The pause that cools: No more warming until 2015?

30 04 2008

You may recall the previous post where Basil Copeland and I looked at correlations between HadCRUT global temperature anomaly and sunspot numbers. This is similar, but looks at the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and uses the same Hodrick-Prescott (HPT) filter as before on the HadCRUT global temperature anomaly data and the PDO Index.


click for a larger image -
NOTE: the purple line is a monthly warming rate, to get decadal values, multiply by 120

This graphic provides some context to what may be happening with the PDO. In the upper panel we’ve plotted the PDO (in red), a smoothed PDO (in light blue), and our analysis of the bidecadal variation in warming rates.

From the PDO data itself, it is just too soon to be able to tell whether the current cool phase is just one of the shorter cycles, or whether it is the beginning of a longer term cycle like we saw back in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It is tempting, when looking at the warming rate cycles, to believe that we’ve just come out of a 60-66 year “Kerr” climate cycle, and are on the cusp of a cool phase like we see for the 1950’s and 1960’s.

But if you look closely at the end of the purple curve for our warming rate cycle, it seems to be about ready to turn back up. Now we do not want to put too much stock in the end values of a series that has been smoothed with HP filtering. So it could still be on a downward trend.

Then, to make it all the more interesting, we have solar cycle 23 lingering on. Considering that also, confidence is higher that we will continue to see a relative respite in the rate of warming and that we’re not likely to see our warming rate cycle jump back to where it was during solar cycles 22-23. But whether we see a full blown interlude between two strong warming trends, like we saw during the 1950’s and 1960’s, remains to be seen.

In other words, as we saw with Easterbrook’s analysis, we can be reasonably confident in projecting at least no further warming for a while. For that to happen, the purple warming rate curve must not only turn back upwards, it must rise into the region of positive values, and continue to rise for several years. If solar cycle 24 turns out to be a weak solar cycle, and there are historical precedents for cycle length suggesting it is likely to be weak, that probably isn’t happening.

I’ll have more on solar cycles 23 and 24 coming up in the next day or so.

So, in summary; probably no net warming for awhile, and maybe a period of extended cooling as in the mid 20th century. It all depends on whether this current PDO shift is a short term or longer term event such as we saw in the mid 20th century.

This is inline with the article in today’s UK Telegraph, saying:

“Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said. Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged. This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.”

There’s a similar article in Yahoo News.

The paper by Keenlyside et al entitled “Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector” from the Nature website


Comments : 126 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate_change, weather

I hate it when that happens…

30 04 2008

I was initially concerned that my stats were down this month, then I remembered that April has 30 days and March has 31.

Of course there’s that nice spring weather, and I recall that TV station ratings suffer a drop during the spring since people are digging out from their winter igloos. But even though I broke even, there was a nice surprise at the end of the month, WordPress put me as the top “hawt” post, even if only for awhile:

It was a nice way to end the month, thanks to all my readers for your help in getting me to NCDC @ Asheville and for the continued patronage!


Comments : 17 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

More on the PDO shift cited by NASA

29 04 2008

For now, we have about 1 year of significant cold phase tendency in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), here is the last 108 years of the PDO index, plotted from monthly values:


Click for larger image – source Steven Hare, University of Washington

Compared to the negative magnitudes seen from 1946 to 1977, our current PDO phase shift magnitude is relatively mild. But that could change. Don J. Easterbrook, a retired professor from the Dept. of Geology, Western Washington University, in Bellingham, WA sends this analysis:

la-nina-and-pacific-decadal-oscillation-cool-the-pacific (PDF)

The announcement by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) had shifted to its cool phase (Fig. 1) is right on schedule as predicted by past climate and PDO changes.

Global temperatures peaked in 1998 and have not been exceeded since then. Pacific Ocean temperatures began a cooling phase in 1999 that was briefly interrupted by El Nino and dramatic cooling in 2007-2008 appears to be a continuation of a global cooling trend set up by the PDO cool phase (Fig. 1) as predicted [shown in the figure below].

Thus, we seem to be headed toward several decades of global cooling, rather than the catastrophic global warming predicted by IPCC.

If we are lucky, this PDO will be a short event. 2-4 years. If we are unlucky, and it is the “full Monty” phase switch at 20-30 years as Easterbrook suggests, we may be in for extended cooler times. This may result in some significant extended worldwide effects, notably on agriculture.

UPDATE! Professor Easterbrook adds in comments:

“The projected warming from ~2040 to ~2070 is NOT driven by CO2, it’s merely a continuation of warm/cool cycles over the past 500 years, long before man-made CO2 could have been a factor. We’ve been warming up from the Little Ice Age at rate of about 1 degree or so per century and the 2040-70 projection is simply a continuation of non-AGW cycles.

An interesting question is the similarity between what we are seeing now with sun spots and global temperature and the drop into the Little Ice Age from the Medieval Warm Period. Could we be about to repeat that? Only time will tell–We might see a more pronounced cool period like the 1880 to 1910 cool cycle (when many temp records were set) or a milder cooling like the 1945-1977 cool cycle. In any case, the setting up of the cool phase of the PDO seems to suggest cooler times ahead, not the catastrophic warming predicted by IPCC and Al Gore.”


Comments : 70 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate_change, weather

NASA: PDO flip to cool phase confirmed – cooler times ahead for the West Coast?

29 04 2008

La Nina and Pacific Decadal Oscillation Cool the Pacific

Click here to view full image (228 kb)

 ”The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. ” – NASA JPL

       
A cool-water anomaly known as La Niña occupied the tropical Pacific Ocean throughout 2007 and early 2008. In April 2008, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that while the La Niña was weakening, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation—a larger-scale, slower-cycling ocean pattern—had shifted to its cool phase.

This image shows the sea surface temperature anomaly in the Pacific Ocean from April 14–21, 2008. The anomaly compares the recent temperatures measured by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite with an average of data collected by the NOAA Pathfinder satellites from 1985–1997. Places where the Pacific was cooler than normal are blue, places where temperatures were average are white, and places where the ocean was warmer than normal are red.

The cool water anomaly in the center of the image shows the lingering effect of the year-old La Niña. However, the much broader area of cooler-than-average water off the coast of North America from Alaska (top center) to the equator is a classic feature of the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The cool waters wrap in a horseshoe shape around a core of warmer-than-average water. (In the warm phase, the pattern is reversed).

See the entire story here:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=18012

See the PRESS RELEASE from JPL here:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-066

Look out California agriculture. The wine industry, fruits and nut growers will be hit with a shorter growing season and more threats of frost, among other things.

Recently in Nevada County, much of their grape crop was wiped out. From The Union in Nevada County (h/t Russ Steele)

Nevada County’s agricultural commissioner will seek disaster relief from the state after tens of thousands of dollars worth of crops were ruined from last week’s freezing temperatures.

Orchard trees, wine grapes and pastures were hardest hit, Pylman said. The commissioner is compiling a report of damages that he will send to the state Office of Emergency Services in coming weeks.

“Growers don’t have anything to harvest. That’s a disaster in my mind,” Pylman said.

 
In Paradise, CA, Noble Orchards reports damage to their Apple crop from recent colder weather, as well as reports of issue with vineyards in the Paradise ridge area suffering from frost damage recently.

Here is a short history of PDO phase shifts:

In 1905, PDO switched to a warm phase.
In 1946, PDO switched to a cool phase.
In 1977, PDO switched to a warm phase.

California agriculture has ridden a wave of success on that PDO warm phase since 1977, experiencing unprecedented growth. Now that PDO is shifting to a cooler phase, areas that supported crops during the warm phase may no longer be able to do so.


Comments : 130 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate_change, weather

What the modernized USHCN will look like

29 04 2008


USHCN-M station at Greensboro, AL

While I was at NCDC, Grant Goodge showed and provided me with a PowerPoint presentation about the plan to update the USHCN manual observing network to USHCN-M or “modernized”. In a nutshell, it is a “light” version of the Climate Reference Network. The summary of benefits goes like this.

More Accurate Data Through:

  • Redundant Sensors
  • Near Real Time Diagnostics
  • Time Resolution of Five Minutes vs The Current Daily
  • Automated data collection via GOES satellite uplink, eliminating human error of reading and transcription
  • No adjustments to the data post reception. Time of Observation is now irrelevant.
  • No more routinely missing data, such as on weekends (fire station at Marysville, CA for example) and thus no need to fill in estimated data using the FILNET adjustment any more.

The station looks much like a Climate Reference Network station, but has some economy considerations, especially in having one aspirated IR screen instead of three, but it contains triple temperature sensors so that issues with instrumentation drift or offset events can easily be spotted in the data stream.

This will be a huge step forward in data quality and quality control.

His PowerPoint presentation is available here at this link: why-modernize-hcn (PPT 9 MB)

Interestingly, it included what appears to be a photo of the rooftop station in Asheville, NC, at the old NCDC (Federal Building) I’m waiting on a  positive ID.


Comments : 19 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, weather_stations

Signs of the times

28 04 2008

While I was on my week long road trip to survey weather stations and visit the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC last week, I encountered lots of signs. Restaurant signs, road signs, signs from above, you name it. I think I must have passed 100 Bojangles restaurants and/or road signs. Bojangles is a popular southern chicken and biscuits restaurant. One though, really got my attention.

But please read on for the real “mother of all signs” I encountered.

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 32 Comments »

Categories : fun_stuff

Fun with Thermometers

27 04 2008

A guest post by David Smith

Recently I completed my tenth survey for Surfacestations.org. These surveys are fun, almost like treasure hunts where the clues are good but not always great, thus requiring some ingenuity. Also, the surveyor gets to see areas which may otherwise never be visited. And, they’re for a good cause.

While I found no “poster-child” poor quality sites I did observe an array of siting problems. Some thermometers were near the drip-lines of trees, some next to buildings, one was near a concrete patio, one at a sewage plant, several sat above poorly-drained soil and so forth.

These conditions are less than ideal, obviously. Perhaps more importantly, these conditions can change over time. Trees and shrubs grow and die, ground cover changes, concrete is added (and tends to darken over time), drainage may improve or deteriorate, fences and other construction are added or removed, and so forth. Each of these can subtly change the local temperature, a situation which is especially important if one is looking for changes of a fraction of a degree.

To what extent do these imperfections affect local temperature?  Well, we really don’t know (or if anyone knows they’re not talking!).

So, to make a small and imperfect step in that direction, I’m running a few local experiments. My goal is to examine, at least qualitatively, how local microclimate factors like trees and concrete affect temperature. As you’ll see, my methods are too crude to allow fractions of a degree determinations but I should be able to quantify the magnitudes of the impacts of trees, concrete, etc. Or at least that is my goal.

First, my instruments:

I’m using several temperature detector/recorders (”USB1″) like the gray object shown in the photo. These electronic devices measure and log the temperature to the nearest degree F and allow sampling on various schedules. I use 30-minute sampling.

Note: Interested readers can buy these at:
http://www.weathershop.com/USB1_temperature_logger.htm

At this point I’m testing the hardware and developing my experimental plan. But, I have made a few (literally) backyard tests and I’d like to share one of those. This is to help illustrate the approach and, I hope, stimulate helpful comments from other readers.

This initial run (sort of a beta test) was made in my backyard. It involved two extremes. One is near my garage, above a dark-soil flower bed and landscape bricks. This is near a wooden deck and walkway gravel. This spot gets direct sunlight about 50% of the day.

The second extreme is deep shade, beneath low-tree (crepe myrtle) cover and above thick, semi-tropical shrubbery.This is about twenty feet from sunlight. A photo of the backyard is below, with red boxes marking the two locations:

I also use the temperature readings from an airport/airbase located four miles west of my house. This airport provides professional-grade open-field temperature readings which should reasonably approximate regional ambient conditions.

A representative backyard temperature time series is below:

This shows pretty good agreement between the deep-shade max/min and the local airport open-field max/min, which frankly surprised me. I’d expected the deep-shade readings to show less variability (lower highs and higher lows).

More importantly is the contrast between #1 (sunlight and plant beds) and #2 (deep shade). The #1 spot stayed 5 to 10F hotter at midday than #2 (deep shade) less than 50 feet away (and, as a matter of fact, #1 was 5 to 10 F warmer than the high-quality nearby airport).

Why does this matter? well, suppose a co-op station had slowly drifted, over several decades, from open-field conditions to those found at site #1. What would that do to the apparent trend?  That’s an important question which is at the heart of the surfacestation effort.

This backyard demonstration involved convoluted conditions. There is little chance to untangle the relative contributions of so many variables (bricks, soil, tomato plants, trees, etc). So, my plan is to reduce the number of variables in the tests such that we might be able to make broad conclusions about the relative impacts of trees, concrete, drainage and other factors which may change over time.

This should be fun! Suggestions welcome.


Comments : 39 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

1828 Miles, 20 stations surveyed, out of 21 attempted.

26 04 2008

The week was productive, 21 USHCN stations visited, 20 surveyed, one dropped due to access problems (Southport, NC which turned out to be at an Army Depot). My trip odometer said 1828 miles when I turned in the car in Nashville tonight.

Here is the map of my travels this week:

Click for an interactive map

The highlight of the week was of course my 2 day visit to NCDC and the survey of the new CRN station west of Asheville. Another fun moment in the trip came when I visited the Lewisburg, TN Agricultural Experiment Station. It was quite a pretty setting for a station:

While I was doing the survey, and looking for the MMTS which wasn’t near the Stevenson Screen but was indicated by the NCDC equipment log, a farm cat came by to say hello. He was quite the talker. He gave me the grand tour and followed me while I was looking around.

I asked him: “hey Kitty, have ya seen Hansen’s Bulldog around” ? He answered simply “meow” and then took off to the cattle barn. I kid you not.

Interesting thing about this trip, I identified two stations that have undergone undocumented station moves in the last year, which look like good test cases for detecting undocumented changes points via the new USHCN2 methodology. More on that later.

Footnote: While this is a lot of miles, it’s nothing compared to the mileage that Don Kostuch, Eric Gamberg, Russ Steele, and others have put in over the life of this project. I wish to thank them too.


Comments : 20 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

I love the smell of sewage in the morning

26 04 2008

With apologies to Robert Duvall in Apocalypse now-

Kilgore: Smell that? You smell that?
Lance: What?
Kilgore: Sewage, son. Nothing in the world smells like that.
[kneels]
Kilgore: I love the smell of sewage in the morning.  The smell, you know that rotten eggs smell… Smells like… victory. Someday this war’s gonna end…


USHCN at Tullahoma, TN Wastewater Treatment Plant – Visible light


USHCN at Tullahoma, TN Wastewater Treatment Plant – Infra red

You know it seems like every morning this week that I prepare to start my day’s worth of surveys, I find that I’m going to visit another USHCN climate station of record at a sewage treatment plant. And so is the case today, my last day of surveys. I’m gonna take a loooong shower when I get home.

I know you all want to hear more about NCDC and USHCN2, and I’ll get into those details next week, but for now, another sewage treatment plant beckons.

 


Comments : 8 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

Day 2 at NCDC and Press Release: NOAA to modernize USHCN

24 04 2008

Click image for a live interactive view of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC

Today started off terrible. I slipped in the bathtub last night at the hotel, and strained a back muscle and was so sore that just getting dressed and into the car was a chore. As a result, I was late getting to NCDC this morning. I’ve been popping Aleves today. Fortunately, they had slack built in so the day got started cheerfully with a review of the new Climate Reference Network with the principal scientists. It was a super meeting and I took many notes, I’ll have much to share later.

Next came a briefing on “Climate Science” from Tom Peterson, but I’m afraid I stole his thunder a little bit when I announced that I had already seen his presentation, which included an analysis of the Marysville USHCN Station. See the powerpoint he presented here:aapg-san-antonio-peterson

Then came a personal tour of the Asheville CRN station by Dr. Bruce Baker. In addition to taking visible light photos, I also took matching IR photos from many angles. Bruce and his team were quite impressed with the IR camera I use, and he says he plans to buy a couple in use for siting surveys. He also plans to post the IR photos I took today on the CRN site to show how well the design and siting is free of IR influences.

I’ll have much more on all of this but I still have 8 more stations to survey plus an unexpected customer detour service call Friday to WDNN-TV in Dalton, GA which has some trouble with our weather display system there. So stay tuned for more details on the visit and questions that were asked and answered.

But the big news came with Dr. Baker providing me with a press release (new today) to post here for you all to see. CRN is getting completed and USHCN modernization is starting:

NOAA today announced it will install the last nine of the 114 stations as part of its new, high-tech climate monitoring network. The stations track national average changes in temperature and precipitation trends. The U.S. Climate Reference Network (CRN) is on schedule to activate these final stations by the end of the summer.

NOAA also is modernizing 1,000 stations in the Historical Climatology Network (HCN), a regional system of ground-based observing sites that collect climate, weather and water measurements. NOAA’s goal is to have both networks work in tandem to feed consistently accurate, high-quality data to scientists studying climate trends.

See the full press release here:
press_release_042408_climatereferencenetwork

What this means: No more adjusted data, the raw data from CRN and from HCN-M is the real data and will be pristine, assuming the network is maintained. No more torturous gyrations of FILNET, SHAP, and TOBS. The downside is that a track record needs to be built up, the older data is also going to be revised with USHCN2 algorithms soon, and I’ll touch on that later.

One thing that Debra Braun said to me today in the meeting hit home: “our funding had been cut for the last two years, and we were unable to move forward until this year”. This made me think that perhaps some of the focus the surfacestations.org project brought to illuminating the deplorable condition of the network may have helped a little bit in convincing some legislators that it was time to get serious about allocating funding to complete the CRN and fix the USHCN. A little public embarrassment of the USHCN provided by all of us that have contributed to surfacestations.org may have helped. I’d sure like to think so.

I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Baker, Debra Braun, Grant Goodge, and the entire CRN science team, plus Jeff Arnfield, and Steven Del Greco for answering all my questions and taking such careful time with me. Additionally I wish to thank Dr. Karl, and Assistant Director Sharon LeDuc for hearing my concerns and offering ideas.

Everyone there at NCDC made me feel welcome and appreciated.

Most importantly, I want to thank you, my loyal readers and volunteers, because without your help, the trip and presentation I made would not be possible.


Comments : 68 Comments »

Categories : Announcements, climate_change, weather_stations

Road trip Update: Day 1 at NCDC

23 04 2008

I felt right at home when I walked into Dr. Bruce Baker’s office for the Climate Reference Network (CRN):

Why? Because the first thing they had, front and center, were pictures of every CRN site:

and more of them on other walls:

I asked about them, and the reply was: “every time we put in a new CRN station, up goes the picture”.

I spent and hour meeting with director Tom Karl and Assistant Director Sharon LeDuc, both were in attendance for my presentation on what we’ve all learned from the surfacestations project.

Quote of the day from Dr. Thomas Karl: “You and your volunteers have surveyed almost half of the network on a zero budget. If we had undertaken this, it would have meant preparing several proposals and allocating thousands of dollars”.

Yep.

Bruce also bought lunch, and I had a rousing discussion on instrumentation with him and Grant Goodge. More later.


Comments : 42 Comments »

Categories : Announcements, climate_change

Road Trip Update: What I’m doing Wednesday and Thursday

22 04 2008

Having driven just over 800 miles around North Carolina, getting USHCN and GISS stations, like the one in Fayetteville NC yesterday, I’m pretty tired. But I’m at the middle of the trip, a trip made possible by the donations of many readers and supporters like you. Thank you, most sincerely for funding this trip. I’m getting lots of stations, but I’ve kept the centerpiece private until now.

Tomorrow, by an invitation sent almost two months ago, I am meeting with Dr. Thomas Karl and many of the principal scientists at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, NC. I will also be giving a presentation that will include many of the things presented here on this blog, and some that haven’t been.

Here is the meeting agenda prepared by NCDC: watts-visit-ncdcbb PDF file.

I’ll be relaying a couple of communications and have some questions. Feel free to pose some here. The visit has been labeled as an “exchange of ideas and information”, which I’m all for as long as a hockey game doesn’t break out.

More station surveys in western NC and into Tennessee for the weekend. I hope to survey 20-25 on this trip.

Sign up here if you’d like to survey some in your state: www.surfacestations.org

Or if you can’t do surveys but would like to help there’s always the donation button at right to fund the next trip.


Comments : 66 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

This is why you don’t put an official NOAA temperature sensor over concrete

21 04 2008

You’d think the answer would be obvious, but here we have a NOAA operated USHCN climate station of record providing a live experiment. It always helps to illustrate with photos. Today I surveyed a sewage treatment plant, one of 4 stations surveyed today (though I tried for 5) and found that for convenience, they had made a nice concrete walkway to allow servicing the Fisher-Porter rain gauge, which needs a paper punch tape replaced one a month.

Here is what you see in visible light:

 

Here is what the infrared camera sees:

Note that the concrete surface is around 22-24°C, while the grassy areas are between 12-19°C

This station will be rated a CRN5 by this definition from the NOAA Climate Reference Network handbook, section 2.2.1:

Class 5 (error >~= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”

Now a caveat: There had just been a light rain, and skies had been overcast, it had just started to clear and you can see some light shadows in the visible image. Had this rainfall and overcast not occurred, the differences between grass and concrete temperatures would likely be greater. Unfortunately I was unable to wait around for full sun conditions. The air temperature was 58°F (14.4°C) according to my thermometer at the time.

Here is another view which shows the NOAA sensor array, the sky, and the evidence of recent rainfall as evidenced by the wet parking lot:

Why NOAA allows installations like this I’ll never understand. And this station is a USHCN climate station of record, used in who knows how many climate studies.

I’ll tell you more on this station and others I surveyed tomorrow.

 


Comments : 103 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

Road trip update: 5 stations, 376 miles

20 04 2008

I surveyed 5 NOAA USHCN stations today, 2 water plants, 1 sewage treatment plant, and two private observers. Total distance traveled: 376 miles.

All stations had MMTS, and were CRN 3,4,5 rated. The sewage treatment plant was a real gem. Mold on the sensor. MMTS was mounted about 18 feet from an open sewer inlet. I have all the yucky pictures.

Total CO2 footprint contributed by travel today: I have no idea, but still less than Al Gore’s.

I still have a week to go. I need a stiff drink. Jeez bought me one.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Had that stiff drink, and washed the smell of today off myself. I don’t have the full survey report done, but gotta love those USHCN official climate stations at sewage plants. This one passed the smell test.


Click for larger image

 

Soylent Green is made from people!


Click for larger image if you dare.

Guess what, more of this tomorrow!


Comments : 41 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

ABC Poll: GW rates a big fat zero

19 04 2008


A non panicked public says “where’s the fire”? Amazingly, “Global Warming” scores a ZERO in the latest ABC News poll.

ABC and the Washington Post polled Americans about the most important issue to them in the upcoming elections. The economy ranked #1 with 41%, Iraq #2 with 18%, Health Care #3 with 7%, Terrorism/National Security #4 with 5%, Immigration and Ethics followed with 4%, Education and Morals with 2%, Environment and Global Warming continue to receive a 0%.

image
See full size table here

(Direct link to ABC Poll, page 6 has global warming zero result) http://www.abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/1063a4EconomyandIraq.pdf

h/t to ICECAP and reader Mike Bryant.


Comments : 60 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

Surfacestations Update

18 04 2008

I’ve recently updated the www.surfacestations.org website with the latest surveys and numbers. We have 534 stations surveyed. Here is where we stand now with USHCN station surveys:


click for a larger image

 

Climate Reference Network Rating Guide – adopted from NCDC Climate Reference Network Handbook, 2002, specifications for siting (section 2.2.1) of NOAA’s new Climate Reference Network:  
Class 1 – Flat and horizontal ground surrounded by a clear surface with a slope below 1/3 (<19deg). Grass/low vegetation ground cover <10 centimeters high. Sensors located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces, and parking lots. Far from large bodies of water, except if it is representative of the area, and then located at least 100 meters away. No shading when the sun elevation >3 degrees.
Class 2 – Same as Class 1 with the following differences. Surrounding Vegetation <25 centimeters. No artificial heating sources within 30m. No shading for a sun elevation >5deg.
Class 3 (error ~1C) – Same as Class 2, except no artificial heating sources within 10 meters.
Class 4 (error >~= 2C) – Artificial heating sources <10 meters.
Class 5 (error >~= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”
During the next week, I plan to add a number of stations during my road trip, and Russ Steele is getting many also on his 3 month cross country road trip through the USA by mobile home.

If you are planning trips this summer, why not check out which stations have been surveyed here and see if any at the bottom of the list that have not been surveyed will be near your travels? We still have over 600 stations to go, and your help is needed!


Comments : 66 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

Open thread

18 04 2008

Behave yourselves.

I’ll be checking in from time to time and making reports from the road. Just remember that some comments with links might end up in the spam filter and may take some time before I notice them.

 


Comments : 82 Comments »

Categories : Uncategorized

How not to measure temperature, part 61 – maintenance optional

18 04 2008

Every time I visit NOAA’s USHCN page I cringe when I see this phrase:

“The United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) is a high quality, moderate-sized data set of daily and monthly records of basic meteorological variables from over 1000 observing stations across the 48 contiguous United States.”

The “high quality” part always gets me, particularly when www.surfacestation.org volunteers like Eric Gamberg keep finding stations like this one:


Click for a larger image

This station in New England, ND COOP ID# 326315 must be one of those  “maintenance optional” USHCN stations. All the photos and report aren’t in, and I don’t have time for a complete analysis, since I’m leaving for my trip, but this seemed like a good parting shot.

Quality is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.


Comments : 8 Comments »

Categories : weather_stations

How not to measure temperature, part 60

17 04 2008

A good number of official climate stations of record in the USHCN network used for climate studies are at airports. All have been converted to the automated ASOS systems, and the placement of these is often chosen to be away from the airport tarmac so that temperature and dewpoint readings aren’t biased.

While climate monitoring is a secondary consideration of these stations. keeping these readings accurate is vital to aviation safety, particularly in calculating density altitude, which is used to determine the maximum takeoff weight for an aircraft and what runway takeoff length would be needed for a given weight.

But what happens to the accuracy when your “out of the way” station suddenly sits just a few feet from a building and parking lot being constructed?

Alert volunteer Janet Elias helped me locate the USHCN station in Lafayette, LA. The Microsoft Live Earth map showed quite a surprise in the making:


Click for a larger interactive image

Of course it didn’t always used to be this way, the Google Earth image, which is a bit older, shows the area before the construction started:


Click for a larger interactive image

Here is the NASA GISS plot of temperature for this station. A call to the LFT airport authority at this contact from their website told me that the contract for the new fire station facility was awarded in July of 2005 and that construction started shortly after that. The new fire station, show being constructed in the top photo is now complete.

So that calls into question the last two data points on this graph, for 2005 (21.11°C) and 2006 (21.19°C), which happen to be the two highest annual average temperatures since the 21.56°C recorded in 1973. For some reason, the 2007 data is not complete yet you can view it here.

Are 2005 and 2006 the real measure of air temperature or a result of bias from the new fire station being constructed within a few feet of the LFT ASOS temperature sensor?

How would NOAA or NASA or Hadley know if they don’t check out the station environment and examine for such issues?


Click for full sized original data plot

Previously I’ve touched on the problems with airports and the ASOS system, including the warm bias that the acres of asphalt runways, tarmac, and buildings can impart into the climate record from USHCN stations placed at airports. Plus we have the maintenance and accuracy issues of the HO83 thermometers used in the ASOS stations initially, which has been shown to be very serious.

The primary mission of the ASOS was for aviation, and remains that today.

So the question arises: why is NOAA, GISS, and HadCRUT still using data from these airport stations as part of the climate record? You can’t correct what you don’t know about or don’t evaluate, and it seems clear that such site level encroachment biases are not being examined in detail by climate researchers.

UPDATE- Reader Davis Smith writes:

Fifteen miles north of the Lafayette airport is another temperature site named Grand Coteau. It seems reasonable to expect the two to have similar trends (using GISS adjusted data) due to their proximity. A comparison of the two for recent years is here :


Click for larger image

Looks like a divergence circa 2004.

I also plotted the 106-year difference between the two sites:

http://davidsmith1.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/0417082.jpg

Both sites are flat land with the Grand Coteau MMTS located on a campus in a small town while the Lafayette airport is being encroached by the urban parts of Lafayette. My suspicion is that the trend difference reflects urbanization.

REPLY: Thanks David, UHI due to encroachment is certainly a factor, but so is local site bias. I suspect the two are additive in this case.


Comments : 26 Comments »

Categories : weather_stations

How not to measure temperature, part 59

16 04 2008

I’ve mentioned this before, but it is worth mentioning again. In the 30 years I’ve been involved in meteorology, I had no idea that water and sewage treatment plants were locations used for climate monitoring until I started the surfacestations.org project. Given the environment at these places, the idea seems simply absurd to me.

Yet thanks to volunteer Michael Caplinger, here we are again with another gem of a station that is a USHCN “high quality” climate station of record located at a water treatment plant. This is COOP ID# 461220 in Buckhannon, West Virginia:

Looking ESE – click for a larger image

In the above photo, note the placement of the NOAA MMTS temperature sensor. As we tally potential measurement biases we can see the ubiquitous air conditioner, brick masonry, concrete, a metal walkway just inches from the sensor, and of course, the big grey elephant in the room, the “tank”. Then there’s the “big valley” of wind shelter.

Summed up: variable shade, wind shelter, heatsinks, heat sources. Certainly not an easy environment to untangle the actual air temperature measurement from.

As I’ve mentioned before, water treatment plants pump massive amounts of water through, with a tank holding tens of thousands of gallons of water this close to the temperature sensor, it acts as a big heat sink. A sewage plant adds waste heat and humidity to the air, which can affect Tmins.

Here’s another view of the facility from the opposite end:

Looking WNW – click for a larger image

Let us look at the temperature record. Here is the unadjusted USHCN data for Buckhannon, as plotted by NASA GISS:

Click image for the original source plot

The trend looks flat. I did a curve fit to the station data and came up with about a .25°C trend over 100 years. With the temperature being measured so close to a nearly steady state heat sink (tens of thousands of gallons of water) is it any wonder there isn’t much trend at this location? The NCDC records for this location only go back to the mid 1940’s, but it appears temperature has been measured at this location since then.

One of the caveats listed in NOAA’s guide to station placement in addition to the 100 foot rule is that stations should “not be installed near bodies of water, unless that is representative of the area”. Good advice to avoid heat sink effects, I’d say.

Fortunately, the new Climate Reference Network, which is carefully designed and sites selected with care, will avoid such problems.


Comments : 7 Comments »

Categories : weather_stations

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