This is the USHCN climate station of record for Bainbridge Georgia. It comes to me by way of surfacestations.org survey volunteer Joel McDade. Joel wins the award for finding the USHCN station closest to an air conditioner, at 8.9 feet. That honor was previously held by Oregon State Climatologist George Taylor at just over 10 feet in his picture of Forest Grove Oregon.
In addition to the air conditioner, this USHCN climate monitoring station sports several other features:
– A building just 14.3 feet away
– Convenient close-by radiator forward parking for your vehicle within feet of the MMTS sensor
– An asphalt road within 10-15 feet of the sensor
– A mature shade tree that changes shade patterns with the season
– A station move of about 150 feet closer to the building to accommodate the new MMTS sensor cable length
The station is operated by the International Paper Company. The plot of temperature below illustrates some data gaps and jumps that may be related to station moves.
Full details on this site are at the surfacestations.org online image database
If this sort of discovery turns out to be prevalent then global warming trends are, in the very least, overstated.
That these stations are used for data gathering and that some reasonable standards are not followed is absolutely ridiculous. The data gathered from such flawed diagnostics is worthless junk.
To modify a venerable data cruncher saw — “Garbage In, Global Warming Out”.
It’s a laugh every day this stuff. Keep up the good work.
I feel certain someone must have suggested this before but it would be great to get some assessment on what proportion of the sites assessed so far are good/bad/indifferent.
If you were really ambitious you could have a heat map of the US showing the temperature trend based only on sites which you’ve assessed as good.
I guess you’ve got other things to fill your time at the moment though!