I’m back from my road trip today. It was a day of surprises, I visited 5 weather stations today, and each had a story to tell.
The one that was the most surprising is represented by the photo below, which I snapped with my Infrared camera. Hint: it’s not asphalt. The reading of 66°C for some elements in the scene is accurate. And it’s at an operating USHCN station, right under it in fact.
I’ll have more on this tomorrow, and a corresponding visible light photo that tells the story, right now I’m dead tired from driving 300+ miles today.
UPDATE: Lot’s of guesses, no correct answers. Click below to see what it is. You’ll be surprised. I sure was.
Fresh wood chips over weedmat at an official NOAA/NWS station, which is also a USHCN station. Surprisingly, note that the concrete is actually cooler in the IR photo. The work was ongoing, which is why the gate was open and the sign is not affixed yet.
More on this station soon in a new post.
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Advanced computer enhancement reveals the real answer.
Were these shots taken first thing in the morning?
I notice that the metal base of the instruments is cooler even than the concrete, at about 40C. This suggests to me that no equilibrium has been reached.
I would guess that this phenomenon is more about specific heat capacity and thermal conductivity, concrete simply takes longer to warm up. The wood chips are well insulated from the cold ground.
Could you tell if the chips were made from discarded hockey sticks? The handles warp when made from a soft or inferior wood….like say bristlecone. Something to do with erratic growth rate.
Flashback to Fargo, any one seen Hanson lately?
The wood chips are clearly decomposing and producing large amounts of greenhouse gases such as methane and sulfur hexafluoride. No doubt they will create a good crop of mushrooms shortly, which will be very poor emitters of radiation, and redress the temperature balance.
Having led the revolution against imperialism in 1776, can’t Americans please dump the imperial system of measurement? Centigrade or “Celcius” really is a lot easier and you don’t have to worry about conversions in your head, unless you start talking Kelvin. Don’t get me started on pounds, ounces, miles, yards, acres, roods, perches and all the other nonsense from antiquity!
I do hate people who misspell “Celsius”, and losers who use “loose” instead of “lose”.
It may not be correct. Is the camera properly calibrated? Did you enter an emissivity value for the surface?
As Algore would say “In Excessive Celsius Deeeeeeeeeeooooo!”.
H, we’ll dump the antiquated measurement systems as soon as you guys dump the antiquated “pound, quid & pence” and use the universal monetary standard of “dollars”. 😉
“..Don’t get me started on pounds, ounces, miles, yards, acres, roods, perches and all the other nonsense from antiquity!”
Alas, I work with computers, and we naturally cleave to the binary, hex, vigesimal, duodecimal and sexagesimal systems which the Babylonians developed. They are much more modern, functional and practical than this strange, odd, 18th century base-10, which seems to have nothing going for it at all…
Its amazing to me that climatologist and the like seem incapable of simply recording data. It is hard to believe they would be any better at digesting that data (even if it were accurate) and making sound predictions.
Rev. I had little faith in scientist before I found this site. It is refreshing to hear a consistent voice of reason and moderation coming out of the heard of natural philosophers.
i garden. i stick my hand under the weed cloth. its hot as hell.
so the physics needs to explain this
@peerreviewer:
Trapped geothermal heat conducting from the magma dome building under your property. 😉
“I’m quite surprised at how much the shadow from the fence cooled things off.”
Which should go to show that the heat is not being generated by the chips. If that were the case, the chips would also be hot where the shadow of the railing falls. But they aren’t.
You should always carry a good contact thermometer when doing thermography. Even your viewing angle can change the aparrent temperature of a surface when using IR. At least you bought a FLIR. One big step in the right direction.
I don’t think I’d call it “spontaneous combustion”. By definition, SC happens for no apparent reason and therefore doesn’t exist. The compost/wood chip combustion happens for a very logical reason.
[…] UPDATED: Guess what this is? I’m back from my road trip today. It was a day of surprises, I visited 5 weather stations today, and each had a […] […]
A tad off topic, but not far.
If any of you are interested in the _meaning_ of the metric system, take a stroll
through your local bookstore’s remainders aisle and pick up “The Measure of
All Things”. The origins of the metric system are explained in hundreds of
pages of detail. Not quite “scholarly sleep aide” stuff, but not for the casual
reader.
If you think the current dust-up with global warming has odd twists and turns,
you will be stunned at the happenings at the start of the metric system. I read
the book in part because I have a few patents in process on US/Metric conversions
on digital systems. Our disputes are tame in comparison: lots of people involved
in the early metric stuff were killed.
Is that grass in the bottom of the visible picture? But the thermal picture looks like its in a slightly different spot so we don’t get to see what the grass looks like in thermal compared to the woodchip.
Ah … Woodchips… Well my Dry grass answer wasn’t too far off the mark.
As a cricket player, there’s quite a difference to standing in 38C heat on a Green grassy oval all day, to standing on a dead dry grassy oval…. The green one is humid but the grass is cool…. The dry one… the heat just beats back at you…
As we all know, cricket is best play during the hottest part of summer by complete idiots dressed in white….. 😉
Off thread,
Anyone looked at the link between Lehman bank and the carbon trading business of Al Gore. It might be that the collapse of this bank will put a severe kink in this hare brained project. Another case of reality interfering!
Cheers
Bulaman (18:09:06) :
Maybe there is a benevelont God after all!
Bulaman (18:09:06) :
Hmm, could be. Subscription site http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.971784 teases with “The carbon credit portfolio of troubled US investment bank Lehman Brothers will be put up for sale later this week, according to a source with the bank.”
From better Lehman days, see the .pdf file at http://www.ieta.org/ieta/www/pages/getfile.php?docID=2665
oops… benevolent
dee, garden technology has advanced
“A high-tech alternative to black plastic. SRM is a specially engineered brown plastic mulch designed to suppress weed growth nearly as well as black plastic while heating the soil almost as much as clear plastic. IRT allows heat producing light through and blocks out wavelengths of light that stimulate plant growth. IRT has been around for a few years and has passed thorough testing at the university level. It works especially well for melons. 1.0 mil thickness. “
RE: Carbon Trading and Soon-to-be-forgotten Wall Street Banks:
Merrill Lynch (Remember Merrill Lynch? You know. They were “…one of the world’s leading wealth management, capital markets and advisory companies, with offices in 40 countries and territories and total client assets of almost $2 trillion…) Anyway, Merrill had also made commitments to the Carbon boys. Last spring they entered a three-year partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which bills itself, “the world’s largest investor collaboration on climate change.”
An awful lot of superlatives are soon to be merely comparatives, relatives… irrelevants.
http://www.ml.com/index.asp?id=7695_7696_8149_88278_92707_93955
See the following link for info on these investors, and editorial examination of their ethics and efficacy.
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/environment/March-April-08/Big-Banks-Buy-into-Carbon-Offset-Industry.html