There is an interesting fight brewing over surface meteorological stations in China being led by Doug Keenan of the UK. This is a case where the station metadata used to track station moves and other changes doesn’t seem to be available, and that lack of availability is in contrast with a paper written by some top climate scientists.
This report concerns two research papers co-authored by Wei-Chyung Wang, a professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York. The two papers are as follows.
Jones P.D., Groisman P.Y., Coughlan M., Plummer N., Wang W.-C., Karl T.R. (1990),
“Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land”, Nature, 347: 169–172.
Wang W.-C., Zeng Z., Karl T.R. (1990),
“Urban heat islands in China”, Geophysical Research Letters, 17: 2377–2380.
Each paper compares temperature data from some meteorological stations in China, over the years 1954–1983. (The first paper also considers data from stations in the USSR and Australia; Wang was only involved in Chinese data, and so the other stations are irrelevant here.) The first paper is quite important: it is cited for resolving a major issue in the most recent assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC, 2007].
See the description of the issue and specific complaints here: http://www.informath.org/WCWF07a.pdf
Right, JS, it’s definitely “weed” of some sort. Maybe we could ask the Chico Greenman for a verdict. Something tells me he probably has a lot of expertise on the subject.
Julie,
I doubt it. I have a sneeky suspicion that his “weed” comes in a plastic bag. On the other hand, ya never know, it is California and he might have a prescription.
This now worries me. There are a lot of crazy people out there, and I sure as the dickens wouldn’t want to be caught poking around some gang’s illegal plants–with a camera. Might be the last place I ever poked.
I repeat, if a volunteer sees any obviously suspicious plants, I advise (s)he leave at once and for god’s sake don’t take any pictures.
Evan, your advice to be careful is well taken. I had never really considered the potential danger. Once while doing veg surveys for the city, I found what later turned out to be a pot patch. Fortunately, it was long abandoned, and the only sign of it was the drip irrigation system and some containers. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I’d found, or that there could be any danger, so I just GPSed it and reported it. Only later did I learn what that stuff was for.
Kidding aside, I do think that those plants in the picture are probably giant ragweed, but you are right that if in doubt, it’s better to play it safe.
I wasn’t aking it seriously at first, myself. Then I got to thinking.
But the topic at hand, the questionable quality of the foreign data.
I note cases of both warming and cooling biases in the unaccounted moves. Is this tit-for-tat, or is there an overall upward or downward bias indicated?
A number of Chinese “rural” stations are in places which, as of the 1950s and 1960s, were podunk with, at best, villages. But during the period 1970 – 2000, some of these made transformations into exurban / industrial zones. Type locations for this would be the industrial satellites of Shanghai, and the endless development zone around the Pearl River Delta.
True, I expect a more severe form of exurban (straight-urban, in this case) creep eating up the stations as in the US.
But there is also mention of urban stations being moved to the seashore and stuff like that, and, of course, one must look at all factors at once.
(Perhaps the data is so bad it’s not terribly useful.)