Oh this is funny. There’s not even any Gore involved.

"Haunted house" in Amsterdam - from About.com

We’ve seen that man-made global warming has taken some hits in the opinion polls lately, and that its 10 minutes of fame may be over, but sharp eyed blogger Dave R. at Care2 spotted this zinger. I’ve posted the graphs and tables from the polls with highlights below.

Dave R writes:

In the United States, more people believe that houses can be haunted by the dead than believe that the living can cause climate change. Is this simply a scary Halloween tale or our frightening future?

The latest Pew poll on global warming shows a large drop in the percentage of Americans who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising, from 71% down to only 57% in the last 18 months. And global warming due to human activity? The overall numbers have declined from 47% to 36%. To put this in perspective, a Gallup poll found that 37% of Americans believe that houses can be haunted.

Here’s the Pew poll graphics:

Pew Poll Data Table - note highlight

And the Gallup Poll says:

Of course the margins of error for each poll is probably greater than the 1% difference noted, but it is still darn funny.

Perhaps next, to prop up the numbers, the two issues will get fused.

On the Care2 website, DaveR has a poll of his own that asks:

“Does global warming frighten you more than ghosts?”

So far, the Yes votes far outnumber the Noes.

Some days I find things by accident. Today, researching for something else online, serendipity paid me a visit.

Fans of the hit sitcom “Seinfeld” may recognize this logo.

Image: Tshirtbordello.com (with some help from the Gimp)

Fans of the show may also recognize this restaurant:

Photo: Wikipedia entry on Seinfeld - Tom's Restaurant - click for details

Fans of Real Climate might recognize this man:

NASA's Dr. Gavin Schmidt in front of the famous Seinfeld restaurant "Monk's" at 2880 Broadway, New York City. Photo: Christy Field, The Guardian

OK by now you are probably thinking, “Anthony has gone off his rocker. Where is this going?” Well, to be honest, I just want to share a little fun.

Have your ever wondered why over at RC, it seems to be like some sort of weird sitcom? There’s a reason for that.

Observe.

The address for the famous Tom’s Restaurant aka “Monks” is, via Google Maps:

The address for the famous Goddard Institute of Space Studies aka “Real Climate” is, via Google Maps:

Yes, that’s correct. They share the same address. The NASA GISS office is above Monk’s, not that there is anything wrong with that. But, it might explain some things. Although I’ve been following the climate products from NASA GISS for years, I never thought to look at their “about” page, mainly because I’d never have a reason to visit. You see, I’m a persona non grata there. But amazingly, here it is right on the GISS page:

Click to visit the GISS web page

While I’m no architect, doing a little reading up, I think we can see where Jim and Gavin’s offices are, though I could be wrong. Gavin’s may be on 112th rather than Broadway.

Here’s a Google Earth street level view of 2880 Broadway:

GISS is located right above "Monk's - Click for a larger image

From the GISS web page above, they give a description of the main entrance to the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at 545 West 112th Street. It is rather plain. Here’s what it looks like:

Click for a larger image and details

So now that we’ve established that GISS and RC  is connected to “the show about nothing” you can use some of the best lines from Seinfeld to refute a number of common arguments put up by Gavin and the RC team.

I’ve complied a list of commonly seen issues and phrases used on RC and appropriate rebuttals from Seinfeld characters:

• The data has been adjusted, why can’t you comprehend it? – “If it’s in the garbage, it’s garbage” – Jerry
• Send it to my email and I’ll have a look – “When you control the mail, you control information!” – Newman
• This year is the hottest ever! – “It’s gold Jerry. Gold!” – Bania
• Ban Ki Moon and the IPCC says so. – “Butros, Butros, Gahli!” – Jerry
• I’m not going to use McIntyre’s name, he doesn’t deserve the credit. – “That’s not funny, how about ‘your cranium called…it has space for rent!” – Elaine
• Come back when you understand climate science – “NO SOUP FOR YOU! COME BACK ONE YEAR!” – The Soup Nazi
• This is why your argument [snip] – “I won’t tolerate infestation!” – Frank Costanza
• Sea level, ocean acidification, it’s all obvious! – The ocean called, they’re running out of shrimp! – Reilly
  
• Check the peer reviewed literature. – “Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.” – Jerry
• Your interpretation is totally wrong! – “Oh yeah? Well I had sex with your wife!” – George
• The data hasn’t been updated, do you think all we do around here is sit around and wait for GHCN to update?  – “Significant shrinkage.” – George
• The tree ring based temperature reconstruction has been reviewed and proven correct time and again. – “Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!” – Elaine
  
• It is “robust”.  – Yadda, Yadda, Yadda, – Elaine

Also, this coming December 23rd, I plan on sending Gavin a calibrated aluminum pole to help him and Steig measure sea ice thickness.

Readers may wish to send a card also, listing grievances.

WUWT readers may recall the story I did last week:

Live in Ontario Canada? – help find this meteorite

Warmists thrilled about the SUV impact? Well I can only imagine but the meteorite did hit an SUV, according to CBC.  No major damage though.

From a University of Western Ontario Press release.

By Communications Staff
Friday, October 16, 2009

GRIMSBY, ONT. – When Tony Garchinski heard a loud crash just after 9 p.m. on Friday, September 25 he didn’t think much of it. That is, until he awoke the next morning to find the windshield of his mom’s Nissan Pathfinder with a huge crack in it. Making note of the ‘unusual’ rocks he later found on the car’s hood, Garchinski chalked the incident up to vandalism and filed a police report.
It wasn’t until two weeks later that his mother, Yvonne Garchinski, heard media reports that researchers from The University of Western Ontario were searching West Grimsby, Ont. for possible fragments of a freshly fallen meteorite. The Garchinskis realized who the real culprit was in the case of the broken windshield — or more specifically, what.

The ‘what’ was a 46-gram (approx. the size of a golf ball) completely fusion-crusted (melted exterior) fragment of an ‘ordinary chondrite’ meteorite. Chondrites are arguably the most important type of meteorite because they are the least processed of meteorites and provide a window into the material which formed the early solar system.

The meteorite is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old.

Western Associate Professor Peter Brown, an expert in the study of meteors and meteorite falls, and Phil McCausland, a postdoctoral fellow at Western’s Centre for Planetary Science & Exploration, presented the found meteorite to the media today at the Garchinski home in Grimsby, with the family on hand to tell their remarkable story.

McCausland has been leading the university’s ground search since seven ‘all-sky’ cameras of Western’s Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) captured rare video footage of the meteor event on September 25.

http://aquarid.physics.uwo.ca/research/fireball/events/25sept2009/

“Having both the video and the sample is golden because we get the dynamic information and the orbital direction from the video, and by having recovered material on the ground, we can complete the picture. We can take a rock that we now have in hand and we can study it in the best laboratories in the world and we can put it back into its solar system context. We can put it back into where it came from,” explains McCausland. “In all of history, only about a dozen meteorite falls have that kind of record.”

Brown says, “Scientifically, it’s equivalent to a sample return mission, which is sending a spacecraft out to a known location in the solar system and bringing back a sample. In this case though, the sample comes to us. We don’t have to spend huge sums of money to send a spacecraft to get the sample.

“We’ve worked out the orbit, where it came from, so it becomes a material within context. It’s like a geologist who can pick up a rock which may be interesting, but if you know where it came from, that context, it means so much more. Most meteorites – we don’t have the context. This one we do.”

Yvonne Garchinski has loaned the ‘pristine’ meteorite sample to Western but it remains her property as meteorites found in Canada belong to the owner of the land upon which they are discovered.

The Western-led search continues in West Grimsby and both Brown and McCausland believe more meteorite fragments will be found. In fact, the Garchinski property is a mere 200 meters off the fall line of the meteorite the Western Meteor Physics Group calculated using data from its video, radar and sound detection systems.

Meteorites may best be recognized by their dark and scalloped exterior, and are usually denser than normal rock and will often attract a fridge magnet due to their metal content. Meteorites may be found in a small hole produced by their fall into soil.

Meteorites are not dangerous, but any recovered meteorites should be placed in a clean plastic bag or container and be handled as little as possible to preserve their scientific information.

If you believe you have recovered a possible meteorite from the Sept. 25th fireball, the researchers ask that you please contact Phil McCausland at 519-661-2111, ext. 87985 or on his cell at 519-694-3323.

For interviews with the scientists and the Garchinski family, images of the recovered meteorite or images from today’s media conference, please contact Jeff Renaud, Senior Media Relations Officer on his cell at 519-520-7281.

My lovely wife pointed this out to me tonight while I was writing the post on the DMSP/SSMI sea ice sensor issue. It spoke to me, not only because it was hilarious, but because I immediately saw a comparison in it to how I feel (as well as many others) about the “rush” to save the planet. We keep hearing these pronouncements that we only have “X number of years left” to act, that we’ll reach “tipping points”, or “points of no return” if we don’t pass the Copenhagen Treaty.

But while the warmers are driving in the fast lane to Copenhagen, us annoying old skeptics (which is how many warmers view us) keep plodding along with facts (they are stubborn things you know) with occasional whacks to the climate science fast track like McIntyre’s recent revelations about the majority of the hockey stick being based on a few tree cores in Yamal and the use of Wikipedia graphs in United Nations official climate reports.

But warmers don’t like it when we do this,  they simply want us to “get out of the way”:

BTW that’s not Joe Romm driving.

NSIDC’s Mark Serreze must be thrilled, as he’ll now be able to justify some of his press releases. Gore must be ecstatic that his 2013  “Entire north polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years” prediction has come in way ahead of schedule.

Click for the current Arctic Ice image.

Notice the contrast between Arctic and Antarctic. I can hear the Angelic choruses of “we told you so”  taking flight now. Oh, wait.

* Hmmm, at second glance it looks like some sort of malfunction. We’ve seen this before in the SSMI sensor, perhaps something similar is going on now.

Even so, you’d think they’d notice it on their main webpage, and you’d think they’d put something up on the webpage to tell visitors about it?

Why do us bloggers have to be the ones to catch these things?

h/t to WUWT reader Tom who writes: “Hi Anthony, Looks like Al Gore was wrong about an ice free summer in a few years. Latest image from Cryosphere Today shows we’re ice free today.”

UPDATE: News travels fast. Within about 30 minutes of posting this essay poking a little fun at CT, the correct images are back online now which you can see here:

As WUWT commenter “Steamboat Jack” says: “That current Arctic Ice image was so pretty (and full of hidden meaning!) that I made it my desktop background!”

For those that missed the ice free interlude and would like to do the same, here is the hi-res “ice free Arctic” image.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/cryosphere_arctic_seaice_map.png

UPDATE: This message has been added to the Cryosphere Today main web page:

Sept. 14, 2009: No, the Arctic ice did not disappear this AM. There was a processing glitch in our maps for about an hour that caused the NH maps to be displayed without their sea ice. We apologize for any confusion.

Electrical circuit runs entirely off power in trees

From the University of Washington by Hannah Hickey hickeyh@u.washington.edu

University of Washington

Electrical engineers Babak Parviz and Brian Otis and undergraduate student Carlton Himes (right to left) demonstrate a circuit that runs entirely off tree power.

You’ve heard about flower power. What about tree power? It turns out that it’s there, in small but measurable quantities. There’s enough power in trees for University of Washington researchers to run an electronic circuit, according to results to be published in an upcoming issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Transactions on Nanotechnology.”As far as we know this is the first peer-reviewed paper of someone powering something entirely by sticking electrodes into a tree,” said co-author Babak Parviz, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering.

A study last year from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that plants generate a voltage of up to 200 millivolts when one electrode is placed in a plant and the other in the surrounding soil. Those researchers have since started a company developing forest sensors that exploit this new power source.

The UW team sought to further academic research in the field of tree power by building circuits to run off that energy. They successfully ran a circuit solely off tree power for the first time.

Co-author Carlton Himes, a UW undergraduate student, spent last summer exploring likely sites. Hooking nails to trees and connecting a voltmeter, he found that bigleaf maples, common on the UW campus, generate a steady voltage of up to a few hundred millivolts.

The UW team next built a device that could run on the available power. Co-author Brian Otis, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering, led the development of a boost converter, a device that takes a low incoming voltage and stores it to produce a greater output. His team’s custom boost converter works for input voltages of as little as 20 millivolts (a millivolt is one-thousandth of a volt), an input voltage lower than any existing such device. It produces an output voltage of 1.1 volts, enough to run low-power sensors.

University of Washington The custom circuit is able to store up enough voltage from trees to run a low-power sensor.

The UW circuit is built from parts measuring 130 nanometers and it consumes on average just 10 nanowatts of power during operation (a nanowatt is one billionth of a watt).

“Normal electronics are not going to run on the types of voltages and currents that we get out of a tree. But the nanoscale is not just in size, but also in the energy and power consumption,” Parviz said.

“As new generations of technology come online,” he added, “I think it’s warranted to look back at what’s doable or what’s not doable in terms of a power source.”

Despite using special low-power devices, the boost converter and other electronics would spend most of their time in sleep mode in order to conserve energy, creating a complication.

“If everything goes to sleep, the system will never wake up,” Otis said.

To solve this problem Otis’ team built a clock that runs continuously on 1 nanowatt, about a thousandth the power required to run a wristwatch, and when turned on operates at 350 millivolts, about a quarter the voltage in an AA battery. The low-power clock produces an electrical pulse once every few seconds, allowing a periodic wakeup of the system.

The tree-power phenomenon is different from the popular potato or lemon experiment, in which two different metals react with the food to create an electric potential difference that causes a current to flow.

“We specifically didn’t want to confuse this effect with the potato effect, so we used the same metal for both electrodes,” Parviz said.

Tree power is unlikely to replace solar power for most applications, Parviz admits. But the system could provide a low-cost option for powering tree sensors that might be used to detect environmental conditions or forest fires. The electronic output could also be used to gauge a tree’s health.

“It’s not exactly established where these voltages come from. But there seems to be some signaling in trees, similar to what happens in the human body but with slower speed,” Parviz said. “I’m interested in applying our results as a way of investigating what the tree is doing. When you go to the doctor, the first thing that they measure is your pulse. We don’t really have something similar for trees.”

Other co-authors are Eric Carlson and Ryan Ricchiuti of the UW. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

###

Hmmm, maybe there’s something to that “Wines grown in England during the Medieval Warm Period” after all. I think maybe the French are upset that Scottish wine might be served with kippers rather than truffles. Oh the horror!

From the UK Telegraph:

Best wines will come from Scotland if climate change is not stopped, French chefs say

Prominent French chefs have given warning that the country’s wines will lose their complexity and the best produce will come from Scotland if the effects of climate change are not tackled.

excerpts:

President Nicolas Sarkozy was posed a stark choice: save French wine by clinching a deal at the international climate conference in Copenhagen in December, or see generations of viticulture slowly die out as vineyards cross the Channel and head north.

“As flagships of our common cultural heritage, elegant and refined, French wines are today in danger,” 50 leading names from the world of French wine and food wrote in an open letter. “Marked by higher alcohol levels, over-sunned aromatic ranges and denser textures, our wines could lose their unique soul.”

Among the signatories were Marc Veyrat, a chef with three Michelin stars, Mauro Colagreco, the award-winning chef, and Franck Thomas, who was voted the best sommelier in the world. The message was also supported by a host of domains from Champagne to Languedoc-Roussillon.

Climate change has been blamed for degrading French vineyards, with heatwaves, giant summer hailstorms in Bordeaux and new plant diseases.

The signatories said that if global temperatures rose by more than two per cent before the end of the century, “our soil will not survive” and “wine will travel 1,000 kilometres beyond its traditional limits”.

Burt Rutan - aviation pioneer, engineer, test pilot, climate skeptic. Note the car.

Recently after some conversations with a former chemical engineer who provided me with some insight, I’ve come to the conclusion that many engineers have difficulty with many of the premises of AGW theory because in their “this has to work or people die” world of exacting standards, the AGW argument doesn’t hold up well by their standards of performance.

Today I was surprised to learn that one of the foremost and world famous engineers on the planet, Burt Rutan, has become an active climate skeptic. You may be familiar with some of Rutan’s work through his company, Scaled Composites:

Thanks to WUWT reader Dale Knutsen, I was provided a PowerPoint file recently by email presented by Mr. Rutan at the Oshkosh fly-in convention on  July 29th, 2009 and again on August 1st, 2009. It has also now been posted online by an associate of Mr. Rutan’s.

There were a number of familiar things in the PowerPoint, including data plots from one of the USHCN stations I personally surveyed and highlighted, Santa Rosa, NM. Rutan had an interest in it because of the GISS adjustment to the data. For him, the whole argument is about the data. He says about his presentation in slide #3:

Not a Climatologist’s study; more from the view of a flight test guy who has spent a lifetime in data analysis/interpretation.

In the notes of his PowerPoint on slide #3,  Rutan tells us why he thinks this way(emphasis mine):

My study is NOT as a climatologist, but from a completely different prospective in which I am an expert.
Complex data from disparate sources can be processed and presented in very different ways, and to “prove” many different theories.

For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data.  I became a cynic; My conclusion – “if someone is aggressively selling a technical product who’s merits are dependant on complex experimental data, he is likely lying”.  That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.

Now since I’m sure people like foaming Joe Romm will immediately come out to label Mr. Rutan as a denier/delayer/generally bad person, one must be careful to note that Mr. Rutan is not your average denier/delayer. He’s “green”. Oh horrors, a “green denier”! Where have we seen that before?

From his PowerPoint, here’s his house, note the energy efficient earth walled design.

In his PowerPoint notes he says about his green interests:

My house was Nov 89 Pop Science Cover story; “World’s Most Efficient House”.  Its big advantage is in the desert summer.  It is all-electric and it uses more energy in the relatively mild winters than in the harsh summers – just the opposite of my neighbors.

The property has provisions for converting to self-sustaining (house and plug-in hybrid car) via adding wind generator and solar panels when it becomes cost effective to do so.

Testing Solar Water Heat in the 70s at RAF; the Rutan Aircraft Factory was converted to solar-heated water in the 70s, when others were only focused on gasoline costs.

My all electric EV-1 was best car I ever owned.  Primary car for 7 years, all-electric with an 85 mile range.  I was very sad (just like the guy shown) when the leased cars were recalled and crushed by General Motors.  I will buy a real hybrid when one becomes available (plug-in with elect-range>60 miles). The Prius “hybrid” is not a hybrid, since it is fueled only by gasoline.  A Plug-in Hybrid can be fueled with both gas and electricity.  You might even see a ‘plug-in hybrid airplane’ in my future.

Interest is technology, not tree-hugging

Well that right there is reason enough to put all sorts or nasty labels on the man. Welcome to the club Burt, we are proud to have you!

Rutan’s closing observations slide is interesting:

Slide #32 from Burt Rutan's presentation

And, in his notes he makes this mention:

Is the debate over? – The loudest Alarmist says the debate is over.  However, “It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry”.

I think by the “loudest alarmist” he means Al Gore.

And his final slide:

Slide #33 from Burt Rutan's presentation

Rutan’s PowerPoint file is posted at:
http://rps3.com/Pages/Burt_Rutan_on_Climate_Change.htm

For those that don’t have PowerPoint, I’ve converted it to a PDF file for easy and immediate reading online which you can download here.

I wonder if in conversations with his biggest client, Virgin’s Richard Branson, he ever mentions Gore and their joint project? I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

Like Waxman-Markey, where 300+ pages get added at 3:09AM that nobody has time to read or fully evaluate, Real Climate gets on the “hurry up bandwagon” in regards to climate change perception. Dr. Pielke takes them to task again. I ask “What’s the rush?” – Anthony

With sincere apologies to "Big Daddy" Roth

Response By Roger A. Pielke Sr. To The Real Climate Weblog “More Bubkes”

Real Climate has posted a response titled “More bubkes” to my weblog of July 30 2009 titled  Real Climate’s Misinformation. First, it is clear they are (deliberately?) misinterpreting what I wrote on the weblog. Embedded in the personal attack comments that Real Climate permits be posted, there are several that recognize that the error in the original Real Climate post was their statement

”Some aspects of climate change are progressing faster than was expected a few years ago”.

As I documented in my weblog of June 30 2009, their statement is clearly and documentably false (and is not a “wild allegation”).

They present a set of observational evidence regarding the longer term trends, and I have no disagreement with them on this. Indeed, in the past I posted a weblog that supported the retrospective skill of the GISS model in simulating upper ocean heat content increases at least until the last few years;

Comparison of Model and Observations Of Upper Ocean Heat Content.

I wrote in that weblog

“The conclusion that the GISS model is consistent with the observations for the time period in the second figure is clear from this comparison. The absence of a positive radiative imbalance in the last 4 years, however, that is anywhere neat the 0.85 Watts per meter squared value in Hansen et al. 2005, needs to be reconciled.”

More recently, I questioned further their skill for the last several years; see

Update On A Comparison Of Upper Ocean Heat Content Changes With The GISS Model Predictions.

Real Climate is correct that the time period to make conclusions on longer term trends is too short. However, they weaken the confidence in the scientific objectivity when they report that “Some aspects of climate change are progressing faster than was expected a few years ago” . Why do they feel they need to do this when this is obviously not true?

By overstating what is actually occurring within the climate system (which they clearly did in their original weblog and perpetuated in their second weblog), they provide fodder for those who conclude that the human intervention in the climate system is minimal. To emphasize my view, it is summarized in my weblogs

Summary Of Roger A. Pielke Sr’s View Of Climate Science

Roger A. Pielke Sr.’s Perspective On The Role Of Humans In Climate Change

Roger A. Pielke Sr.’s Perspective On Adaptation and Mitigation

House Testimony of Roger A. Pielke Sr. “A Broader View of the Role of Humans in the Climate System is Required In the Assessment of Costs and Benefits Effective Climate Policy”

Real Climate could be an important venue to permit the presentation and debate on the diversity of peer reviewed perspectives on climate. However, they need to permit all such viewpoints to be presented, as well as not attack (or permit their commenters to) colleagues with whom they disagree.

Our QOTW comes from the newly minted Wikipedia page of the late, great Dr. Jack Eddy. Jack had a way with words, he liked them immensely and wielded them in ways that were not only profound but entertaining.

As a person who has worked on all sorts of meteorological and TV broadcast electronics systems in my career, this one quote from Dr. Eddy really hit home for me, and I think many of our readers will get the same great laugh and flash of understanding that I did from it. Then, you’ll understand the image I rendered above.

Jack said:

“Were God to give us, at last, the cable, or patch-cord that links the Sun to the Climate System it would have on the solar end a banana plug, and on the other, where it hooks into the Earth—in ways we don’t yet know—a Hydra-like tangle of multiple 24-pin parallel computer connectors. It is surely at this end of the problem where the greatest challenges lie.”

I’ll think of that one with every time I try to understand the sun-earth connection.

Thanks to Michael Ronayne for finding this magnificent quote, and to his diligence during the past week in metamorphosing Dr. Eddy’s Wikipedia page from a  few dry lines of text to a living document.

“He’ll stop the globe from getting warm; fuel your car with nuts and corn”
(h/t to Tom Nelson)

The link for the YouTube video is below. It is very well done.

The folks at JibJab have really done an excellent job of animation. Whether you agree with the parody or not, they did an excellent job with their craft.

If the video preview does not appear, here is the direct link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVFdAJRVm94

Gavin should watch this show - he might find his missing weather station

A couple of days ago, I located the “long lost” Honolulu Observatory GISS weather station on the Island of Oahu with just a couple of hours of digging. That one apparently got “lost” because the station name changed, and the inter-agency communications seemed to be the cause, and nobody at GISS bothered to look to see if there was still current data coming from the station.

Today I found one in under 5 minutes. I wasn’t even planning on looking for one, it happened by accident. I was watching the Discovery Channel TV show this afternoon “Deadliest Catch” where crab fishermen brave the worst imaginable weather to keep crab shacks running nationwide. They are based out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

While watching a scene where they were coming into the docks, I saw an ever so brief flash of what looked like a Stevenson Screen off in the distance near the docks. I hadn’t expected to see one and I wasn’t 100% sure, but I thought I’d check NCDC’s metadatabase (MMS) for Dutch Harbor, AK. Sure enough, they have a COOP station there with a Stevenson Screen there that is “current”.

When NCDC says “MAX-MIN THERMOMETERS”. that means mercury thermometers in a Stevenson Screen.

The MMS Location description tab had this:

Topographic Details: TOPO- STN NEAR WATERFRONT, ACROSS HARBOR FROM DUTCH HARBOR ARPT IN VILLAGE OF UNALASKA. MNTOUS ISLAND. STN EXPOSED TO STRONG TURBULENT WINDS AND TEMPS INFLUENCED BY SURROUNDING WAT

I assume the last word was to be “WATER” and they ran out of characters in the database field. The MMS database also mentions it to be located at REEVES TERMINAL, which I assume is the ship terminal/dock.

Here is where the lat/lon given by NCDC places it, I seem to recall my brief glimpse was closer to the docks visible near the top of the image, but the lat/lon given by NCDC is not always accurate:

Click for a larger image

So I was curious to see what the temperature record looked like in this very remote part of Alaska. I figured if it was an active weather station, GISS would have a plot of it. They did indeed but it was not what I expected to find:

Graph from NASA GISTEMP

Here is the link to the GISTEMP graph above.

Huh. Big data hole. But NCDC said it is current? WUWT?

So I decided to look at the COOP section of NCDC, and sure enough it WAS current to April 2009. I found the most current B91 form and downloaded it.

click for larger image

Here’s the PDF of the form: Dutch_Harbor_April2009

Seeing the big hole in the GISS data,  I decided to look for the data forms  backwards, and sure enough, it is current all the way back to 1985 where it picks up in January and appears to have every month through April 2009.

So why does GISS not have this data? Remembering the name change which happened in Oahu, names again come to mind.  I can’t be sure, but it might have something to do with the station name spelling.

• I spell the station name this way: Dutch Harbor
• NCDC MMS spells it this way: Dutch Harbor
• NCDC B91 selector spells it this way: Dutch Harbor
• The station COOP observer spells it on the B91: Dutch Harbor

NASA GISS spells it on the graph header and web page station selector:

Harbour? WUWT? It’s an American port!

I checked this guide for differences in British, Canadian, and American spelling, and sure enough:

Note to Gavin: change the spelling in the GISTEMP database and the station data might automatically kick in on the next data pass.

Glad to help! Got any more lost stations and station data you need found? We’ll look for the last 20+ years of Dutch Harbor data to show up in GISTEMP real soon.

UPDATE:

In comments “timetochooseagain” writes-

I’m reminded of this from John Christy:

“the use of a few popular stations for which the data are easy to find, leads to too much warming when the averages are constructed. I have published research for North Alabama, Central California and in a few months East Africa, in which I went back to the original sources of data to augment the number of stations by roughly a factor of ten – indeed, ten times more stations. This effort requires significant time in searching for and manually digitizing the records for scientific purposes. In each case, I’ve found that the data sets based on a few popular stations overstate the warming by up to a factor of three.”

http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/christy/ChristyJR_WM_Written_090225.pdf

Update2: I’ve removed a sentence related to Gavin Schmidt and British spelling of the station name, since he’s not at fault, GHCN managed by NCDC is the source of error -Anthony

I busted out laughing when I saw this on Tom Nelson’s blog.

His title was “For climate hucksters, two inconvenient Google trends”.

I never think about this sort of stuff, but it was darn funny.

click for larger image

In the discussion thread about CO2 and Antarctic cold, some references to CO2 ice in the ice caps of Mars were part of that discussion.

WUWT reader Lou Mackenzie sends word that we can now watch Mars ice caps and many other things ongoing with the planet with a  new NASA widget. You’ll find it now at the lower right on the WUWT widget panel.

Here are the details:

Mars Today, created by Howard Houben of the Mars Global Circulation Model Group, is a poster produced daily by the Center for Mars Exploration at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The updated poster depicts current conditions on Mars and its relationship to Earth in six panels.

The upper left panel diagrams the current positions of Mars and Earth in their orbits around the Sun. Note that Mars has a highly elliptical orbit compared to the Earth. For much of the time, Mars is too close to the Sun (as viewed from Earth) to be observed by Earth-based telescopes. For a QuickTime animation [1.1 MB] of the orbits of Earth and Mars and their relative positions through 2000 and 2001 click here. The panel also shows the interplanetary trajectory of Mars Global Surveyor. That spacecraft entered Mars orbit in 1997. Much information on the Martian surface and atmosphere was being gathered by the Global Surveyor which began the mapping phase of its mission in spring 1999.

The upper middle panel shows two views of the positions of Mars and Earth from vantage points near the ecliptic (the plane of the Earth’s orbit). This allows visualization of the tilts of the rotation axes of the planets that are responsible for the seasons. Two views are necessary because Mars and Earth are tilted in nearly orthogonal directions. At this time, late spring in the Earth’s northern hemisphere, the north pole is pointed towards the sun. It is also late spring in the northern hemisphere of Mars and that planet’s north pole is pointed towards the sun at a similar angle. The changes in seasons on the Earth and Mars can be visualized in a 1.2 MB QuickTime animation of this panel through 2000 and 2001.

The panel on the upper right compares the apparent size of the Martian disc as viewed from Earth with the size of Earth’s disc as viewed from Mars. (Since the diameter of Mars is about half that of the Earth, Mars appears to be about half the size of the Earth when viewed from the same distance.) Both of these discs are compared to a circle 25 seconds of arc in diameter. This circle represents the largest possible apparent size of Mars as viewed from Earth (which is achieved only on those very rare occasions when the planets are both favorably positioned at the nearest points in their orbits). Even at these times, Mars — a very difficult telescopic object to observe in detail — is only about half the apparent size of the much more distant, but much larger planet Jupiter. For a QuickTime animation [1.5 MB] of this view of Mars through the years 2000 and 2001 click here.

The lower left hand panel displays a simulated image of Mars as it would appear at the present time to a very high resolution Earth-based telescope. At this time, (late northern spring), an extensive carbon dioxide frost cap is growing in the southern hemisphere. Sharp brightness contrasts have allowed telescopic observers to follow Martian surface features for many years. Unlike the Earth, the Martian atmosphere is usually free of obscuring clouds. One exception is the cold region surrounding the winter pole that may be covered by a polar hood of water or even carbon dioxide clouds. Another exception occurs during periods of widespread dust storm activity, usually in southern spring and summer.

The lower middle panel shows a model prediction of the meteorology at the present time (from the Ames Mars Climate Model). Daily average temperatures in the lower atmosphere are color coded, while predicted wind speeds and directions are indicated by the arrows. In the equatorial regions near the surface, the atmospheric flow is dominated by the Hadley circulation that transports air from the cold winter hemisphere southwards across the equator. Because the equator rotates at a faster speed than other parts of the planet, this leads to a tradewind-like pattern of easterlies in the winter hemisphere and westerlies in the summer hemisphere. Strong westerlies are also apparent in the region of the polar night while light easterlies are prevalent in the vicinity of the summer pole. For a QuickTime animation [2.6 MB] of the predicted Mars meteorology over a one-year period click here.

The lower right panel shows model predictions of the atmospheric water vapor column on Mars. At the present season — late northern spring — there is a nearly uniform distribution of water vapor over the low latitude regions of Mars best observed from Earth. The atmospheric inventory of water should continue to increase for several months as water sublimes off the permanent northern polar ice cap. For more information on Martian water, see the Mars water page. For a 2.5 MB QuickTime animation of the Martian water column predictions for 2000 and 2001 click here.

The statistics printed below the image indicate the apparent diameter of Mars (in seconds of arc); the angle between the Sun and the Earth as viewed from Mars (in degrees); an angular measure of the season in the Martian northern hemisphere (Ls= 0 at the vernal equinox, 90 at the summer solstice, 180 at the autumnal equinox, and 270 at the winter solstice); the sub-solar latitude in degrees (another indicator of the season); the longitude of the sub-Earth point in the image; and the latitude of the sub-Earth point.

Click here to display the full GIF or JPEG image. Both images are about 170 kB in size.

You can also display the classical 4-panel Mars Today poster (about 120 kB).

Watch a movie showing the widget in action for 2000 to 2001:

Everyone see things in the clouds. People, animals, Christ on the cross,  UFO’s, angels, and even schizophrenically imagined chemical attacks by contrails. You name it, somebody has seen it. So when I was prodded with a news item that said “new cloud type defined” I was thinking “uh oh, here we go again”. It is a lot like cyclomania, as humans tend to assign patterns to randomly ordered observations of nature. Looking for meanings in the clouds isn’t much different than looking for meanings in the alignments of the stars and planets.

From ChattahBox and The UK Telegraph:

Click for a larger image

(ChattahBox)—Meteorologists around the world have taken notice of a new storm cloud on the horizon, literally. And if they have their way the dark and choppy cloud will take its rightful place among its more famous cousins, cumulus, cumulus, cirrus and nimbus.

Cloud gazing Meteorologists first noticed the stormy and billowy formation floating over the Scottish Highlands and above Snowdonia, Wales. The unique gray storm cloud was also spotted over Australia, the cornfields of Iowa and high above the Arctic Sea off the coast of Greenland.

A group in England dedicated to cloud watching, the Cloud Appreciation Society, became quite excited when viewing numerous photos of the new storm cloud floating in the atmosphere.

The Cloud appreciators describe the cloud as “…a bit like looking at the surface of a choppy sea from below,” said Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, and the first man to identify the new cloud.

The Royal Meteorological Society has named the new cloud, “Asperatus,” the Latin word for rough, since the cloud has the appearance of a rough, choppy ocean.

The Royal meteorologists are now attempting to have Asperatus officially recognized by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization in Geneva to have it included in the International Cloud Atlas.

If the meteorologists are successful, this would mark the first time a new cloud was officially recognized since 1953.

Source

Here are the existing classifications:

Classifications
High-Level Clouds
Cloud types include: cirrus and cirrostratus.

Mid-Level Clouds
Cloud types include: altocumulus, altostratus.

Low-Level Clouds
Cloud types include: nimbostratus and stratocumulus.

Clouds with Vertical Development
Cloud types include: fair weather cumulus and cumulonimbus.

Other Cloud Types
Cloud types include: contrails, billow clouds, mammatus, orographic and pileus clouds.

Source: http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/cld/cldtyp/home.rxml

So for “asperatus” I could see maybe “stratoasperatus” but not “altoasperatus” since there is no evidence of them at the high altitudes, and clouds at that level tend not to be rough edged.

I actually hope WMO doesn’t accept this ploy for attention by the Cloud Appreciation Society, if they do, it could open an avalanche of new cloud classification applications, we may see pitches of the most absurd kind.

For example, here’s another one from the Cloud Appreciation Society:

This contrail formation has been sent in by several different cloudspotters, and has become known as the Dorset Doughnut. Over Dorset, U.K.

“Altostratus Obamus” perhaps?

People see all sorts of things in the sky, if this new one is accepted, the petitioning for WMO recognition of new cloud types would never end.

You may have noticed that I have been absent from WUWT for a few days. The stories have been on scheduled automated posting, and the WUWT team of moderators has held down the fort (thank you).

The reason is that I have been traveling on business. While I was traveling I was invited to photograph the weather station at what I think is probably the most visually stunning and technologically advanced meteorology center in the world today:

Can you guess what city and country this is in?

Hints below.

The building in the background has a Doppler radar on top, and is the meteorology HQ for the city. The entire building is just for meteorology and they employ 150 people. The Stevenson Screen in the foreground is where the official temperature record for the city is measured.

Hint: The city is not in the USA, NOAA has nothing like this.

I’ll have a complete report in a few days.

WUWT contributions made this portion of my trip possible, so I owe all of you a big thank you. More to come. – Anthony

UPDATE: well, that was fast. I’ll have more on this in a few days.

Congrats to “weatherman”! If anyone wants to locate it on Google Earth, and post URL here or lat/lon, it would save me a lot of trouble. I couldn’t take my GPS with me due to concerns at being at a gov installation with one might get me in trouble. Gotta catch a plane, back online in a day or so. – Anthony

Some of our younger readers may not get the title, and may never have seen a TV show in black and white. The answer is at the end of the article. Here’s an interesting weather phenomenon on the prairie – snow rollers!

From the NWS in Spokane, WA

(h/t to Mike D)

Snow Rollers on the Camas Prairie

March 31 2009

On the evening of March 31st, 2009, Tim Tevebaugh was driving home from work east of Craigmont in the southern Idaho Panhandle (see map below). Across the rolling hay fields, Tim saw a very unusual phenomenon. The snow rollers that he took pictures of are extremely rare because of the unique combination of snow, wind, temperature and moisture needed to create them. They form with light but sticky snow and strong (but not too strong) winds. Some snow rollers are formed by gravity (i.e. rolling down a hill), but in this case, the snow rollers were generated by the wind.

These snow rollers formed during the day as they weren’t present in the morning on Tim’s drive to work.

Based on estimations from Tim as well as the blades of grass in the picture, most of the snow rollers were about 18″ in height, while the largest rollers were about 2 feet tall.

Click on the thumbnails below for a full-size image.

OK figured out the title yet?

If not here is a hint:

And here is the original TV show and theme.

Don’t get me wrong, I like new technology, and improved fuel economy too, but I just had to show this auto review excerpt from the Sunday Times because, well, it’s just so darn funny.

BTW to the potential hate mail senders, I drive an electric car myself to/from work most days. It costs me about five cents a mile to operate.

Sure, with any combo gas-electric technology, you likely won’t get the same performance, but I don’t have these sorts of problems alluded to in the article. – Anthony

(h/t to Kate at SDA)

Honda Insight 1.3 IMA SE Hybrid

WUWT reader David Summers sends this photo along taken a few days ago in 2007 in Australia from a colleague that “returned there for the summer”. I thought it might make a fun photo caption exercise.

Note: This photo as represented to me in email, was supposedly recent.

Thanks to alert WUWT reader “snow captain of queanbeyan” obviously now that is not the case.  So much for trusting friendly emails from people. The photo was originally taken in 2007 and you can see the details here.

Still, as originally intended, feel free to make a fun photo caption.