Guest post by John Goetz
The GISS temperature record, with its various adjustments, estimations, and re-estimations, has drawn my attention since I first became interested in the methods used to measure a global temperature. In particular, I have wondered how the current global average can even be compared with that of 1987, which was produced using between six and seven times more stations than today. Commenter George E. Smith noted accurately that it is a “simple failure to observe the standard laws of sampled data systems.” GISS presents so many puzzles in this area, it is difficult to know where to begin.
My recent post on the June, 2009 temperature found that the vast majority of temperatures were taken from airports and urban stations. This would cause some concern if the urban heat island (UHI) effect were not accounted for in those stations. GISS does attempt to filter out UHI from urban stations by using “nearby” rural stations – “nearby” meaning anything within 1000 KM. No attempt is made to filter UHI from airports not strictly listed as urban.
If stations from far, far away can be used to filter UHI, then it stands to reason some stations may be used multiple times as filters for multiple urban stations. I thought it would be amusing to list which stations were used the most to adjust for UHI. Fortunately, NASA prints that data in the PApars.statn.use.GHCN.CL.1000.20 log file.
The results were as I expected – amusing. Here are the top ten, ranked in order of the number of urban stations they help adjust:
| Usage | Station Name | Location | From | To | Note |
| 251 | BRADFORD/FAA AIRPORT | PA / USA | 1957 | 2004 | Airport |
| 249 | DUBOIS/FAA AIRPORT | PA / USA | 1962 | 1994 | Airport |
| 249 | ALLEGANY STATE PARK | PA / USA | 1924 | 2007 | Admin Building |
| 246 | PHILIPSBURG/MID-STATE AP | PA / USA | 1948 | 1986 | Airport |
| 243 | WELLSBORO 4SSE | PA / USA | 1880 | 2007 | Various Farms |
| 243 | WALES | NY / USA | 1931 | 2007 | Various Homes |
| 241 | MANNINGTON 7WNW | WVa / USA | 1901 | 2007 | Various Homes |
| 241 | PENN YAN 8W | NY / USA | 1888 | 1994 | Various Homes |
| 237 | MILLPORT 2NW | OH / USA | 1893 | 2007 | Various Farms |
| 235 | HEMLOCK | NY / USA | 1898 | 2007 | Filtration Plant |
Unfortunately, having three of the top four stations located at airports was the the sort of thing I expected.
Looking a little further, it turns out all of the top 100 stations are in either the US or Canada, and none of those 100 stations have reported data since 2007. (By the way, #100 is itself used 147 times.) Several of the top-100 stations have been surveyed by surfacestations.org volunteers who have documented siting issues, such as the following:
- Mohonk Lake, N.Y. (197 times) – much too close to ground, shading issues, nearby building
- Falls Village, Conn. (193 times) – near building and parking lot
- Cornwall, Vt. (187 times) – near building
- Northfield, Vt. (187 times) – near driveway, building
- Enosburg Falls, Vt. (180 times) – adjacent to driveway, nearby building.
- Greenwood, Del. (171 times) – sited on concrete platform
- Logan, Iowa (164 times) – near building, concrete slabs
- Block Island, R.I. (150 times) – adjacent to parking lot and aircraft parking area.
The current state of a rural station, however, is an insufficient criterion for deciding to use it to adjust the history of one or more other urban stations. The rural station’s history must be considered as well, with equipment record and location changes being two of the most important considerations.
Take for example good ‘ole Crawfordsville, which came in at #23, having been used 219 times. As discussed here, Crawfordsville’s station lives happily on a farm, and does seem to enjoy life in the country. However, up until 16 years ago the station lived in the middle of Crawfordsville, spending over 100 years at Wabash College and at the town’s power plant.
| Mohonk Lake, N.Y. (197 times) – much too close to ground, shading issues, nearby building |
| Falls Village, Conn. (193 times) – near building and parking lot |
| Cornwall, Vt. (187 times) – near building |
| Northfield, Vt. (187 times) – near driveway, building |
| Enosburg Falls, Vt. (180 times) – adjacent to driveway, nearby building. |
| Greenwood, Del. (171 times) – sited on concrete platform |
| Logan, Iowa (164 times) – near building, concrete slabs |
| Block Island, R.I. (150 times) – adjacent to parking lot and aircraft parking area. |
Maybe it’s time a major global mapping project of heatsinks (concrete, roads, highways, air-conditioning units, buildings, skyscrapers, the works) is done to find out how much of the global surface warming in the last century is caused by the creation of such sinks and other artificial surfaces that absorb and release heat and their fallout regions (where forces like wind blow the heat released by such surfaces), something that would go far beyond the surfacestation project.
Over the past 100 years 1000’s of square miles of land has been paved and urbanized, in some areas like China for example the UHI effects can be huge considering there’s cities like Chongqing with nearly 30 million people. The study mentioned above may have to be done to get the full picture of warming in the last century.
What a mish mash malarkey. Are those top three big airports for jets?
Another question is how far back did they start using that station for correction? Back 80 years ago (for example) it might have been a good reference station to adjust others, but from 19xx it might have been so mutated as to be useless for that purpose. However, knowing how gov’t. works, they most likely just blindly kept using it until the present. IOW, good for one time, good for any time or year. Considering the sorry state of the great majority of stations, I doubt if anyone in NASA has the faintest idea what the actiual conditions are at these “golden” stations being used for reference and adjustments.
1000km would mean that John o’ Groats could “correct” Lands End or even Swedish stations.
DaveE.
I don’t understand. None of the top 100 have reported data since 2007? Is this right?
So to get rid of any UHI contamination that may have been present at existing sites, and to make use ofthe data that came from staions previously shut down in the 1980;s they use stations that are themselves contaminated.
Does it get dumber
How this organisation put men on the moon beggars belief –and they now want to go to Mars !!!!
I wouldnt send them down to the local to get some milk.
Adam from Kansas (15:22:35) : The ironic thing is that UHI have been known to spawn clouds. They will help dissipate the UHI-generated heat, just as (I suppose) clouds do elsewhere. I have to wonder if there will be a net effect on the global average temperature. Hey! Maybe we could model it!!
Say what?! The top 100 “rural” stations that are being used to adjust 100s of urban stations for the UHI effect haven’t reported since 2007?
Can someone explain or provide a link as to how the rural stations are selected and how these data can be used effectively to adjust for urban stations 2 years later? Do they simply create a formula that represents the differences between past rural and urban temps and apply that formula as the adjustment into the future?
Are the same rural stations used to adjust for the same urban stations forever or can they be changed? If so, what criteria are used to change and who gets to decide when to apply it?
Sounds like yet another area that could be subjected to monkey-business as usual.
“File name PApars…”Given the locations of the first five stations, the file naming comvention makes sense.
Note that I only count 9 stations listed.
Reply: A big Homer Simpson “Doh!” I fixed and added the tenth station. – John
Anthony already made perfectly clear what’s real problem here:
“How not to measure temperature!”
It would be great if we came to a real clean non bias temperature map.
I think that really would the end of AGW?Climate Change and all the planned policies.
The current AGW doctrine is based on “Junk Science”.
Questions – maybe they can be answered with filtering the data.
What is the most heavily sampled CURRENT station that is used to adjust for others (stations ending in 2009)?
Others might want to filter this data, ranked by FROM and TO dates, by location (what area of the US had the heaviest sampling), and even bumping this list against the surfacestations.org files.
Are those heavily used stations CRN 1/2, or CRN 3,4,5?
The not so interesting thing about these 9 stations is that they are in part of the US that has towns about 15 miles apart from each other and sometimes much closer. Thus, I doubt that the 1,000 km measure is ever reached.
An interesting question is what has happened to these stations, such as Bradford and Dubois, where airports still operate (I think – haven’t been to either in years)? Are the airport monitors gone, just dropped from usage, or just no longer using that name? On this last thing, I’m thinking of the American versus English spelling discussed recently when a station got ‘lost’.
Reply: I am working on figuring that one out, but I will point out that there are roughly 2000 stations in the US that have ever been a part of the GISS record, most of them not rural, so a station that is used to adjust 250 non-rural stations is reaching pretty far. – John
This is so bad that you just won’t have to look a Giss anymore.
Weather stations for these two places (from fuzzy photos)
taken from Google Earth
Bradford 41. 798260 N, 78.635408 W
Dubois 41.179509 N, 78.893184 W
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=291423153272209
At least the business press, such as IBD, will give the skeptics a bit of support. I think Willis should be asked to provide a graph of the Argos buoy data for the last five years, which, he admits, shows no warming. Considering the thousands of buoys scattered over the oceans, the data should be hard to deny.
Six or seven times as many stations in 1987. Top 100 “best” stations shut down. What happened? Was the funding cut off?
Or has the funding skyrocketed in recent years because of the Pending Doom of Global Warming?
The whole thing smacks of deliberate monkey wrenching. Sorry, but when the magnitude of failure reaches this level, I have a hard time blaming incompetence. What does the Director of GISS have to say about this situation? Oh yeah, that would be James E. Hansen …
OK, so we risk our economy on two bit tin horn stations with known unreliable siting issues and data. What’s the problem. It’s only a few trillion dollars.
You would have really hoped someone other than a bunch of rank amateurs were doing this, because if they aren’t then what are they trying to do. The last thing that comes to mind is science.
A simple question: What do they do with the money they get?
So this is manufactured warming for Copenhagen.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a darker comedy.
“Looking a little further, it turns out all of the top 100 stations are in either the US or Canada, and none of those 100 stations have reported data since 2007.”
OK, please let me know if I understand this correctly Anthony. In order to adjust properly, they use stations that do not report data, and so these stations actually ‘report’ the data that is filled into them, and then this data is used to adjust for UHI? Is that correct?
Reply: Some of the stations continue to report data, but it is not currently captured by NOAA’s GHCN V2 record and therefore does not get reported to GISS. – John
What a curious choice by GISS! The Crawfordsville record has more gaps than nearby Rocksville, and is only marginally longer. Might the choice be related to the much shallower dip seen in 1979? The attenuation of that dip–which produced the lowest average temperatures of the 20th century in the USA–seems to be a persistent feature of GISTEMP analysis.
And a fair number of the “best” stations were tarmac bakeovens anyway. The whole system stinks of crock-itude. And we are supposed to sacrifice $trillions based on this snake oil? $Trillions that the “universal consensus” admits will have no effect on global temperatures?
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and women. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered…. If there be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. ~Thomas Paine
This is an issue I often deal with in my role as an engineer. People often use automated algorithms / SQL’s etc… to process large data sets automatically. The problem is a computer can not solve problems like a human and as soon as you start to delve in it, the problems start appearing everywhere.
The interesting thing is what happens when these stations stop reporting, how is the UHI then adjusted for? Linear extrapolation of the 1978 – 1998 trend? mmm
I think I’ve figured this out. The people who run GISS obviously work for the Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fishery and Polymer Injection Co. http://www.yuwanmei.com/ . Who, btw, just bought out The Onion.
So Anthony – Now that you are over 80%, what will it take to get a usable temperature record, based on raw data from the CRN 1 and 2 stations?