Urbanization raises the heat in Orange County, CA

Heh, of course you have to be politically correct about that last part. There are some UHI examples here in Southern California. There is a weather station at Fullerton that is a joke, always appearing several degrees higher(anomaly wise) than all other stations surrounding it, including San Diego and even Los Angeles: http://www.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=sgx
Reno, Nevada does the same thing but it is far worse; I simply can’t believe it is legit.

Since global warming was supposed to have started in the late 1970s, then if you look at that graph there doesn’t appear to be any rise in that time in Santa Ana. Over the entire time period, yes, but not the ‘global warming period’. By eye, one could even suggest a slight fall over that period, or am I just seeing things? Certainly, the net shift between 1978 and 2008 is zero.

For those quick to jump on the estimate that 40% of the warming in SoCal is attributed to AGW, please note: a skeptic should be equally skeptical that the majority of the warming is due to AGW. Instead of asking for documentation of the 40% number, why are you not asking for documentation of the 60% UHI number?
Skeptics don’t get to pick and choose what they get to be skeptical about. At least, objective, unbiased skeptics don’t.
REPLY: And warmers don’t get to choose CO2 as the only possible answer

I wonder what evidence is used to assign the other 40% of the temperature gain to CO2.
Since no reason is provided, I can only speculate that once again the author (or the scientists he is reading) are using the rationale that since they can’t explain it through natural processes (like solar or ocean) then it must, by the process of elimination, be man caused.
The problem with that explanation is that it doesn’t actually prove that man is the cause. It simply assumes it to be so.
It doesn’t prove they are wrong either – it just doesn’t prove anything.

Please tell us how they deconvolve the temperature to determine which increase is caused by UHI and which is AGW?

Stevenson’s screen is probably located at the apex of the building, bolted on top of the air conditioning unit condenser, smack in the airflow to make sure there’s plenty of air movement on the sensor. You want to keep that sensor in the wind, don’tchya?.
Seriously, no matter where it is located, since there is not a patch with more than three leaves of grass on the station grounds, what would be the best possible rating for this station?

Re: Stevenson. What is the object near the white care that is alone on the east side of the building?
Hmm–I got a different view than you did. http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=pmn4wc559s6b&style=b&lvl=2&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=6918792&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&encType=1

I noticed something odd in the temperature record for this station. There are a lot of days missing from the data on the NOAA site that are filled in on the observation sheet. It’s like FILNET in reverse.
Here’s a link to a page that will show you both for June 2008. I’m curious to see what the rest of you make of this.

Comment to Bill Patzert’s response: Again, just in case you wander into Wattsupwiththat but fail to notice the same comment at the “Orange County Register”.
Bill Patzert: The Pacific Ocean off the California Coast is a thermohaline circulation/meridional overturning circulation (THC/MOC) upwelling point. Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) oscillate there at a much greater amplitude. Please don’t confuse your audience by mixing topics, such as sea surface height.
Note: You changed your attribution percentage; you still haven’t documented your claim.
Regards.

Frank,
If you look at the recent b-91 forms for that station, you will see that there is a problem with the automated data collection. The last couple of months are all hand written, indicating that they have given up on the automated process. In prior months there have been two b-91s for each month — one printed and one hand written. Some months also have a printed b-91 with missing records filled in by hand.

OK. Maybe someone will help me with a simple question? To a simple mind like mine, it seems obvious (after months of subconscious thought) that the simplest way to determine if the earth is warming is to measure (via satellite) the amount of energy the earth receives MINUS the amount of energy the earth radiates. If the difference is positive, the long term trend is warmer. If negative, then the long term trend is cooler.
I surmise then, that the difference is so small as to be practically immeasurable?

Anthony et al,
I don’t know what your problem with this station is. In the last frame you can clearly see that it is isolated from the hot roof by a lattice work of wood (apparently). Obviously you’re picking nits …
This is representative of the U S Government’s continuing quality effort to give the public the data they need.
REPLY: “Obviously you’re picking nits ” Uh, no, I’m not. NOAA is closing rooftop stations and citing the issues with them in their own training manuals.
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-48-noaa-admits-to-error-with-baltimores-rooftop-ushcn-station/

I don’t see what all the fuss is about. There are at least six trees around the fire station, it is clearly a rural location.
Over the weeks that I have been reading the entries here there have been many interesting questions raised about the accuracy of air temperature measurements. My unscientific brain can understand that feeding beef into a sausage machine will not result in the extrusion of a pork sausage. I can, therefore, understand that feeding inaccurate temperature data into a computer climate model might mean that the the computer’s conclusions are not correct. But, it seems to me, the conclusions will only be necessarily incorrect if the difference between the data used and the “true” data is statistically significant. I say “necessarily” because they might be incorrect no matter what is fed in or they might be accurate if the difference between the data used and the true figures is not significant.
To me it seems unlikely that the presence of so many square yards of concrete within so many feet of the measuring device has a predictable or calculable effect on measurement. And the effect of an air conditioning vent or, indeed, any other vent close to the measuring device seems entirely immeasurable.
Two conclusions seem inevitable from the fact that a measuring device is situated on a slab of concrete or, as in today’s example, on a concrete/brick/tarmac/slate/tile/whatever roof. One is that the readings will be too high during the day (and at night until such time, if ever, that the heat absorbed by the concrete during the day has dissipated entirely). The other, a result of the first, is that any adjustment to take account of the siting of the measuring device must be a downward adjustment (except, perhaps, for some days in winter when the concrete/brick or whatever acts as a refrigerator by storing cold and slowing a thaw).
Is there any way of adjusting accurately for UHI?
While I’m here, a word to the wise. I speak as someone who worked 80-100 hour weeks for over 20 years and took work with him on (rare) holidays. Result: major heart attack at the age of 44. Your work is respected and valued all over the world, but for goodness sake next time you have a day out with the family, Mr Watts, keep well away from weather stations. Just take a day off and relax.

With all the poorly sited stations found thus far, I have a feeling if we ignored them, we’d maybe wind up with global cooling instead.
Would it be possible to calculate the US temperature trend using only the 1 & 2 rated stations?

Anthony,
Consider marking the July 17, 1955 Disneyland opening date on the temp chart when you complete the station survey (& Knotts’ Berry Farm?). My recall of the county in 1957 is that there was not much there.
Pielke Sr. may have something to say about the cooling, then heating effect of growing (& irrigating?), then removing those orange groves.

On a different subject, I just noticed Roy Spencer’s update on his research – I think he’s really onto something:
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm#research-update

Pierre Gosselin (02:59:13) :
The folks (Idso and Idso) at this web site have been making comparisons between rural stations and those impacted by UHI for many years now. Here’s an example of the one of the rural station long-term trends:
http://co2science.org/data/ushcn/stationoftheweek.php

@Dee Norris (05:55:53)
Dude?? Dude?! Dude??!!!
Also, I’m struck by the position of the air being responsible for warming the oceans. Sounds like he’s taking the position that GHG’s warm the air which in turn warms the oceans. Isn’t that a bit like putting the cart before the horse?
From reading a number of simplified explanations by Stephen Wilde, such as, THE HOT WATER BOTTLE EFFECT, I would think that it’s the water that heats the air, so that after the past century or so of heightened solar activity, what followed was:
• stronger repulsion of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR)
• reduction of GCR’s slowly result in reduction of clouds with high albedo
• greater amount of sunlight reaching the ocean warms the water
• same thing happens over land, but heat is released quicker than from water
• over the course of decades, surface water warms which in turn warms land
On the other hand, were we to experience an extended period of lessened solar activity, such as proposed by Livingston and Penn, I expect that we would see:
• increasing levels of GCR’s over the years as they overcome solar repulsion
• over the years a cumulative effect of heightened GCR’s to cloud formation
• high albedo clouds reflect more sunlight leading to gradual ocean cooling
• initially, while high albedo clouds cool land masses, the lag in ocean cooling will modify such cooling
By mid-century, assuming extended solar inactivity, the place is gonna be getting mighty chilly, no matter the amount of GHG’s pumped into the air.
But warm air heating the oceans? I doubt it.

The shelter on the roof at Santa Ana appears to be facing the wrong direction looking at the shadow it casts. The door should face north. So the sun could hit the thermometers when the shelter is open and since the minimum thermometer is usually read and reset first, the sun could be hitting the maximum thermometer for a moment in the heat of the day if the shelter is opened in the afternoon. Also, Just having the shelter facing the wrong way could bias readings anyway.
REPLY: You are correct, and I was wondering if anyone would catch that. I actually have photos of the reading in progress. More when I write up a full report. – Anthony

Those are the Santa Ana projects just on the other side of the location… did ya check for bullet holes?

Bob Tisdale,
I’ve looked over the adjustments from the government website, and the graphs that you have produced from them. I am stunned. I can’t believe they still have that graph posted. I guess it will be removed soon.
Thanks,
Mike Bryant

Okay, I am now convinced that the reporter is as ignorant of climate as they come.
I posted a comment telling him about how the PDO affected the climate in OC. His response was that my comment “grossly distorted” the findings of Hartman / Wendler, Journal of Climate.
A quick review of the abstract of Hartman Wender revealed the title: Hartmann, B., Wendler, G., On the significance of the 1976 Pacific climate shift in the climatology of Alaska. Journal of Climate.
ROFTL, this guy either didn’t read the paper he cited, or he doesn’t know the difference between Southern California and Alaska. Then when I clowned him about it, he sent me an email telling me I am no longer welcome on his blog…. ROFL… then he errased his comment about the study.
It’s the old AGW crowd tactic of “when I’m in error I’ll cover my tracks.” Now you know why these guys will not debate… they can’t.
The NCDC or RC needs to hire this guy NOW!

So much noise, but the main question still remains unanswered:
Does this so-called “Urban Heat Island” effect cause a warming “bias” in Marysville, Watts’s poster child of ‘bad’ surface stations, as compared to Orland the ‘good’ station?
And the answer is no. There simply is no warming bias in Marysville as compared to Orland.
I repeat: There simply is no warming bias in Marysville as compared to Orland.
But I’m sure all the open-minded Galileo-like skeptics here will try to ignore or downplay this fact.
— bi, International Journal of Inactivism
REPLY: You neglect, as far as I can tell, in reporting something very basic. What specific datasets did you use? Citation with links to the datasets you used please.
And please explain why you won’t allow Mr. Goetz to post a response to this on your own blog. That hardly seems fair. You accuse him of “blowing smoke” yet delete his response to you as shown below:
frankbi said, on August 13th, 2008 at 03:07
(John Goetz: It’s clear you didn’t read this post before complaining that I wasn’t reading your post. That’s uncool, don’t you know?)
You appear to want discussion, and advertise for it here, but then block the responses from people you name? My goodness how convoluted that logic is.
I won’t bother commenting on your website if that’s the way you play.

Watts:
“What specific datasets did you use?”
Fair question. I’m using data sets that I wrote about before — that is, temperature records after homogeneity adjustments — and I’m uploading them.
“then block the responses from people you name?”
I have the right to block knee-jerk reactions and anything I deem to be dumb.
But whatever excuse to ignore the lack of warming bias, I suppose.
REPLY: OK I was pretty sure you plotted homogenized data, (the key is the “data_set=2” in the links to GISS) but I had to ask to be totally sure. The point of which shows that all you’ve done is plotted data that has been “homogenized”, so no wonder they look alike, with diminished differences.
From Wiki:

Homogenization (or homogenisation) is a term used in many fields such as chemistry, agricultural science, food technology, sociology and cell biology. Homogenization is a term connoting a process that makes a mixture the same throughout the entire substance.

So, you’ve plotted data that’s been homogenized within a radius, using data trends within that radius, and you’ve found the differences data trend from two stations from the homogenized data set to have a slight cooling trend. Note that that data doesn’t represent JUST Marysville and Orland, it has quite a number of station data in the region mixed in. Some stations in the nearby Sierra Nevada (also within the GISS homogenization radius) have in fact cooled. To better understand the issue see this post:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/cedarville-sausage/
So it is no surprise in what you found. It also doesn’t prove your point because you are plotting data that is a mix of stations within the GISS homogenization radius. Try the raw data from NCDC, direct from the thermometers, without ANY adjustments or homogenizations from GISS, then you’ll actually be doing something that could show a difference between the stations that isn’t “homogenized” or adjusted. When you get that actual untouched raw data, please link to it.
But the issue of station siting remains. By NOAA and WMO standards, one station is sited poorly, one is not. When we get the significant majority of USHCN stations surveyed, then we’ll be able to answer the question for the entire dataset, which is what really is the most interesting and relevant issue.
It is unfortunate that you choose to block Mr. Goetz response, that demonstrates a lack of tolerance for differing views, such as we see regularly at RealClimate.

Anthony,
I noticed that with Petersons presentation. His point is that a bad station resembles a neighboring good station after homoginization but fails to mention that both stations were homoginized by averaging all of the local stations, what kind of a putz would think we cant figure that one out.