Analysis Of UHI In South Korea

Urban areas are heavily overrepresented in the siting of temperature stations: less than 1% of the globe is urban but 27% of the Global Historical Climatology Network Monthly (GHCN-M) stations are located in cities with a population greater than 50,000.
It’s even worse than that. In the US HCN I was hard-pressed to find a record -any- record that wasn’t either inside city limits or within a mile of a US Post Office. I only managed to get through several hundred sites, but we’ve heard several times that the largest -changes- in the UHI should come about at the lower end of the scale.

You don’t think that perhaps Pohang, which was a FISHING village until about 1960, might suffer from UHI as the home of Pohang Steel company just possibly, apart from the fact the population must have grown by a factor of 1000 in the interim
Ah, nights gazing across the beach at Pohang….straight at one of the largest steelplants in the far east…..

I just came back from the shopping centre. My car was sitting in the lot in the sun.
When I came out and got into my car the temperature in my car read 31C.
The weather station showed 25C. If that is not an example of UHI, then what is?

I’m reminded of McKittrick’s paper showing that there’s a strong correlation between warming and economic activity.
It 2006, total U.S. energy consumption was estimated (according to DOE/EIA) to be 97.1 quadrillion BTUs, which when converted to “watts” type measurements is
equivalent to 3.25 x 10 ^12 watts generated continuously over the course of a year.
If we divide that by the surface area of the U.S. in meters, we get 0.33 watts per sq. meter.
Now, compare that the the total radiative forcing from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations supposedly operating today, which (according to the IPCC) is
somewhere around 1.6 W/m2.
At this point, we might conclude that the waste heat generation (0.33 W/m2) is only about 20% of the radiative forcing from increasing CO2 (1.6 W/m2).
We have most of our thermometers where people live. People mostly live in urban areas.
Some temperature measurements will be measuring growth of urban areas
rather than effects of greenhouse gases:
http://129.115.102.107/lrsg/Teaching/EES5093/UHI-houston.pdf
and some is measuring trends in lower evaporation due to paving and
building over large areas,
leaving less room for the cooling effects of the latent heat of
vaporization:
https://www.stroudcenter.org/about/pdfs/Dow2000-WRR-TrendsEvaporationBowenR=
atio.pdf
Most people are aware that the world’s population has quadrupled,
from about 1.6 billion to about
6.5 billion in the last century. , and urban populations have more
than quadrupled. The world’s energy use has gone up by a factor of
10 over the last century, again most of that increase being in
urban areas. I get a rough estimate of 0.26 watts per square meter
heat energy produced over the world. Assuming that 3% of the land surface is
Urban, and 30% of the earth’s surface is land, I get
29 watts per square meter assuming most of that heat is produced in
urban areas. And that has
gone up by a factor of 10 since 1900, from 2.9 to 29 watts, way more than the 1.6 watts theoretically due to greenhouse gases.. There should have been a long negative correction for the urban heat island effect over the last centure, and yet, as Steve McIntyre has pointed out,
http://climateaudit.org/2008/03/01/positive-and-negative-urban-adjustments/
corrections have been about 50-50 for positive and negative
corrections- nonsense on the face of it!- A. McIntire

Why not simply use the raw temperature data? All these adjustments and corrections are, to a substantial extent, falsifications. No one should have to depend upon falsifications for scientific data, let alone for justifying policy decisions. I remember earlier articles on this site showing the actual temperature increase due to UHI, so raw temperature data from urban areas (which is most of them nowadays) should have an asterisk that leads to a notation of the likely temperature had that location been in the country (which most actual land still is). The raw data should be still available and should be the foundation upon which any extrapolations or deductions are made, even if allowances must be made for UHI or other conditions. I could also go on and on about “anomalies” or departures from an average that is impossible reliably to establish, but that’s for another time.

Doug Proctor says:
July 10, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Average temperature change GISS: +0.98C, after average UHIE change (reduction of, from raw): 0.032C. Yer right, not enough correction. But …..
GISS says that the +/- averages out OVER THE WORLD.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Unfortunately, individual countries (such as Oz) look at and make decisions based on the adjustments FOR THEIR COUNTRY with little regard for the global figures.
Raising the temps in Oz and lowering them in, say, Antactica could certainly average out the global adjustments but makes Oz look hotter. Cue the greenies and pollies making decisions on such distorted figures.

highflight56433 says:
July 10, 2013 at 9:02 pm
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Obviously, the use and interpretation of the raw data is preferable so as to prevent one from falling into the trap of simply interpreting the effects of adjustments and unexpected bias caused by the adjustments.
If CO2 is a well mixed gas and if global warming is a global issue, why do we need so many weather monitoring stations? What we need is quality not quantity.
I would have tjhought that the first task would be to undertake a thorough audit of all weather monitoring stations world wide, and identify those that are properly sited and those that are truly rural and have been so from inception. One needs to identify station data whereby the only anthropogenic change and influence is the atmosphere, and not change of land use (by which I include urbanisation and of course, nearby crop spraying). A proper physical inspection and site survey is required, and we need to ascertain whether in the case of the rural stations there have been any material changes in vegation (including the siting of trees) over the years, and remove ones which have been adversely affected by such change .
Thereafter, one would look at the resultant class to identify those with the longest uninterupted record. Any change of instrumentation would be the end of one record and the beginning of a new record. There should be no attempt at splicing one onto the other. Ditto any geographical relocation of the station, although I consider that we should not use any station that has been the subject of geegraaphical relocation.
In theory, just a handful of high quality stations in each country should be better representaive of temperature changes than a data set comprosed predominantly by poor quality stations and which thereby require some form of adjustment/homogenisation..
PS. a good article Paul; yet another example where it would appear that the Team have failed to get a grips with UHI.

Nah, Mosher says it’s insignificant.

Didn’t the Energy Sec say we should cover our roofs with tin foil to eliminate UHI?

Steve Mosher, where are you? How much more of this do you need to change your mind?

For World “climate” purposes, why are weather stations in urban areas included at all? Towns and cities are special cases that do not reflect what is actually happening in the surface atmosphere.