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.
OT and I apologize.
Everything I’ve read or been reading does not seem to account for basic laws of physics with regard to AGW.
A gas increases temperature when its volume decreases. Correct? So, when the sun is active – and the solar wind compresses the earth’s atmosphere – temperature would be expected to increase, correct? When the sun is inactive – and the Earth’s atmosphere expands – temperature would decrease, correct? (All of this reasoning is, of course, broad-based and does not account for other factors.)
By what method is the combined gas law canceled out to satisfy the AGW crowd? What report have I not seen or read to account for this? I expected to see it in the take-down of Lord Moncton’s[sp?] APS report, but didn’t – I’ve Googled and not found it either; what am I missing?
Does the ‘Ideal’ Gas law not have anything to do with Earth’s atmosphere?
What’s up (and I do mean “up”) at Hadley? Their early version is out for August 2008 at http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly and it’s gone up from August 2007. UAH, RSS, and GISS, all fell from Aug 2007 to Aug 2008. As a matter of fact, when rounded off to 2 decimal places, Hadley equals GISS for August 2008 at 0.39.
crosspatch (16:25:49) commented:
<blockquote cite=”
JAFAC (20:20:14) :
> OT and I apologize.
> Everything I’ve read or been reading does not seem to account for basic
> laws of physics with regard to AGW.
> A gas increases temperature when its volume decreases. Correct?
Correct, as long as the only energy added was that to compress the gas.
> So, when the sun is active – and the solar wind compresses the
> earth’s atmosphere – temperature would be expected to increase,
> correct?
The solar wind is so weak that satellites sail through it. It’s also extremely hot, so the outer atmosphere heats up and expands. Solar storms can expand the atmosphere enough so that low altitude satellites experience a lot more drag and need to expend more fuel to maintain their orbit.
> Does the ‘Ideal’ Gas law not have anything to do with Earth’s atmosphere?
It does, it’s just that it’s a system where you can’t conveniently adjust just one element of pV = nRT. Also, note that the solar wind hits one side of the Earth. If it were able to push on that side, the atmosphere would just bulge out on the other.
J.Hansford. (17:26:20) :
“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 usual cricket provides the answer. It also tells us something which might be relevant to wood chip conflagrations. Linseed oil is used to season cricket bats and there are numerous recorded instances of rags seeped in linseed oil catching fire for no apparent reason. It’s never happened to me but I always oil my bats outdoors and leave the rag on the patio just in case.
Perhaps the excitable wood chips contain an oil with the same quality.
As for compost, regular turning of a compost heap is more effective than so-called optimum heat for speeding up the composting process. Don’t know why it works but it does, presumably something to do with spreading around the little bug things that cause decomposition and giving them more stuff to work on. One year I made two heaps as near identical as I could, stirred one but not the other, the stirred heap produced usable material in less than half the time. Does that make me a scientist?
I know what Anthony’s photo is – it’s definitely an elephant in a room, isn’t it?
“Good eye there, but the same wouldn’t hold true for the concrete with its larger thermal mass. ”
You can see the evidence of the concrete’s thermal mass … or as I like to call it, a thermal flywheel. It would appear to me by looking at the photo that the shadow of the fence rail has been moving from right to left if you consider the shadow that cuts across the front edge of the concrete. The area to the left of the shadow (where the shadow has yet to reach) appears hotter to me than the concrete to the right of the shadow ( where the shadow had shaded recently) and the farther you move to the right, the warmer the concrete gets
Dear peerreviewer — I used the weed cloth from H Depot and it failed utterly. The weeds grew underneath, ripped it open, and they had to be pulled anyhow. The good news is that the cantaloupes and honeydews ripened thanks to the Sept hot spell. In August I was worried about the spotless sun and the plunging temps, but Sept rescued the garden. All of which proves something or other.
Anthony,
I asked my landscaper about these photos. He has about 17 to 18 years of experience in landscaping, and is also was familiar with FLIR images due to a stint in the military. He said that, when he first started doing landscaping, he would use weed mats, but that they always “cooked the plants” and didn’t work very well. The weeds would come back within 6 months and the amount of labor to put in weed mats was so high that it wasn’t worth it. So it would seem the weed matting is to blame. Maybe it is just one more thing that needs to be put into the siting specs for these stations (i.e. don’t use weed matting anywhere near these stations).
REPLY: That makes sense. I have some other IR photos showing exposed areas of weed mats, toasty. Look for a larger write-up soon. – Anthony
I’m changing my answer: What did I say? A? Well, it’s C. No, B.
After re-reading Anthony’s posting about Tucumcari irrigation issues, I’m switching (to agree with several above). The temp is related to moisture and heat retention in the wood chips, due to evaporation.
Abstract of Christy’s article:
http://www.uah.edu/News/newsread.php?newsID=293
If this is the case, it raises the question of whether USHCN stations take humidity readings. Wouldn’t temp / humidity connections be easy to prove?
REPLY: USHCN stations for the most part (ASOS conversions accepted) don’t take humidity readings. – Anthony
Havent time to read all the replies here, but couldnt the metal in the picture be conducting heat up and away from the woodchip area? Was a second picture taken of the top of the metal structure by any chance?
I’m certainly no expert on physics and chemistry.. I wash dishes for a living, lol! But I was always taught at school of the conductive and radiant properties of metals – which is why we use copper heatsinks in some of our industrial equipment at work.
Just a curiousity. 🙂
using that fr measuring the temp is like those bank thermometer,they are always off by over 30 degress or more in the summer and then never record the right temp.