the station so that it wouldn’t get collided with by nearby parked vehicles. How’s that for diligence? The station mount was set right into the concrete. So much for the 100 foot rule away from asphalt, concrete and buildings issued by NOAA

Click image for larger version

The station was recently closed, and the instruments and wooden portion of the shelter put into storage, which is why you don’t see any Stevenson Screen shelter in the picture above, only the mount. Since it’s permanently set into the concrete, they couldn’t easily remove it. Not well thought out, I’d say.

The GISS temperature plot has an offset just before the year 2000, care to bet when the concrete for the traffic island was poured?

You may recall the post earlier this year where the USHCN official climate station with the largest positive trend in the USA turned out to be located in a parking lot at the University of Arizona in Tucson. See below:

Click picture to see image gallery at surfacestations.org Photo: Warren Meyer

The GISS surface temperature plot for Tucson:

The Uof A Tucson station is still there in the parking lot, but as www.surfacestations.org volunteer Bob Thompson finds out while visiting family this Thanksgiving, it appears they are in the process of dismantling the station. The wooden portion of the Stevenson Screen has been removed.
Click picture for full sized image

It seems odd for them to remove the shelter, yet leave the precision aspirated thermometer, which is the long tube with the “T” on the left side spanning the old shelter mount.

One of the emerging patterns that I see again and again as the volunteers and I survey the USHCN climate stations of record around the USA is that many of them have been relegated to back lots with an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude. At California Polytechnic Institute, San Luis Obispo, that attitude seems obvious.

Here we have a USHCN station in the middle of a junk pile. Old storage crates and containers, a rusty metal trailer, and a disabled Winnebago. Most curiously, one piece of junk, a discarded solar mirror, has the potential for heating up the thermometer more than a few degrees under certain conditions. It’s hard to believe, but this is exactly how I found the site.

USHCN San Luis Obispo Cal Poly Looking North

This was my second attempt at surveying this site. In my first attempt, I found three other weather stations, all on campus building rooftops, and one of my readers said he spotted the “official station” in grass plot near a large parking lot. It turned out to be none of those. This station was tucked away behind the maintenance buildings.

Note how the solar mirror is pointed right at the shelter, under some sun angles, I’d wager that this reflects sunlight directly on the shelter. At other times, some localized heating of the ground and objects near the shelter could also occur, heating the air nearby. Here is another view:

Catching some rays?

In addition, the Stevensen Screen is wind sheltered on all sides, and a pool chemical test facility was recently constructed about 90 feet south, which adds humidity to the air, possibly increasing Tmin at night.

Click picture for a larger image

And, if that isn’t enough, the Stevenson Screen is at the crest of a small hill with acres of ashpalt and vehicles just below:

Given these many microsite biases, it is not at all surprising to see a sharp upwards temperature trend for this location.

The Cal Poly campus, like many, has seen a lot of building going on. In the last 5 years, two new buildings have been constructed just south of the station, and there have been other land use changes.

It seems a far less than ideal place to measure long term temperature trends. The complete station survey with additional photos is available on my surfacestations.org image server.

I recently made a trip into Oregon to survey several USHCN stations there, including Klamath Falls, Crater Lake, Bly, and Lakeview. I also made a stop at another remote USHCN station in Cedarville, California.

Klamath Falls was one of those places where you have to wonder “what were they thinking?” when they placed a  climate monitoring station. Imagine measuring the temperature in the middle of acres of asphalt combined with huge amounts of waste heat from electric power conversion. That’s’ Klamath Falls USHCN official climate station of record.

Below is an aerial view of the electric power substation facility operated by Pacific Power and Light:

And here is a wide view of the location where the Stevenson Screen was:

And a close up view:

As is typically found, the station location was chosen for the convenience of the  observer, who had an office in the old administration building, shown on the right side of the photo. Only a few short steps were needed to get the reading. The station closed in May 2002, when the observer at the power company retired, and nobody wanted to assume the job. All that remains is the walkway to the screen, and an old Heathkit rain gauge on a post.

Can you imagine the heat from the transformers being transported by wind, or the heat from the massive asphalt in the service staging facility yard being pushed toward the sensor by the wind? Being almost exactly in the middle of the complex, it’s hard to imagine any bias free day there, wind or not. It’s a likely scenario, and one well suited for a study this coming summer where I may ask permission to place a sensor at the old measurement location, and position some temperature loggers around the facility to quantify the difference.

Another thing this location may have been doing in the long term is measuring waste heat generated by the transformers as a function of power usage demands. Historically, power use has not declined, so its safe to assume that this facility, its transformers, and capacity has been upgraded over the years to handle increased demand.

Yet we measure temperature there. Here’s the temperature trend graph from NASA GISS:

The photo gallery and site survey are available on my surfacestations.org database.

There’s a USHCN station out there, in the “ass end of nowhere”.

Apologist Eli Rabett (Joshua Halpern) recently lamented that in order for dendrochronologists to update tree ring studies used in MBH98/99 (aka Mann’s Hockey Stick) that they “have to drive out to the ass end of nowhere”. It’s such an inconvenience for those that just perform data wrangling in the office, instead of going out to get their hands dirty, that a study used as the basis for legislation hasn’t had its data updated in almost 10 years!

Thanks to Mr. Pete and Steve McIntyre, a recent outing in Colorado to get updated core samples from the very same trees used in Mann’s study proved that it’s not so hard after all. In fact they were able to have a Starbucks in the morning, do the field work, and were back home in time for a late dinner. No futzing with grant proposals, no elaborate plans submitted for approval, just basic honest field science. The samples they collected are in a dendrochronology lab undergoing analysis.

In that same spirit, I decided to survey one of the hottest and most remote USHCN weather stations in the USA, Death Valley. I was able to have a Starbucks’s coffee that morning, complete the work, survey an additional station, and an oddball station and head off to dinner and my next destination all in the same day.

The day started out in Baker, California, at the southern entrance to Death Valley. Appropriately, they have a Starbuck’s there, as well as what was once billed as “the worlds tallest thermometer” which has sadly been converted from a desert information center into the “worlds tallest mini-market”.

Given that it’s over concrete, asphalt, and the roof of a mini-mart, I’ve going to give it a CRN rating of “5″. Of course that’s what they want here, hotter temperatures, because that’s part of the tourist attraction.

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