Who's Adjusting the Climate in Tucumcari: Cows, Canals, or Hansen?

Considering the amount of effort required to understand the bias in this and the several other sites that have been published, it is difficult to believe that there is any “global average.” Perhaps if errors or anomalies were random, the mass of data would help, but the data on this site usually shows bias, not random error.
Thank you for the good work!!

OOPS I see Dr. Christy already answered that question. My apologies.

I seem to recall that nightlights imagery date back to the 1990’s. Of what use would it be 10 or 20 years later?
REPLY: The night satellite imagery was put together in 1995 by the DMSP

I added the precipitation line in purple1971-2000 to the earlier precipitation graph in green and it appears that precipitation is up 5-10%. The graphs are small, 1 pixel is about 1%. Hope the link works:
http://i32.tinypic.com/206zpub.jpg
REPLY: Precip might be up due to local humidity being up, which helps in building convective thunderstorms, which in turn dump more rain.

That was my guess. I notice the same thermal effects here on the western slope of Colo. that Cristy mentioned re: higher RH% holding in the heat at night. We often have RH% in the single digits, makes for great summer night relief from the diurnal heat.

Also, I noticed that the hourly observations are only from 6am to 10pm but it does list the maximum and minimum daily humidity.
REPLY: Hopefully someone can take on the task of extracting this, I’m overloaded as it is.

So does Hansen just role a dice for each station?
“On a 1-3 I’ll adjust it upwards, on 4-5 I’ll adjust it downwards, on a 6 I’ll make yet another press release about being muzzled.”

Some basic principles here. Relative humidity is a measure of the water content of the air with respect to the maximum water content the air can hold at the ambient temperature. What really matters is the absolute water content which is given by the dew point. That largely determines the Enthalpy of the air KJ/kg (or BTU/lb)and is much more significant than the air temperature since the heat content of dry air is roughly 1KJ/kgDegC whereas that of the water vapour is more than 2000 times larger. That is why a warm, still day at the coast is uncomfortable compared with a hot day in the desert. The lower the enthalpy of the air, the easier it is to lose heat to it. 40C dry day air probably has comparable enthalpy to the 16C cloudy day. 50% RH at 50C is unbearably uncomfortable. You can cool a lot of hot dry air with not much water but the heat content and the perception of warmth may not change much. The humid air from irrigation will not lose temperature as quickly as dry air. Water vapour is very important in terms of heat content and thermal lag. And of course the water vapour content is related to the so-called greenhouse effect. Moral: Enthalpy is more important than temperature but not as easy to ‘adjust’!

This post is mostly repititive of one that I posted several months ago, but in my visits to Las Vegas over the decades, it seems like the temperatures are hotter there now. The last time I was there, I noticed how green the surrounding land had become — there is a lot of grass and vegetation being grown now in the area, and that grass is being watered daily.

Anthony, I don’t know if this was covered in the thread yesterday, but has anyone checked to see if the observation time has changed at the site? You’ve got to be on the right track with the land use investigation, as a “step” in the data almost has to correlate with some sort of systematic change in the data.
REPLY: McIntyre observes that there is a significant TOBS adjustment but that it doesn’t appear relevant. Still, a check is warranted.

Anthony,
My apologies for posting this item here, but I could not find your email address.
http://blog.snowdonia-active.com/
Very briefly, the blog details the construction of the new restaurant on Snowdon’s summit. On March 18th the construction teams restarted after the winter layoff, but 15th April they were frozen out, much to their surprise and consternation. There are good photographs and the route to the summit is also a great day out. http://www.snowdonrailway.co.uk/news.php
I hope you don’t mind, but it’s another example of the reality of a colder planet.
Regards,
Perry
REPLY: reality bites ‘eh?

Every adjustment begets another; if the adjustment wasn’t correct it is insufficient or excessive with respect to expectation.
Does any one suppose that the data will ever fit someone’s model or that fiddling with the model will be easiest at every turn?
“Of the heart’s deceipt there is no end; who can understand it?”

What could cause that? We can rule out adjustments, since this is GHCN data before Hansen gets his adjuster mitts on it.

Anthony, as you know (but isn’t clear from the above), GHCN (and USHCN) both adjust data e.g. the USHCN time-of-observation adjustment, USHCN SHAP and FILNET adjustments, GHCN has its own adjustment. I think that your point is that none of these adjustments appear to be relevant to the issue at hand, though Tucumcari has a noticeable TOBS adjustment (which doesn’t appear to be material here. )
REPLY: True, and thanks for making this point. When I said “we can rule out adjustments” I was referring to the results on the GISS graph, and yes the GHCN tweaks aren’t relevant to the issue at hand.

This is living proof that the proper method is to examine each station and its surrounding past before applying ‘adjustments’ rather than simply writing a ‘generic’ program that adjusts away based on temp readings. Of course, I doubt that Dr Hansen has either the time or the resources to attempt such a task.
I wonder if this would be a good follow on exercise for Anthony’s minions after the sites are cataloged and rated? It would certainly be a fine contribution to the real ‘science’.
REPLY: “I doubt that Dr Hansen has either the time or the resources to attempt such a task.” Well he’s got me and about 400 volunteers, and mounds of metadata freely available now.

Anthony,
You noted the apparent step-wise changes in average and minimum temperature that occured about 2000 and suggest that it may have been caused by irrigation. After scanning the hyperlinked report, I noted that the irrigation project has been ongoing for fifty years but the evaporation rate and annual release have declined substantially since 2001. In fact, there was no release in 2003. It is not apparent to me that this source of water vapor would cause the increase in nightime temerature since 2000. Perhaps the monthly temperature records would provide more insight.
REPLY: I read that too, but also note that 2000 had one of the highest releases ever. The odd thing is though that an increase in temperature minimums not followed by an increase in maximums is the signature for increased water vapor according to Christy. Perhaps alternate sources have been developed. If my livlihood was threatened, the first thing I’d start doing would be to dig a well. It is also possible that due to the increased leakage over the years, a water table has developed that is high enough for plant evapotranspiration. The report mentioned that a good amount of water is lost to that along the delivery routes as plants seek out the leaked water and thrive.
What I really need is acreage under irrigation within a radius.

Here is my favorite GISS Arctic step function. The site warmed 3C in one year.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=222241250005&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

“If this is true then the coolest temperatures of the night are not recorded and omitted from the average. Why?”
Well, that is probably the times that they could get a person to physically make the observations going back into history. Would you like the job of having to take the current relative humidity every hour all night long? Back then it was a manual operation and Tucumcari isn’t exactly a booming metropolis.
But in any case, if one were to construct a spreadsheet of only the times given, since they are consistent over time to the present, any trends in relative humidity should pop out. In other words, if the area is generally more humid now than it was in the past, that change should be visible during the day just as well as at night. So if you select some consistent time period and look at the humidity over time, if Tucumcari is more humid now than it was in the past, you should be able to see it regardless of which part of the day you select as long as you select the same time period across the overall data set.
One thing though. They might irrigate more at night. I have some relatives in Southwestern Utah who grow hay. They run their irrigation at night when there is less loss from evaporation.
REPLY: Same goes here for California, irrigate at night. It just makes good business sense not to lose water to higher daytime evaporation.

If you look at the Google Maps image of the station, the southern edge of its field is not a road — that’s a canal, with a road parallel to it. Trace that canal to the west and it curves up to the northeast, matching the shape on the tr335.pdf report’s map.
As this is an experimental farm, it is not surprising that they are doing research which involves irrigation. Unfortunately, they don’t have their 1999 and 2000 annual reports online so an overview of their activities during that period is not online.

Rereading the comments here made me wonder…maybe there has been a reduction in irrigation recently? Maybe the low temperature jump is due to the farm stopping nighttime irrigation nearby. In addition to any regional trends, did the experimental farm end some irrigation projects in 2000 and has recently been focusing on arid farming research?

“Surely there must be a more straightforward way to detect if the earth is getting warmer or cooler.”
There is:
Monitor the ocean temperature. It would not be subject to “land use changes” or urbanization and “night lights” is always zero. So far the measurements show no warming, in fact, slight cooling over the past several years.

Daniel Rothenberg (10:57:54) :
The reason that they make so many adjustments to the datasets is because they took a bunch of crappy weather monitoring stations and tried to make them into a “high quality” climate monitoring network. One word; JOKE!
REPLY: It is important to note that these stations started out as an aid for forecasting on a mesoscale and synoptic level, not as a climate network. The climate portion was secondary. This network has been called into service for climate without anyone doing a hands on inspection first. Karl didn’t do it when he devised USHCN, he only looked at metadata for station moves and length of continuous record. Hansen didn’t do it with his nightlights scheme either.
The microsite conditions have indeed deteriorated at many stations, but at least NCDC is doing something about it by creating the new CRN network and the upgraded USHCN network.
See:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/uscrn/
and
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/what-the-modernized-ushcn-will-look-like/

I just did some more looking around the area with Google maps. To the Southeast of the station South of Interstate 40 there appears to be quite a lot of irrigation including many fields that appear to be using pivot irrigation. Those are the ones that I remember running most at night. To the Northwest of the station is another large area under cultivation. I can see “stains” on some of the larger field that are often indications of recent rain or irrigation.
Here is a picture centered roughly on the station location. It appears to have been taken in or around winter as the ground is brown and the shadows are long suggesting a low sun angle.
But if I zoom out one level, I get a picture that appears to have been taken in summer and the areas being irrigated are suddenly very obvious. Again, the station location is roughly in the center of the picture (not where the “A” is, I moved the map slightly to center it on the station).
I would be willing to bet a burger and a coke that the area looked much different in the 1960’s.

The only fly in this ointment is that most tropical deforestation is in the Southern Hemisphere,
I seriously doubt this is true, not least because most SH tropical forest is in Africa and in regions that have seen the least economic development, but by all means show me data that proves me wrong.
And on the GISS climate network; I sympathise with the people trying to get a climate signal out of this data. But the thing that people should remember is that without the adjustments there is zero 20th century warming (this is in the US data BTW).
Thats not to say these adjustments aren’t justified. TOBS is normally used to justify the adjustments because there is a clear case for a TOBS adjustment. However, the data supporting the size of the adjustment is rather weak and the adjustment could well be too small or too large by a substantial amount (both at individual sites and in the averages). Karl who originated the TOBS adjustment method seems to think it is, or could be, out by about 25%.
Now quibbling about the size of adjustments sounds petty, until you realize that without the adjustments there is no warming and the size of the adjustments determines the amount of warming.

Given the amount of discussion this one weather station is generating (not to mention all the pothers) is it not possible for someone to write a simple report to circulate to media politicians and opinion formers which can highlight the problematic and subjective nature of the source readings?
PS thanks for all your work – pity I am a layman and struggle to get through it all.
I know AGMis a scam because I know all about Maurice Strong.

One of my concerns, and personal conceits, about any climatic warming that is occurring is connected to this discussion. Has anyone examined the effect of increased water vapor in the atmosphere due to the suburbanization of society? Think about all those green lawns that get watered regularly in areas that used to be desert or “sagebrush” type environments. How many new golf courses are there that have been built in the last forty years, with all that lush green grass and artificial lakes and water hazards? We have been creating new concentrated water sources for the atmosphere in record numbers over the last fifty years.
Could not this increased presence be contributing to the overall heat record due to the storage of heat during those periods when the old environment normally released heat and cooled? High humidity at night is like an additional blanket, holding in heat so that when the warming from the sun begins in the morning, the beginning start temperature is already higher than the historical record.
REPLY: Christy documented this problem in the Sacramento valley due to irrigation, see his paper in this Tucumcari post. Suburban sprawl and lawns should be easy to catch. Find a weather station that has been overwhelmed by lawn bearing suburbanization and look at the data.

Trevor: “is it not possible for someone to write a simple report to circulate to media politicians and opinion formers which can highlight the problematic and subjective nature of the source readings?”
Yes, that could be done. But if the information is counter to the agenda of the publisher it would never see print. You can give them information but you can’t make them print it.
There is enough around on the Internet here, at Climate Audit, Icecap, and other places for any interested journalist to find and write their own article. Basically what you are asking is for someone to “freelance” an article themselves and submit it to the paper for publication. In most cases that would be counter to the agenda of the publication and would fall on deaf ears.

Anthony,
I mentioned in a post a while ago that I was puzzled by some step-wise changes that I observed in the difference betwen the average and median temperatures for some USHCN stations. I used the monthly data from http://cdiac.ornl.gov. I defined TMED=(TMAX+TMIN)/2 and delT=TAVG-TMED. I calculated the annual values as the 12-month arithmetic mean.
I was surprised to see delT remained quite constant for long intervals followed by abrupt step-wise changes. I was puzzled by the self-evident seasonality of the changes, i.e., a distinct DJF, MAM, JJA and SON pattern that suggested that the monthly data had been adjusted from time to time on a quarterly basis.
I decided to use the same methodology to examine the Tucumcari station data and found a similar pattern. I don’t know how to post an EXCEL plot on your website but I’ll try to briefly explain what I observed. First, there are two apparent step-wise changes in delT: 1914-15 and 1984-85. Second, in 1914-15, a step increase in annual delT=0.54 degF; DJF delT~1.3 degF; MAM delT~0.7 degF; JJA delT~0.2 degF and SON delT~0.4 degF. Third, in 1984-85, a step increase in annual delT=0.18 degF; DJF delT~0.5 degF; MAM delT~0.2 degF; JJA delT~no change and SON delT~0.05 degF. Fourth, I didn’t observe any significant change around 2000.
It appears to me that some algorithm was used to adjust the Tucumcari station data in 1914-15 and again in 1984-85 but it is not apparent to me if TAVG, TMAX, TMIN or all were adjusted.
Having said all of this, the step-wise changes Tucumcari station data are fewer and smaller than in other stations that I have examined.

Anthony,
Re: “UPDATE 7/1/08 One of our commenters “AnonyMoose” has brought this well done historical weather and climate report by NMSU superintendent Rex Kirksey to our attention:
http://tucumcarisc.nmsu.edu/documents/rr751.pdf”
I note that the TMAX, TMIN and TMEAN data contained in Table A2, A3 and A4 of the NMSU report, Weather Observations at the Agricultural Science Center at Tucumcari 1905–2002, are quite different from the TMAX, TMIN and TMEAN data that I downloded from http://cdiac.ornl.gov. (See my 07/02/08 post above.) The differences are quite significant.
I manually transferred the NMSU data for 1905-1919 to my Excel program to compare it to the USHCN data. There were differences between every data point in the 15-year NMSU and USHCN data set. For example, the differences in TMEAN ranged from -4.12°F to+6.24°F and the average was -0.31°F; the differences in TMAX ranged from -3.14°F to+8.16°F and the average was 0.12°F; the differences in TMIN ranged from -2.89°F to+17.07°F and the average was +0.26°F.
I understand that NCDC adjusts surface station data but their algorithm is not apparent to me. Is there an explanation somewhare that would help me understand the differences between the NMSU and USHCN Tucumcari station data?
REPLY: This is odd, this station has a near perfect attendance record for daily data. I wonder if the differences are resulting from the total set of USHCN adjustments? Truly a puzzle worth exploring.

Anthony,
Re: My 04/07 13:21 post on NMSU v. NCDC Tucumcari data
I have now manually transferred the NMSU data for 1905-1949 to my Excel program to compare it to the USHCN data. I have not deciphered NCDC’s algorithm for adjusting the NMSU data but here are a few observations:
1. There are very few missing data in the NMSU data set; OCT and NOV in 1907 and AUG through DEC in 1920. It appears there may have been an instrument problem in 1920 that corrupted some data. It is not apparent to me how NCDC filled these missing data points in their data set.
2. In addition to the missing data points in the 1915-1949 data sets, there are a small number of data points where the differences between the NMSU and NCDC data exceed three STDEVs; the remining differences are less than 3°F.
3. NCDC adjustments to the 1915-1949 data sets a) increased TMAX for each month in the DJF and MAM seasons and decreased TMAX in the JJA and SON seasons, b) increased TMIN for each month in the DJF and decreased TMIN in MAM seasons; and decreased TMIN in the JJA in ~1/2 of the months and SON by ~1/3 of the months, c) increased TMEAN for each month in the DJF and JJA; decreased TMEAN in MAM seasons; and decreased TMEAN in SEP, OCT but increased it in NOV.
4. The details of the NCDC adjustments are beyond the scope of this post but suffice to say, they are relatively small but extensive. If I knew how to include Excel graphics in WordPress, I could illustrate the nature of the adjustments.
5. I don’t see any direct relationship between the NMSU and NCDC data sets.
Transferring data manually is a slow, boring process for someone with my limited typing skills. I’ll try to transfer more NMSU data when I have time but I doubt that I will see many new trends.
REPLY: Check your email for a message from me, Anthony

The GISS data apparently does have some adjustments (or “corrections” as they call it) built into their data. The station graphing at GISS (data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/) does not provide raw data graphing – the basic level is “raw GHCN data+USHCN corrections”. This has the effect of creating more apparent warming at Tucumcari. See the comparison and description of the data at http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/Tucumcari.htm
This also compares the data from the Agricultural Experiment Station, which matches the NOAA GHCN not the GISS data.

Anthony,
I would be pleased to send you a copy of my Excel workbook but I haven’t received your email yet. Also, I can’t find an email adress listed on your surfacesstations website. If I called th4e telephone number listed under contacts there, would I be able to obtain an email address?
REPLY: I’ve sent two emails to you, perhaps the MSN spam filter ate them.
email address is info [-at-] surfacestations dot org