This is a preliminary post to a much more detailed one coming from my friend Paolo Mezzasalma. who is doing a tour of Italy’s weather stations.
While there are significant and systemic problems with USHCN stations in the United States, there are also problems with stations worldwide. One of the problems is that a good percentage of GHCN stations are at airports. For example, Paolo sent along a photo of the weather station at the Ciampino Airport in Rome, Italy. It piqued my interest for obvious reasons.
The arrows point to three different weather stations. two are Stevenson screens, the third is an automated “ASOS” like weather station presumably used for aviation weather. Note the proximity to the parked jets and tarmac.
Paolo writes:
“You see two Stevenson screens: the official one to the East and an automatic Data Collection Platform to the West, which was added recently.”
But that’s not all, this weather station site has other heat islands nearby, like a nice semi truck parking lot. That’s always good for a warm boost.
In fact this weather station is caught between two modes of transportation. Trucking and aviation. I wonder which affects it more? I wonder if the jet parking area and the trucking staging area were always there?
Note also the red/white striped light pole missing in the older photo at top, but present in the annotated photo. You can view that photo interactively here. The jet on the right is also missing. The differences in photos underscores the fact that airports are hardly static places, and expansions, improvements, and construction is the modus operandi at most airports today.
Here’s the view looking south.
Here is the interactive view
I wonder how the jet blast affects the high temperature recorded at the airport weather station on certain days when they take it out for a spin? I wonder how much the tarmac adds, or the trucking parking lot adds? Or is it all swamped by Rome’s UHI?
UPDATE: for those that might question whether jet exhaust could reach the weather stations, this instructional video from United Airlines done at the San Francisco airport in 1993 might be helpful in visualizing the problem. (h/t to “Just want truth”)
The TV show Mythbusters also recently did a similar demonstration.
So what are we really measuring at those weather stations at Rome’s airport?
The ENVIBASE project reports:
In the [Rome] urban area, five meteorological stations continuously collect climatic data, such as temperature, relative humidity, wind velocity and orientation, rainfall intensity, atmospheric pressure, etc., and organised them in a database form.
Such stations are:
* Urbe Airport;
* Ciampino Airport;
* Rome-Eur (operating for the last three years);
* Collegio Romano (located in the historic centre of Rome and collecting data since 1782);
* Monte Mario (for a limited period of forty years).
So what we have at Rome’s Ciampino airport is in fact a climate station. I’ll have more on this and other weather stations in Italy soon.
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“What are we really measuring in Rome?”
Exhaust gas temperature of a jet engine is, say, 600C….distance to the MMTS (in the photo) is ~ 150 m directly in line with the engine exhaust…
It’s anyone’s guess as to what we’re measuring in Rome, but it’s not a natural ambient air temperature.
Pictures do not lie. Nothing like photographic evidence of weather stations adjacent to heat islands. Well done.
It is good to document all these things but they are no longer surprising. It is reasonable for airports to have the data on temperature and winds close to runways. Even so, one might think the weather stations would not be located directly behind revving jets. Only the pilots and flight control folks should make any use of these local numbers. When this information is scooped up to support the global warming issue fraud begins.
Thanks to Paolo.
What a great post for Simon’s blog.
Exhaust blasts would produce momentary peaks of climatically unrealistic temperatures which may or may be recorded. If recorded,the readout would be very interesting.
If the prevailing winds were from the truck car park, then that would produce a more constant ‘heat island’ effect that would effect( with a slight time lag due to thermal gathering) daytime temperatures.
Comparisons to nearby sites would be useful.
Is it too soon to go off topic?
Has anyone tried to assess the impact of the Mt. Redoubt eruption?
There is a nice image from two days ago (3/26) — a brown ash cloud extending over the Cook Inlet. Either or both of the two volcanoes might yet explode so maybe the question is premature. Still, this is a nice image.
http://www.avo.alaska.edu/image.php?id=17249
I had more ‘Romeing’ success using Google maps.
There is only one runway and the MMTS site, to be fair, is near the aircraft parking area and the aircraft were probably towed there.
I could not discern a prevailing wind from the description given in the ENVIBASE site, perhaps wind direction is random and seasonal.
As mentioned by JFH airport weather is for aviation use. The key temperature data is that a few feet above the runway usually black tar. The temperature is used for every takeoff to determine both flight speeds and engine performance/setting. A few degrees can be the difference between a drama or disaster in the case of something like an engine failure.
Wrong data (presumably data entry) is a leading suspect for EK407 at YMML last week where there was a tailstrike, tracks on the grass and the localiser antenna was cut off 50cm (20″) above the brick localiser building.
So we’ve already seen the abysmal state of the USHCN. It appears this pattern may be repeated in other countries as well. Not only are so many stations located in urban areas where the UHI bias has an impact, but they’ve also got siting issues. Now all we need do is find out how much of the past century or so of warming is real and how much is due to UHI & poor siting.
But Hansen and Mann are absitively, posolutely sure they are already accounting for heat islands…. and see nothing wrong with smearing anybody who thinks otherwise.
John F. Hultquist (20:52:28) :
The AVO also has some great video footage of lahars racing down the flank glaciers at Redoubt.
Link: ftp://ftpext.usgs.gov/pub/wr/ak/anchorage/Parker/
While this off the immediate topic, I just wanted to mention a brief experience I had of UHI just a few days ago. I was working in Horsham, a medium sized country town in rural Victoria, Australia. It has a population of approximately 15,000. I had to drive back to Adelaide after a few days there, and left at 5.15am and the temperature on my car’s thermometer was 10 degC. As I drove out of Horsham into the surrounding rural areas the temperature steadily dropped, eventually settling on 6C. As I came up to the next small town Nhill it rose again back to 10C and then dropped again to 6C as I passed into the rural areas and rose again to 10C as I drove through Kaniva. Both Nhill and Kaniva are small towns of only 2000 and 1000 people respectively. This experience showed to me that UHI is real and significant – of the order of 4C – and appears applicable in even quite small towns of 1000 people. I suspect the difference in temperature from town to rural is more at certain times of the day, but nonetheless is significant. This sort of difference seems of a similar order of magnitude to Anthony’s transect across Reno that he did a while back.
This all is just a little scary…. because.
Neil Crafter (22:06:51)
If this is true, then we have COOLED this 4C in all the UHI places, and
even the sat. temps will be higher as well.
why be afraid? that is a big difference, crops are in trouble and soforth
seeds need to be planted in just two weeks, ground is still frozen and
covered with a new snow fall.
CO2 where are you?
Airports are normally oriented to the prevailing winds.
If this is the case here, the concrete pad would act as
a heat capacitor. This could be verified by comparing
the data from this site, to other local, more rural sites.
The temperature data from this station should drop
more slowly than others at night.
Sun can we please have a little speck? please?
At least they don’t irrigate the grass under the weather station, unlike Australia, where most climate reference sites are also at airports but on patches of nice green grass.
Or at least they were until recently, when the AGW hysteria made irrigated grass unfashionable. Shutting off the irrigation produced a fall in Australian averaged (measured) temperatures (from the airports).
And the government has resorted to not updating their temperature graphs to cover up the embarassment of falling temperatures.
http://www.climatechange.gov.au/impacts/trends/temperature.html
Note the page from the Department of Climate Change is dated 2009, but stops its temperature trend data in 2005.
REPLY: Sounds like a job for WUWT. – Anthony
Not possible for heat coming out of the back of jet engines–they don’t produce any heat or nothing. Let’s close up shop and go home. 😉
YouTube video of thrust from the back of a jet engine and the distance that thrust reaches :
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2620422658308473679&ei=OB3PSdvFDIWgqQPA8eTDAQ&q=jet+engine&hl=en&client=firefox-a
Never been there, but the parking stands are taxi-in capable (and on concrete). It wouldn’t take more than idle thrust to make the corners, so the temp that far from the aircraft would be maybe 20 C above ambient directly in the exhaust, and probably stay that way long enough to mark a high on a Stevenson thermometer.
J Campbell (21:20:48) :
. . . A few degrees can be the difference between a drama or disaster in the case of something like an engine failure.
Wrong data (presumably data entry) is a leading suspect for EK407 at YMML last week where there was a tailstrike, tracks on the grass and the localizer antenna was cut off 50cm (20″) above the brick localizer building.
Improper loading is a more likely culprit at YMML. Loaded nose-heavy, when the pilot pulls back on the yoke for a normal rotation, the nose stays on the ground. A couple seconds to recognize the problem and the end of the runway is getting close, so all the way back gets you off the ground, but guarantees a tail strike, and a ton of paperwork.
Takeoff data at commercial airports is canned for each runway, and the pilots have their own air temp gauges, so there are crosschecks. Lots of leeway built into the system for safety, and you’re pretty far into the no-go area of any takeoff data table before you’re truly unsafe.
I’d look for an anemometer and temp sensor out by the runway instead of these ones they use for the climate network. Be interesting to see the GHCN highs and lows for Ciampino.
OT. The Catlin team switched their lights off last night. Hmm, I wonder if that made them more dim?
Here is the trend up to 2009, it is probably not right because it rises at the end!
http://www.bom.gov.au/tmp/cc/tmax.aus.0112.18614.png
“Or is it all swamped by Rome’s UHI?”
Naaah, UHI doesn’t exist. It’s all co2. We have dead polar bears.
I keep wondering when we see all of these possible heat sources close to weather stations, why doesn’t someone put up a reference station a few hundred yards further from a heat source than an official station. Then it would be a very simple matter to compare the two sets of data and know for sure how much of an effect the heat source was having.
Of course the effect would not be the same for all heat sources but it might give us an idea of how strong the effect could be.
A typical case of Jet Propelled Global Warming.
Thanks for a job well done.
So where can we find the temp. data recorded at the Ciampino Airport site?
“IImproper loading is a more likely culprit at YMML is a more likely culprit at YMML”
Usual suspects for takeoff problems are:
1. Improper loading – Total not CG position
2.Density altitude with temp being important 5C has given me a tight feeling in the rear
3. Donk problems
The rest CG, brakes ice etc are not so common