NOAA/NCDC – USHCN is broken please send 100 million dollars

But city lots are expensive!
Sarc/0

My thoughts exactly. $100K a site? Not for the equipment and operating costs, particularly when there’s a volume discount to set up 1,000 of them. I would imagine the $100MM gets soaked up in “systems design” (consultants) and “standards development” (consultants) and “database infrastructure” (consultants) and “training” (consultants) and “management and reporting processes” (consultants).
Add about 25% markup for standard governmental waste, confusion and graft, and you’re at the desired total without much trouble.
Seriously, if a Net Community were to attack this problem, what would it look like and how much would it cost (both hard dollars for equipment and third-party vendor costs; and imputed dollars for volunteer time to design and build it, and to tend the system and crunch the numbers)? Somebody should do a Shoestring Challenge Model and shame these guys into a less crazy figure.

By the time you do a soil study and spread some black asphalt pavement, the costs go up.

What’s missing from these analyses are the (high) costs of special high-tech heat absorbing materials that must surround each station.

Whilst I applaud the need to address poor siting issues and bias caused by adjustments, if one simply creates 141 or 1000 new sites, whilst you start of with a clean bill of health, you start at year one. No worthwhile trend data will be available for at least 15 may be 30 years. Gurther, will this add anything of substance to the satellite data. Are we not better ditching the idea of new sites and just use sat data and sea buoy data?
Since we want to find out what has happened during the past 150 or so years, there is no alternative but to simply collate those records, examine the sites, and throw out data from sites which would require adjustment/harmonisation and just use the raw data from the pure sites available.

It really is an astonishing letter and admission that the historical record is of little use in estimating temperature trends in the US, supposedly the best in the world. No doubt the experts who supported its “value” are from GISS and CRU/Hadley.
I’d trust Anthony et al to do it better and cheaper and at a fraction of the cost.

The real costs are associated with the special coding trick © needed to hide the decline… not to mention to state of the art computer centre and management suites located near the beach in Bali so the managers can be close to their programmers… then there are the first class return flights to the states – one week off / one week on the beach… its a tough life… but someone has to do it.
Of course there is always plan B – Forget about the network of technical stuff in the field which always goes wrong… just concentrate on programming the trick ©… Pardon?.. What did you say? Really? We are doing that already? Gosh! And its outsourced! WOW! Lets all go home then… Anyone fancy a BBQ on the beach? We’ve got a real party budget now… so leave your wallets at home… just bring a shopping bags with you so you can take home some of these greenbacks.

Virtual stations: The solution!

@ur momisugly richard verney says:

If they use good sites they will almost immediately (year two) be able to compare current trends with the sites they have. Of course, that might make them look bad, so all that extra money is to find sites where the temperature can be expected to go up or special thermometers which trend up all by themselves or some other scheme. I would be happy to be proven paranoid, but consider their history.
Standard bureaucratic fare: “If we screwed up, it was because we didn’t have enough money and power. You need to give us more so we can do a better job.”
[Of screwing up, we all know they mean.]
A modernized USHCN would be nice, but it’s not what we’ll get with the NOAA in charge.

$100M over 10 years doesn’t sound that bad to me all on its own for such an important function. . . but yeah when the context changes to $100k/per, that does seem very high. I’d need more drill-down on the detail to support those kind of numbers.

What we need is a redistribution of equipment wealth.
The Alabama Confederate grave stone is missing I see.
Let’s move it to a Confederate Grave Yard and make it a monument under a Different budget and have it play Dixie.