Best place to measure would be nonperturbed environments; ain’t gonna be easy to find. And it is worthwhile to measure thermal trends in non-natural environments. Consider the difference in evening desert thermal regimes in say, downtown Las Vegas (roof top or street paved surfaces) and fifty miles away in rural desert setting.

Here is the URL:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5736103.html

It’s just hard to imagine a university actually complaining about getting too much national and world recognition. lol.

The difference is that last week the wind was from the southeast. Why does that matter?

Well, the layout of adjacent parts of my backyard, which can’t be seen from the camera, is here:

http://davidsmith1.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/0428081.jpg

What this shows is that, when the wind is southeast, the breeze travels over about 50 feet of sunlit concrete, through a breezeway and across a brown wooden deck in a manner that probably swirls to the right. Pass that warmed, weakened breeze across the darker compost and bricks beneath the sensor and I suspect that a +5F local temperature rise resulted.

On the other hand, when the wind is northerly it travels across my neighbor’s grass backyard, through about 20 feet feet of shade and then across 10 feet of low vegetation. That’s a zero-concrete “cool” path.

This backyard comparison is simply an exercise, but it suggests the contamination possible by placing temperature sensors too close to human habitation.

All periods of low solar activity have been named (Sporer, Maunder, Dalton, Kristen…). How about we name the current one “The Gore Minimum.”

When error bars are reported for surface temperatures, it makes me cringe. Our climate controlled labs don’t have the uncertainty claimed by climate “scientists”.

Doug is also correct in saying:
“Unfortunately assurances are costly but errors should be known and stated or they will be exploited by those who need to support some issue other than the science.”

All sources of error must be identified before before reporting the uncertainty. It is not an easy task, but the integrity of the data relies on correct calculations of the uncertainty. And true as well, the data can be exploited. Honestly, the idea that wind balances out the UHI/microsite issues (Parker et al) is completely laughable to those of us in the real world of the science of measurement (metrology). It seems Pielke and a few others (obviously Anthony Watts) are the only ones who fully understand this concept. Common sense goes a long way for certain things in this world, and it doesn’t take a PhD to see them.

Now we have NOAA on the one hand announcing a renovation of the surface station network, which is good, but on the other they say all the previous records have been “statistically corrected”. Surely they must have been blushing when making that statement.

I have little doubt Doug and Retired Engineer would agree if in our fields we turned in a study using the same sloppy methods used by climate “science”, we’d be out on the street.

There are lies, damned lies, and temperature records :)

The interesting thing though is the level of accuracy of both.

The temperature accuracy is +/- 1 F Which is also the internal resolution. That’s the USB2.

The USB1 is a resolution of 1 F also, but the accuracy is +/- 2 F

So today’s mean of 55 and tomorrow’s mean of 56 might actually be backwards or the same or ?

REPLY: The inexpensive solid state sensor has it’s limits.