Warren Meyer, one of the first surfacestations.org volunteers, delivered Tucson for us Saturday. It was discovered during an analysis of climate stations around the USA on the Climate Audit blog that Tucson had the greatest positive temperature trend for any USHCN station after the TOBS adjustment was applied. The TOBS adjustment corrects for differences in local times of observation of temperature by the observer. The picture says it all:
Yes folks, this is an official climate station of record, the temperatures it measures go into our National Climatic Database and are used in research such as the graph produced by NASA Goddard Institute for Spaceflight Studies here:
There’s a British word that has been bandied about to describe the reaction to pictures like this one: “gobsmacked”. The word applies even more so since this station is operated by science faculty members at the University of Arizona.
They are so proud of this station they even had a sign made for it to hang on the chain link fence enclosure:
The complete photo essay is available at the Tucson album at www.surfacestations.org The satellite and aerial photo images there are telling of the environment being measured.
Besides the obvious questions like “why is it in the middle of a parking lot?” and “why would scientists who should know better allow such a bizarre siting for a USHCN climate station of record?” Then there is this burning question: “Why did they go to the trouble of installing a precision aspirated temperature sensor and then not even bother to place it at the standard observing height?”.
It appears that the Stevenson Screen serves no other purpose except as an equipment holder, as Warren Meyer reports the Stevenson Screen to be empty. Originally the inside standard mounting board for the mercury max/min thermometers were mounted about 1.5 foot higher than the air inlet of the precision aspirated temperature sensor. So the lower mounting height for the precision sensor adds a positive bias.
Is there no diligence left in basic measurement? Is this what they teach in college science departments these days?
Jeff C., I suspect you’re right, but neither is a caged area on an asphalt parking lot. It’s been nearly 12 years since I was to Tucson, and all I remember was that it was HOT (and that was in November).
John,
I agree that the photos have a multitude of uses beyond documenting the site at a particular moment in time. I suspect most of those throwing stones are doing so because they can’t argue with the central point, i.e. NOAA says the USHCN is a collection of high-quality sites, NOAA has specific siting guidelines, large numbers of the sites don’t meet the guidelines. It really is that simple. As an added complication, virtually all of the documented deviations from the site guidelines would introduce a positive bias in the temperature record.
Anthony, this article popped up on my home page this morning. I didn’t quite know whether to laugh or feel reeeeeaaally sorry for the good citizens of Nevada. Clearly this writer thinks we need to “do something” quickly or Nevada will soon become uninhabitalble, followed shortly after by the rest of the planet.
I checked your SurfaceStations site, and didn’t see any results from Nevada. I know a guy who writes for a political blog who lives in Las Vegas and is quite interested in the GW issue. I’ve linked to your site in posts on his blog in the past, but I’ll run it by him again, along with this article, in an email.
In the meantime, “we” clearly need to “DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING”, or we’re all doomed, heh, heh. Perhaps we should heed the advice in the last paragraph of the article:
Our “elected officials” do such a great job of solving all our other problems, global warming should be a piece of cake.
I am just a rural guy up here in Canada (who does have an engineering degree, but that’s not relevent) and I have couple of comments …
To MarkW, I hope I was seeing sarcasm when it, to me sounded like you were chastising folks “don’t question the science here”. There is a very legitimate time and place for anyone to say … HUH? (with a big question mark).
Second, to all the apologists who are suggesting we need to know about where and when and how things were placed (like lets not jump to conclusions with the recent phtotos etc.), the fact remains.
If you are to be considered credible in claims of the magnitude we now see in the global warming argument, then you must insist on non-biased data … and if that is not possible because of “historical” or other reasons … then you must ignore completely such data.
I postulate that with the daily increasing panic of something we are not certain is happening, we ought to be daily monitoring truly accurate recordings.
And, although we get more crowded every day, with the technology we have there is no excuse to not have totally isolated sensors.
Sorry, long rant. But I promise I will only be here once in a while!
Rick
It appears that a pervasive flaw in the experimental design of these stations is the lack of replication. In order for one to be confident of sampling the temperature of the air somewhere, it seems one must have a number of measuring stations, perhaps two or three, placed close enough that one can be sure they are measuring “the same air” or “the same weather,” but far enough apart that one can be sure they’re not just measuring the same flaw in siting or installation. It seems good that three streams of measurements be continually compared and that a divergence be taken as indicative of an emergent problem in measurement.
[…] in a parking lot, it is a less than an ideal location. The pictures have been shown repeatedly on Watts Up and Climate Audit, as well as in presentations by Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. The temperature record was […]
[…] stations at some universities. Of course we have the station at University of Arizona Tucson in the parking lot, and this one isn’t too far from that. It has a long uninterrupted history, but what is it […]
[…] USHCN climate monitoring stations placed at sewage treatment plants, next to burn barrels, or in parking lots of University Atmospheric Science Departments, or next to air conditioning heat exchangers. These were all huge […]