Quality Control of pre-1948 Cooperative Observer Network Data

10 12 2008

I stumbled across this paper “Quality Control of pre-1948 Cooperative Observer Network Data” on the AMS website while looking for something else. I know the work of many of the people who authored this paper, and thus I have reason to believe it is well done for the issues they were attempting to address. However, one thing that was not addressed, and really needs to be, is a site bias timeline. While it will be difficult to go back and find photos of weather station siting for the entire network, there does exist one resource already in NCDC’s hand that could be utilized for the task: B44 forms. These are site surveys, completed by USWB, and later NWS personell that set up these COOP stations. Each B44 includes a site sketch to scale, such as this one from a station in California:

Putting together these B44 forms over the life of a station would enable the creation of a timeline that shows building and road proximity biases that may exist, which are just as important as catching the errors that creep into the human transcription of the data.

Unfortunately, the B44 forms are not available to the public because of NCDC’s privacy concerns for observers. I can appreciate that. However that just doesn’t hold up anymore because NCDC provides all the tools needed on their Metadata MMS website now to identify the location of the observer, including a Google image map and accurate lat/lon, plus on their “free data” section of the NCDC website, you can download the B91 station originals. These are the daily record of observations done in the observer’s own hand, and have the name of the observer written on them in most cases. They are the source of the US climate data and the focus of the QC paper named above.

A sample of the B91 Record of Climatological Observations Form – click for larger image

Here is another B91 form, done by a private observer I happen to know in Livermore, CA His name is listed at the bottom. Put his last name, “Livermore”, and “weather” together in this Google search, and you get all the details you need to proceed. You can even see his picture courtesy of the NWS COOP awards page here.

It is now an easy task to locate anyone and any address given a name, Google, public records, and mapping programs like Google Earth. Since the “privacy issue” no longer exists due to this volume of info available on individual observers, perhaps it is time for NCDC to free the B44 forms. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : weather_stations

Prospects grimmer for reducing greenhouse gases, study shows

10 12 2008
http://www.aragonproducts.com/products/Gas-x22.gif

Perhaps this will work just as well as any other measure.

By Bill Scanlon, The Rocky Mountain News

Scientists have vastly underestimated the challenge of reducing greenhouse gases in a world where billions are boosting their carbon footprint, an important new report says.

The report throws ice water on projections that global warming can be slowed as energy efficiency helps poor countries develop in a more sustainable way.

China has a chance to do that. But nations such as Colombia, Argentina and Iran don’t have the wealth to convert to more efficient energy, even as their economies grow and their citizens demand more electricity and cars, says the report from Colorado atmospheric researchers.

The study by scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado is expected to be a hot topic of discussion at this week’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland.

“We always knew that reducing greenhouse gas emissions was going to be a challenge, but now it looks like we underestimated the magnitude of this problem,” said Patricia Romero Lankao, an NCAR sociologist who is the lead author of the study in this month’s journal Climate Research. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : climate_change

JPL says: FORGET LA NINA: OSCILLATION RULES AS THE PACIFIC COOLS

10 12 2008

While I said a couple of days a go that “La Nina is back” it appears I mistook a strong PDO cool signature for the La Nina signature. As JPL’s Patzert says in the article below “This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can cause La Niña-like impacts around the Pacific basin,”.

This PDO shift will be longer term event, and it appears that California will see some significant changes along with the many other parts of the planet. – Anthony (h/t to Allan)

PRESS RELEASE
JPL/NASA, 9 December 2008
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-231

PASADENA, Calif. — The latest image of sea-surface height measurements from the U.S./French Jason-1 oceanography satellite shows the Pacific Ocean remains locked in a strong, cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a large, long-lived pattern of climate variability in the Pacific associated with a general cooling of Pacific waters. The image also confirms that El Niño and La Niña remain absent from the tropical Pacific.

The new image is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20081209.html

The image is based on the average of 10 days of data centered on Nov. 15, 2008, compared to the long-term average of observations from 1993 through 2008. In the image, places where the Pacific sea-surface height is higher (warmer) than normal are yellow and red, and places where the sea surface is lower (cooler) than normal are blue and purple. Green shows where conditions are near normal. Sea-surface height is an indicator of the heat content of the upper ocean. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : PDO, Science, climate_change, sea level