I don’t know what it is with weather 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 arrangement. It has a long and uninterrupted history, but what is it really measuring?
Click for a larger image
More pictures here
Thanks to surfacestations.org surveyor Craig Limesand we get to see the official USHCN climate station of record at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You can see that the Stevenson Screen is just a few feet from parked cars.
This aerial view shows it better:
Click for a larger live interactive image
Note that in addition to being surrounded by asphalt and parked cars, the station is also about 35 yards from the college power plant.
According to NCDC MMS database, the station has been in this location since at least 1948, unmoved and using mercury max-min thermometers even today.
But without doing a historic evaluation to look at what transpired around the station during that history, how would we know how much is this signal is “climate change”, “UHI from Milwaukee”, or “increased parking capacity” or all of the above?
As much as I like weather stations, it is becoming clearer to me that looking for a clean climate change signal in surface data is a complex excercise in uncertainty.
I don’t see a problem. All you have to do is adjust it using the GISS urban cooling factor . . .
why the sidewalks. Really?
To keep us from wearing down the earth.
I hope this is the right place for my comment. In addition to all of the errors of temperature measurement documented here and at SurfaceStations.org, I’ve been thinking about potential measurement errors inherent in the concept of “Maximum/Minimum” as opposed to integrated measurements. To that end, I’ve purchased one of the Data Loggers and started doing some measurements in my yard. From July 12 through Aug 8, the difference between the Max/Min average and the five-minute average during each 24-hour period shows the Max/Min to be greater every day but one. The average difference is 1.5 deg F with a max difference of 4.9 and a min difference of -0.7. I intend to continue doing these and will make the data available.
Some questions occurred to me: Are the MMTS systems automatic recording, or do the maximum and minimum readings have to be manually recorded? If they are manually recorded and the attendant misses a day, there is no way to tell which day the maximum and minimum readings represent. The deployment of the MMTS system began in the mid-80’s. How far along is that deployment and what effect does that have on temperature records?
REPLY: The early MMTS display had no memory, while the newer display model, the “Nimbus” has a 5 day hi/lo memory I believe. So yes, it’s possible in the early models (and many are still in service) to miss a day. The deplayment of equipment cna be seen here:
http://www.surfacestations.org/images/USHCN_equip.gif
– Anthony