UPDATE: I personally visited this station today, thanks to a family visit that coincidentally took me to within a couple of miles of this station. It’s on a rooftop at the fire station. I’ll have a complete report tomorrow, but here are some preliminary photos I’m submitting via WiFi at a local Starbucks a short distance away. – Anthony
Click thumbnails for larger images
From the Orange County Register:
Urbanization raises the heat in O.C.
August 7th, 2008, 2:00 pm by grobbins
The average annual temperature in Santa Ana has increased by 7.5 degrees in less than a century, a spike largely attributed to urbanization which has seen the city’s population climb from less than 15,000 to more than 350,000. The temperature has gone from a low of 59.7 degrees in 1920 to 67.2 in 1997, with yearly temperatures near the all-time high as recently as 2006.
“Santa Ana now has a lot more buildings, parking lots and streets, which absorb and hold heat, some of it through the night,” says Ivory Small, science officer at the San Diego office of the National Weather Service.
The NWS analyzed the city’s climate and weather based on daily temperature readings from the Santa Ana Fire Station, which has been recording temperatures since 1916. The upward trend is depicted here by Register illustrator Scott Brown.
Forecasters calculated the average yearly temperature by determining the average high and average low temperature for each month. Then they divided those figures by two and got the average monthly temperature. Then they added up the average temperature for January through December of each year and divided by 12, getting the average annual temperature.
Santa Ana’s population has been on a steady, and basically predictable, rise for decades. The average annual temperature also has risen steadily. But the temperature increase didn’t occur in a predictable, incremental year-by-year pattern. There were lots of hiccups. For example, the average high for 1961 was 64.0 degrees. Three years earlier, the average high was 65 degrees.
Scientists say the average temperature didn’t smoothly rise year-by-year partly due to natural variability. In other words, some years are hotter than others because of natural fluctuations in weather and climate.
But over the long-term, the average temperature has been going up in Santa Ana (click to enlarge image of the ‘city” in the 1920s.)
“The increase in temperatures in Santa Ana, as well as an increase in extreme heat days and in heat waves is primarily — about 60 percent — due to the ‘urban heat island effect,’ ” says Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
“Santa Ana is embedded in the dramatic urbanization or ‘extreme makeover’ of Orange County. More homes, lawns, shopping centers, traffic, freeways and agriculture, all absorbing and retaining solar radiation, making Santa Ana and Orange County warmer.
“On a larger scale, Orange County is atmospherically connected to our ever-expanding and warming Southern California megalopolis. Global warming due to increasing greenhouse gases is responsible for about 40 percent of the overall heating observed in Southern California. “
Scott Finegan (09:58:42) :
“On the roof, I believe.
Rotate the view until North is to the left ( view is larger).”
With that view, there’s an attached addition beyond the foreground unit (with the curved brick facade). On the roof the addition there is a dark stripe going to a white box. I bet the the dark stripe is a walkway to protect the main part of the roof and the white box is the Stevenson screen. There is a shadow from the box that suggests the box is several feet above the roof, just about the right height.
Gotta have a paved walkway to the screen, right?
REPLY: Confirmed, on the roof, see pix in update. No paved walkway though. – Anthony
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?
There was a heat island
and boy was it hot
so onto the rooftop
Evan went top.
And there he sat drifting,
drifting away.
I hope from the guard rail
he safely stays
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/
A variant of the story from the OC Register was the lead story a few times
today on KFI, a large SoCal radio station. I caught it twice, then called
in to the news tip line.
After explaining the precarious reasoning for the story, I referred the
KFI news department to this blog.
The story is no longer being played on the air. Apparently somebody is
paying attention.
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.
That station is a real beauty!
Looks like an asphalt flat roof beneath it.
That little wood-slat base the station is sitting on hardly shields it from the asphalt heat.
Is that an A/C on the roof 2nd photo center poking up beyond the roof?
I have a feeling Anthony is saving the best photos for later.
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?
Pierre:
Another similar question: Do we end up with cooling if we eliminate the adjustments to the instrument temperature record?
The NCDC was kind enough to publish the adjustments they’ve made to the USHCN.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
For a thread at another blog back in April, I reproduced it.
http://i31.tinypic.com/10xy6qc.jpg
Then I subtracted it from GISS Contiguous U.S. Temperature Anomaly data and added polynomial trends. Yeah, I know I mixed data sets. But, hey, I’m a blogger, not a scientist.
http://tinypic.com/fullsize.php?pic=2bux35&s=3&capwidth=false
If you smooth the data and run linear trends, the trends are almost exactly the same, except the Raw data trend is inverted.
http://tinypic.com/fullsize.php?pic=5vov3p&s=3&capwidth=false
This is why I asked Anthony to request the global adjustments when he went to visit the NCDC earlier in the year.
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.
I posted this comment on the site and here is the answer I got:
An 8 inch ocean rise? Hmmmm….
# Dee Norris Says:
August 9th, 2008 at 3:17 am
Please explain how a 7.5 degree increase is 40% due to Greenhouse gases (GHG)? What is your evidence? What are your sources?
Is SoCal subject to a more intense effect of GHG than the rest of the planet?
Dude: After readers raised questions about Patzert’s figure, I raised the issue with Patzert. He emailed this amendment this morning:
“Actually, I would correct my original estimate of
the global warming share of Santa Ana warming at about 25%. How?
In the past century, the local oceans, at the coast and offshore,
have warmed about 2 degrees F. This ocean temperature rise is
certainly due to the excess heat radiated by the atmosphere and
absorbed by the Pacific and other oceans. (Fully, 84% of the
“global warming” is being absorbed by the oceans.) Sea level
rise is the unequivocal proof of this. (The global oceans have
risen 8 inches in the past century.) To the east the local
mountains have warmed about the same. This can be seen in our
shorter snow pack seasons. Thus my “estimate” that the Santa Ana
rise is mostly local “heat island” (approximately 5.5 degrees F)
with some larger-scale (ocean and unpopulated regions) “global”
signal (estimated at 2.0 degrees F) added on. This partitioning
of the local and global warmings agrees with many other scientist’s
estimates. My point is that Southern Californians are warming
due to our own “urban heat island” and GLOBAL (much larger than
local) WARMING.
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
[…] Anthony Watts, Watt’s Up?: Urbanization raises the heat in Orange County, CA How anomalies are […]
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
Bob Tisdale,
Thanks for the graphics. Looks to me a good part of the global warming we’ve seen was produced by “adjustment”.
OSUprof
It would be interesting to calculate the past temperatures using ONLY rural stations. I have a feeling we’d get something Hansen would not find amusing.
Looking at the above station, a real whopper, I don’t see how accurate readings and temperature records can be discerned using urban stations.
@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.
As Gary said Disneyland opened in the 1955. I got there in 1957 and there was still substantial farming in nearby. But a building boom was underway that completely changed the area.
Whittier, CA station records might be of interest.
Whittier is in the metropolitan L.A. area but due to geography and planning there has been much less change than in other cities. At least up to 1999 when I was last there.
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
Anthony,
My earlier post was entended as humor. I’m glad that NOAA is at least taking stations like this out of service. Anyone who has calked their house knows the roof is something you work on on cloudy days or in the shade. With all the stations surveyed that show problems this station takes the cake.
More to the point, the AGW (CO2) crowd supports the ground station data by saying that Hansen has an “adjustment” that takes this and other such stations into account. Do we know what that is, and has it been checked by “Peer review”.
During an earlier life in radio, I had to go out into the field behind the studio to check the max and min in the “weather station”. I remember grumbling on those snowy days as I trudged out to reset the little magnetic wires in the tubes. That station was one of your 1 degree’ers. At least the farmers in Pullman, Washington had good data to go from at that time (late 60’s early 70’s).
I detect a bit of pique in your response, and it was intended as humor. Like some of the videos on television you have to wonder about things like this…
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!!!!
Sorry if I upped your bloodpressure.
Those are the Santa Ana projects just on the other side of the location… did ya check for bullet holes?
Anthony, I lived in Garden Grove , Orange County 1962-1978. I find the Register’s temp graph to be very interesting. Example, it shows an elavation in temp during thirties(known warm period). Then a cool period until 1950 followed by a steady climb into the 1960s It happen that Orange County went through a very rapid growth during this period .I don’t know how many, but must have been thousands of acres of orange groves and bean fields replaced by houses,asphalt streets and parking lots.
In the eighties and nineties the building was mostly up. Dont know if the taller buildings had anything to do with temperature readings.
In 1987 I moved to The rual part of Moreno Valley In the Inland Empire. I commuted From LA area. In the wintertime(the only time I payed attention to the outside temperature) I noticed something very strange as I traveled through Moreno Valley when I would reach the outskirts of town my outside tamperature gage would take a nose dive dropping by as much as 10 degrees F by the time I reached the grapefruit groves and open land(Area similar to pre 1950 Orange County.
In 1997 I started A business in Las Vegas were I now live
I’ve witnessed phenomenal growth here in just eleven years. The valley is all filled up now.
Thinking about all of this and the variables that would be
involved ,I can;t see how Hansen and his poeple, no matter how smart they are , could make any meaningful temperature adjustments or comparison in high growth areas.
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
I think the article should read “Santa Ana has been getting colder for the past 33 years”. Interesting how AGW alarmists always (cpk=1.67) pick a low spot to start their graph from.
Global warming is supposed to be exponentially occuring with the fastest rate in the past 2 decades … Santa Ana’s temperature record does not support this.
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!
Actually, the ocean off California is warmer during a PDO warm phase. The PDO does not affect only Alaska. So the whole Pacific doesn’t have to warm to affect OC, which adds confusion to claims about straightforward relationships between warming air, warming water, and resulting sea level. Keeping in mind that the PDO was in a warm phase from 1976 until recently, see the map at http://www.jisao.washington.edu/pdo/