Early in the project, one of the criticisms heard against the surfacestations.org effort was that there had been “cherry picking” going on in the selections of stations to survey, and that the project wasn’t reaching a wide area. In this first map of it’s kind, one can clearly see the how the quality distribution of the 460 out of 1221 stations surveyed so far looks and that those claims weren’t valid. The results clearly show that the majority of USHCN stations surveyed so far have compromised measurement environments. The question then is this; have these mircosite biases been adequately accounted for in the surface temperature record?
As you can see below, there appears to be some clustering near population areas, and some east coast/west coast volume bias. There are sparse areas in the midwest that I hope can be surveyed soon. But, there is a nationwide distribution. The thing that really stands out though is that there are few sites that are CRN1/2 and many more that are CRN 3/4/5. This speaks to the concerns that our measurement network is broadly affected by microsite biases and urbanization encroachment.
Here is how this map came about; there was a suggestion made in comments by Henry, suggesting that a map showing distribution of the CRN rating would be useful. I agreed, but lamented that I’m overloaded with work at the moment. The beauty though of this project is it’s capable volunteers.
Volunteer Gary Boden came to the rescue, and provided the map below as a function of the Excel spreadsheet tracking the ratings that I’ve made publicly available for some time now. You can download my data set in Excel format at www.surfacestations.org See his plot below:
Click picture for a larger image
Here is the same data presented in Pie Chart Form:
For reference, as originally defined in the NOAA Climate Reference Network Handbook, here are the site quality rating descriptions:
Class 1 – Flat and horizontal ground surrounded by a clear surface with a slope below 1/3 (<19deg). Grass/low vegetation ground cover <10 centimeters high. Sensors located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces, and parking lots. Far from large bodies of water, except if it is representative of the area, and then located at least 100 meters away. No shading when the sun elevation >3 degrees.
Class 2 – Same as Class 1 with the following differences. Surrounding Vegetation <25 centimeters. No artificial heating sources within 30m. No shading for a sun elevation >5deg.
Class 3 (error >= 1C) – Same as Class 2, except no artificial heating sources within 10 meters.
Class 4 (error >= 2C) – Artificial heating sources <10 meters.
Class 5 (error >= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such as a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.
Given that the generally agreed upon rise in surface temperature over the last century is approximately 0.8 degrees Centigrade, and seeing that the majority of climate monitoring stations have errors that are nearly equal to or larger than that value, the microsite bias errors are a cause for concern.
We need more stations surveyed; this upcoming Christmas travel season would be a perfect opportunity to help us fill in the midwest. If you’d like to volunteer and survey a station or two, visit www.surfacestations.org and sign up.
Anthony – No fight or arguement, sometimes it takes a while for the coffee to kick in.
Rikard said:
“I think it is already possible to make the conclusion that satellite (MSU) is our best available data for the last 28 years.”
The ony real problems with satellite data are as follows:
1. Still listed as an estimate.
2. At last count, there were at least 6 studies observing the same data, and there are just as many trends (from about .05 to .2 dC per decade). No real “consensus” yet. An average of the trends is still twice that of the surface station trend.
3. Still misses the poles, requires ground data to fill in the blanks.
Sam & Mike –
Here’s a list of the stations in Texas that haven’t been surveyed.
Albany, Alice, Ballinger, BALMORHEA, BEEVILLE 5NE, BLANCO, BOERNE, BOYS RANCH, BROWNWOOD, CATARINA, CLARKSVILLE 2NE, CORSICANA, CROSBYTON, DANEVANG 1W, DUBLIN, EAGLE PASS, EL PASO WSO AP, ENCINAL, FALFURRIAS, FLATONIA, GAINESVILLE 5ENE, HALLETTSVILLE 2N, HASKELL, LAMPASAS, LLANO, LULING, MARSHALL, MCCAMEY, MEXIA, MIAMI, MULESHOE 1, PECOS, PLAINVIEW, QUANAH 5SE, RIO GRANDE CITY 3W, SEMINOLE, SNYDER, STRATFORD, TEMPLE.
(This is info from step one in the guide linked below)
Click here for details on how to locate the individual stations and what to do when you find them.
Thanks for stepping forward and I wish you good luck on the hunting!
Anthony,
I don’t think it’s premature at all do an analysis on the data collected. It IS premature to draw conclusions at this point but it would be shortsighted not to look at preliminary results.
JohnV is (hopefully) continuing to work on his program and may have a decent version going by the time surfacestations hits 50%, although he has been a little trigger happy to draw conclusions in my opinion.
Someone posted a distribution of sites at Climate Audit by amount of warming per decade (as I recall) on the x axis. The distribution was skewed to the right and the mode was almost on zero (warming).
It was clear that the average (mean) reflected a small number of sites with a lot of warming and most sites showed no or almost no warming.
Combine this with the siting issues documented and the multiple adjustments to the data, and you have to wonder if the warming trend is even real.
Bill in vigo was spot on, the science starts when we measure properly.
[…] USHCN National Weather Station Quality Plot […]
THIS JUST IN!
It is somewhat OT, and for that I apologize, but it is very big news in this debate, indeed. Straight from the Monck:
“The IPCC now says the combined contribution of the two great ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. ”
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Of course, we might point out (and not without justification), if the IPCC has screwed up this badly, one might also distrust he above results as well.
However, taken as it stands, it seems that the observations (i.e., knees-in-the-mud measurement) of That Most Wicked Witch of the Sea, ol’ Axe Moerner have prevailed over the prognostications of IPCC doom.
I had, of course, to account for the fact that Our Favorite Sea Witch had to resort to beastly Lyndon LaRouche for publication. I concluded, it appears correctly, that he was absolutely unable to obtain publication elsewhere. Also, not being an American himself, he was, perhaps, unaware of the radical nature of the beastly Double-L.
I do not see an equivalent objection to Lord M.. After all, he is an official peer reviewer of the IPCC (as was the Axe). The strength of confirmation is enhanced by the fact that Lord M.’s conclusions are reached by a different means of measurement than Axe M.’s. In the former case, the conclusion comes from revision of CO2 forcing calculations. In the latter case, we have direct surface measurements buttressed by rotational period calculations (the higher the sea level, the marginally slower the rotation of the earth).
Moerner also insisted that the IPCC satelllite measurements had been cherry-picked (in Hong Kong, IRRC) to measure areas that were subsiding while avoiding nearby areas that were geologically stable. That meant that either Moerner was lying through his teeth, had gone batty, or was correct. And that it was only a matter of time before someone actually eyeballed the situation.
One is forcibly reminded of the Rev and his efforts!
If the neo-conclusions of the IPCC are correct, it puts paid any and all the panic regarding climate change. My number one concern, and that of most others was sea level rise. (Secondary concerns involve the expansion of the Sahara, but the opposite is happening–the Sahel is spreading northward very rapidly.)
The retreat of non-Greenland/Antarctic glaciers (c. zero percent of land ice) was considered alarming from a symptomatic approach, but as direct effect, such retreat can only be regarded as an unmitigated blessing. It seems the prayers of those who traveled up the Alps and begged God for a cessation of the environmental horrors of glaciation have finally been answered.
The only problem I have with all this is that the white paper I have been preparing on the subject may become passe within the next couple of months. Other than that, I can only regard it as Christmas come early.
Got a laugh out of the ‘cherry picking’ canard. I cna hear it now: “It’s a vast volunteer conspiracy!”.
PS: Hoping to fill in a string of West Texas stations in the next month. But if a critic of the project would like to float me the money I’ll take vacation and do it next week!
I would be proud to be considered a volunteer for the oil industry.
“It’s a vast volunteer conspiracy!”.
Hmm. Didn’t I see that SAME barbecue setup near every single site? That SAME air conditioner? That SAME Hummer? (That SAME Mig-29?)
[…] interested in my work on the http://www.surfacestations.org project, this set of preliminary data posted here pretty well sums it […]
This is an outstanding graphic.
It would be interesting to know the location of the stations which have yet to be surveyed. Perhaps they could be represented by an open circle. These would serve several purposes:
– it would show where surveys were needed
– it would further address the issue of cherry-picking
– it would further address the point that the stations are concentrated in high-density population areas, such as the east and west coasts (as this may be attributable to the number of volunteers)
Because of the weather changes that seem to be changing from one
part of the world to another. The antartic, other parts of the earth
where glaciers are advancing, temperatures are hitting all time lowes,
yet in other parts of the world temperatures are higher.
Has anyone ever thought that the Earth Axis might have shifted
slightly because of tsunamies or other extreme weather events, which
has impacted on climates all over the world, and not as a result
of global warming.
Sincerely,
Christiane Maxwell