While we’ve taken some detours looking at some of the amazing things that have happened globally for temperature in January, with another detour to the sun, our www.surfacestations.org volunteers continue their mission.
This NOAA USHCN climate station of record #415018 in Lampasas, TX was found to be tucked between a building, and two parking lots, one with nearby vehicles. According to the surveyor, it is right next to the ACE Hardware store on the main street of town. While likely representative of the temperature for downtown Lampasas, one wonders how well it measures the climate of the region.
View looking NE
In her survey, volunteer surveyor Julie K. Stacy noted the proximity to the building and parking, which will certainly affect Tmin at night due to IR radiance. Daytime Tmax is likely affected by the large amount of asphalt and concrete in the area around the sensor. The main street of the town (28 ft from US 183) and the ACE Hardware parking lot are visible in this photo below:
View looking south
Google Earth shows just how much asphalt and buildings there are around the sensor.
According to NCDC’s MMS database, the Lampasas climate station has been at this location since 10-01-2000.Previous location was an observer residence, which appears to have been a park-like location according to MMS location map. The sensor was apparently converted to the MMTS style seen in the photo in 1986, so the move did not include an equipment change. See the complete survey album here.
But the big surprise of just how bad this location is came from the NASA GISS plot of temperature. It clearly showed the results of the move to this location, causing a jump in temperature almost off the current graph scale. Note that before the move, the temperature trend of Lampasas was nearly flat from 1980-2000.
Click to see the full sized GISS record
Given the entropy of the measurement environment, I have sincere doubts that anyone can create an adjustment that will ascertain an accurate trend from temperature data as badly polluted as this. In my opinion, this station’s post 2000 data needs to be removed from the climate record.
UPDATE:
Since there has been some discussion about how well “adjustments” take care of such problems, I thought I’d show you just how well the GISS homogeneity adjustment works with this station.
Here is the GISS plot for Lampasas, TX with the GISS homogeneity applied, I’ve changed the color to red and labeled it to keep them visually separate from the raw data shown in the plot above.
click the plot to see the original plot from GISS
Now here is the GISS raw data plot with the homogeneity plot overlaid on it:
The effect is quite clear. The recent “spurious” measurement remains unchanged, and the past gets colder.
The result? An artificial warming trend for this station that is created by GISS adjustments.
Banner Engineering and TURCK has some interesting temperature measuring sensors.
Based on this comment ‘I have sincere doubts that anyone can create an adjustment that will ascertain an accurate trend from temperature data as badly polluted as this.’ If a new station were installed properly and data was collected for several years, maybe more, and the old station was also left active for comparison. Could a correlation be made that could be used to correct the polluted data?
REPLY: for the period that the station existed at this location, most likely yes.
Great sluething fellas.
I would dearly love to identify a conspiracy here, but I have already poked around meteorology science on the ground in Australia and my conclusion has been that politicians underfund; bureaucrats have departmental and not science priorities; and most scientists are thick as bricks.
An example of the latter… In virtually every damaging cyclone that hits Australia, the wind speed (WS) equipment is destroyed by flying debris. I publicly challenged meteorologists to move their equipment to immediate beach high points, to avoid damage and they simply defended current locations. The result is, official WS measurements are whatever was recorded at the point of destruction. Go figure.
I argued that photographic evidence showed that Cyclone Tracey of Darwin, 1974, showed every leaf, twig and branch stripped off what trees remained standing, and that exposed cars were sandblasted to clean steel, indicating at least 300 KPH wind speed (as every sandblaster is aware). Yet, this irrefutable comparative evidence of wind impact was not evident in other cyclones that scientists claimed had higher wind speeds.
This has horrific implications for public safety, architecture, storm surge and insurance; yet scientists refuse to confront the evidence that commonsense renders apparent.
In terms of anthropogenic global warming I suspect that, likewise, refusal to acknowledge the impact of urbanisation of formerly rural weather stations has distorted measurements, and that banker/corporate conglomerates are exploiting the situation to garner the $3 trillion per year ‘carbon tax’ and further impoverish we mugs.
‘How not to measure’ frontiersmen and women are incisively penetrating the fraud and I believe deserve a vote of thanks from all of us.
[…] up as a false trend in data. In some cases, such moves are easy to spot in the data, such as the USHCN station in Lampasas, TX that got moved from an observer’s back yard to a location 30 feet from the main highway […]
[…] found examples where the algorithms have failed to even find sudden changes due to station moves like Lampasas TX). So it appears NCDC has taken a giant step backwards in trying to provide accurate climate change […]
Some inacuracies noticed in your assesment of the photographs. the first photograph shows the Ace parkinglot, not the second, the station is NOT between two buildings it is about 15 feet from the radio station whos property it is on. it is about 15 feet from the road and the parking lot in the second photo is the parkinglot of a now closed coffee shack. the “coffee table and bench” is an old bed frame. I am not sure of how this info is worked out to get the average mean tempurature. but to give an idea of normals in the area. 99-105 in summer durring day time lows of high 80’s. spring and fall are around mid 60’s lows to highs in the high 80’s “winter” from low 30’s to 60’s just some info that may be helpfull to your deciding the accuracy of this station.
[…] hand, with a plethora of issues with GISS data, including adjustments to pristine data, failing to catch obviously corrupted data, significant errors in splicing and reporting pointed out by bloggers, and pronouncements from the […]