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. “
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.
REPLY: You double posted this for some reason, see reply in other identical comment
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:
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.
AnonyMoose,
I explained to science dude about how OC California warms and cools with the PDO, I even pointed out specific points on his graph to demonstrate, he responded by saying that my comment “grossly mistated” Hartman / Wendler. Hartman Wendler was a study about Alaska, not California. The “Dude” simply threw out a scientific cite without even reading the paper, the abstract, or the title.
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.
Watts:
If the homogeneized data are what Hansen and others use to build the global warming theory upon, then why shouldn’t I be looking at the same data to see if there’s a warming bias?
And indeed, the data that are used by Hansen and others show no warming bias in Marysville vs. Orland.
“But the issue of station siting remains.”
That’s backpedalling.
REPLY: No, its a basis, and it is reality. Look I get it, you don’t like me or any of the work I do and your mission is to discredit anything I say or do at any cost. So it wouldn’t really matter what I said or published. But, I’m hoping there is a reasonable person behind the affrontery you present, so I’ll try one more time.
You made a basic mistake, (even though you won’t admit it) and plotted homogenized data for two stations, making no point at all. So plot the raw data to actually show the differences (or sameness) between the stations which is the issue you raised. The issue has been and continues to be lack of siting compliance. Those differences (or sameness) at the scale we are working with, will show up in raw data, not homogenized data.
Plotting homogenized data between two stations is like trying to discern two shades of grey in resultant paint mixed from two cans each of black and white (hi and lo temp) and trying to determine what the component paint pigmentation levels were originally…you can’t, because GISS homogenization has mixed the starting four cans of paint, with other cans of paint within 250 kilometers. You won’t be able to tell if the four starting component paints before mixing were truly black, truly white, or something in between.
While that may not be a perfect analogy, it serves to illustrate the need to plot data that have not been homogenized in order to show the differences in the measurements at each site. The GISS homogenization routine is a regional smoothing routine, 250km. It’s not for small scale site to site comparisons.
I’ve been thinking about your block-out treatment of Mr. Goetz on your own website. Thus, it is clear that your agenda is to discredit, not to truly discuss or to carefully investigate. Otherwise, your response would be different.
You are welcome to come back when you get it right, and apply some fairness to commenters like Mr. Goetz. Thank you for your consideration. -Anthony
[…] 23 08 2008 Two weeks ago I posted about a story from the Orange County Register titled Urbanization Raises The Heat in Orange County. It was front page news that day, on Friday, August […]
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