People send me things, its always interesting to see what comes in the inbox daily:
Dear Mr. Watts,
I have followed your blog and surface station project with great interest. On a recent trip to Italy, I found myself in a city park in central Milan and a weather station caught my eye. I have attached a couple of photos along with a map showing its location. The station is attached to a lab which is part of a greenhouse in gardens. Upon seeing the installation I just had to snap some photos to share!
Keep up the great work.
Jeff Kalt
San Francisco
Here’s what Jeff sent me, a series of successively wider views of a weather station in Milan, at the Giardini Pubblici Indro Montanelli (public gardens). Here is more info on the place as well as an interactive Google Map. Milan’s Public Gardens extend for around 16 hectares / 40 acres and it is the largest city park in Milan. The building is the Palazzo Dugnale, housing the Greenhouse Laboratories, part of the Milan Natural Science Centre.
Click for larger image
Click for larger image
Click for a larger interactive map image
Click for larger interactive map image
Interesting thing to note here, is that this is a high-end weather station, costing several thousand dollars, with precision insturmentation, and apparently a datalogger. Though I’ve been unable to find any data online from this weather station. I suspect the weather station was installed by the museum there for monitoring the greenhouse lab.
Pity they couldn’t put it in the middle of the park for better exposure, away from the building and walkways, but instead chose to tuck it next to the building and green awning, which I’m sure contribute to higher daytime highs and higher nighttime lows.
It just goes to show that while you can strive for the best in instrumentation, a poor choice of placement brings the instruments down to K-Mart thermometer quality levels. Mamma Mia!
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Make up your own jokes here about the “manmade greenhouse effect”.
Ummmm….that placement is throwing the K-Mart Thermometers under the bus!! 🙂
http://www.cookevilleweatherguy.com
We ran into an enclosure in Konstanz Germany recently. Surrounded by concrete and maybe 30 feet from the lake on one side and 20 feet from a harbor. I thought they were supposed to be away from bodies of water?
Are European sites worthwhile to document?
REPLY: yes they are – Anthony
Ed,
Certainly worth recording but of course it may have a specific purpose related to the lake, in which case its location may be sensible, and may NOT be part of any network supplying direct wider area data for global interpretation.
But without checking, who would know?
ER, you ran into an enclosure…???
Were you running, or in a running car; if so, was the accident fatal? Isn’t it a bit careless of you to run into a weatherstation, these things cost money, you know.
OK Enough with the humor. Seriously, if you are in Europe and can monitor sites, that will be excellent. It’s rather difficult in Canada as distances are so great, it would become a full time job, just on the travel. Within a day’s drive, I have the National Research Center site and one in Brockville. Is it worth me doing these?
Illustrative example of what happens when budgetary constraints drive the train and are used to determine instrument placement.
The output from the anemometer must be as priceless as the temperature data!!
Kalt said:
Mr. Kalt’s jumping ability significantly exceeds mine. Nice selection. I just hope the data is only being used for the adjoining greenhouse…and for weather needs.
GP has a good point. If this is really a weather station and is not part of a climate data recording network, then there is practically no reason to be upset. “Backyard weather stations” are excellent tools available to meteorologists when fine-tuning forecasts and also serve as a great way to confirm forecasts after the fact.
REPLY: Mr. Rothenberg, nobody’s upset, the point here is that siting doesn’t seem to be considered. Significant money (probably public money) was spent on a quality weather station with quality instruments, but there appears to have been no consideration given to siting to minimize the chances of bias. In this placement, there will be temperature bias, wind bias, and precipitation bias, all due to the building and awning. This location is greenhouse laboratory, so you’d think there would be people there capable of noting the potential for such biases.
This lack of consideration of siting seems to happen a lot, as the surfacestations project has shown, it is rampant in the US climate network. The point of this entry is that it happens elsewhere under other circumstances. -Anthony
But wouldn’t it be better to get weather data way from buildings where it would be more useful? I would think the building proximity would give false wind speed readings, and might even mess with the amount of rain hitting the rain gauge.
counters (18:39:59) : “Backyard weather stations” are excellent tools available to meteorologists when fine-tuning forecasts and also serve as a great way to confirm forecasts after the fact.
Would you please give an example for using the data from this site?
On a blacktop
On a rooftop
On a hot spot
In a parking lot
And they’re all in little boxes
And they all look just the same . . .
I don’t know for other countries but in France, all up to date stations used in the climate databases are at airports who are, like anywhere else are invaded by huge parking lots years after years. The only French rural station used for climatology is Mont-Aigoual (a superb mountain station manned by Meteo France for weather forecasts) but its data after mid 1990 are absent from global climate databases !
Another anecdote of climate “science” : in the recent BBC’s “the climate wars” (see it on video.google), Ian Stewart, the series’ host was proud to present a “great” station meticulously managed by a Jesuit monastery : Stonyhurst. It is supposed to be the gold standard for the climate network: data back to the mid 1950, rural & no urban heat island problems, no method or location change.
And here the joke: if you look in the “global” temperature database (GISS or GHCN), data from Stonyhurst stop short in… 1969. It would take just 20 s to check it at the GISS’s web site, but do you think the BBC guys would be interested to do such mundane things? NO.
I imagine placement is often determined by the fear of generating an uproar, by digging a ditch to lay a cable in. In this case the ditch would mess up gardens, lawns, and need to cut through pavement. I’ve noted, in other cases, laying a cable would involve crossing state highways, and so forth.
Cordless technology would avoid these problems, but then you would face an uproar by those who would object to this gizmo standing in a park. (Of course, if you put a bronze plaque at the base, and called it art, the same people might stand around it and look thoughtful.)
In the middle of the park!! And get my Versace threads wet if it rains? Mama Mia!
Nice instruments + poor siting = precise bad data.
Demesure (01:48:51)
Ian Stewart is a resident mathematician for New Scientist. Think about that !
Typo in my previous post : “data back to the mid 1950” should read “data back to the mid 1800s”
I like Pierre’s take on it!!! (Nice Instruments + poor siting = precise bad data)
…that, my friends, sums it up quite nicely. The boobs in the man-made global warming religion do not take into account poor setups, such as this one, when the spew their ‘evidence’…
http://www.cookevilleweatherguy.com
Burke and Hare (03:19:19)
I think Demesure is refering to Ian Stewart the geologist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Stewart
not Ian Stewart the mathematician
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stewart_(mathematician)
Cookeville,
As you certainly have realised, I’m just saying all that nice equipment ends up just being a big waste of taxpayer money! The data it delivers is utterly useless, and the equipment eventually just rusts away.
If these GISS bozos ran a farm, they’d buy Catepillar heavy equipment just to cultivate the vegetable garden near the house. Flaming wasters of OUR money they are.
Burke & Hare (03:19:19)
Yes, M. White is correct. Iain (note Scots spelling) Stewart is a geologist at Plymouth.
This looks like one of the network of monitoring stations set up by the EU to “Improve weather forecasting” across the European Union. Driving through the countryside you see them everywhere, especially on the edges of roads and at junctions.
Probably the station is not much use for getting objective weather data. But it looks like an ideal site for gauging the “greenhouse effect”.
The Finnish Meteorological Institute publishes some pictures of our weather stations on their website. The photography is not up to the standards at surfacestations.org, but they might be worth looking at. Most are from rural(ish) locations, but it is hard to tell without aerial shots from satellites. The coordinates are there, in case someone has the time: http://www.fmi.fi/saa/havainto_93.html