There’s been a lot of interest in this station from my post on “pipes”. Finding it from Google Earth has been a challenge since the lat/lon provided by meteorological agencies is rather coarse.
A number of commenters, especially Jeff C. and George M. have zeroed in with the help of land photos they’d discovered, such as this one from a travel company that offers trips to the “pole of cold”:
Another image of the brown wood slat covered building which houses the office is here:
Click for larger image
Note the two pole barns in the distance from the Stevenson Screen photo and the field of view. It seems that we have located the station in the far northeast side of town at 67.565°N 133.413°E Here is the corresponding Google Earth image with my addition of the field of view lines:
Click for a larger image
A live Google Earth for this image is here
It appears that the original meteo station office, seen below with the quad Yagi satellite antenna on it, has been replaced with the newer one above that has a dish antenna. The new office can be seen in the background left of this photo:
Direct URL to the photo above here
What is curious is the plume in the left of the frame. It appears to be steam but could be smoke, we’ll never know for sure.
I’ve also been able to obtain the raw daily data for Verhojansk.
Which has four readings per day at six hour intervals, plus the Tmax and Tmin Temperature. I’ve placed the text file on my surfacestations.org server for anyone that wishes to do an analysis and compare it to the same period for HadCRUT or GISS.
Here is the GISTEMP plot, there does appear to be a positive trend since about 1980:
Fighting a massive cold and work duties preclude me from doing any decent analysis now, but given the interest level, I’m making it available to anyone that wants to give it a go. Even though the data set is only 8 years long, there may be something interesting to discover. This short raw data set has not been processed by GHCN whereas the GISTEMP data has been.
Link: VerhojanskDaily Data (ASCII text file 1.1 MB) to save to a file, do a right click and “save target as”
Link: Verhojansk GISTEMP Monthly Data (ASCII text file 17KB)
@John Baglien (23:08:29) :
You wrote in part, “… I had thought that global mean temperatures were based on the mean of daily min and max temps. How does GISTEMP calculate annual mean temp in the absence of recorded minimum and maximum temps?”
That set me thinking. What does the mean of max and min tell anyone anyhow? Doesn’t the length of time that a temperature persists throughout a day count for anything?
Consider a typical Indian Summer Fall day in the midwest. It might start with overnight lows in the 50’s and warm up to 70 degrees F where it remains for most of the day. Then, along about, say, 10:00 pm, a clipper could come through and drop the temperature to let’s say 20 degrees F. The mean for the day would be 45 degrees F but really, the bulk of the day was mostly in the 60-70 degree F range. I’d argue that the better characterization of the temperature for a given day be the time weighted average average for the max and min temps.
I’ll have to ponder all this a bit more but thanks for setting off down that path.
oopsie!
Should read, “I’ll have to ponder all this a bit more but thanks for setting me off down that path.” (I don’t think you were headed that way. ) Thanks again.
Some additional comments on this site. The Google view is apparently from 2005, according to the press release about the future competetive Indian service. So, this could explain why several of the abjects apparent in the various ground level photos do not appear in the satellite photo. Anyone know how to access current satellite photos?
Finally, the absence of snow on top of some of the enclosures is puzzling. Two possibilities, the light bulb stays on. Or, some poor thermometer reader has to sweep it off every hour. I’ll bet they would opt for MMTS in a heartbeat.
abjects? oops, objects
Hinkel et al?
Daniel Said: In the paper they say that we can reduce CO2 50ppm by “reforestation of degraded land and use of more natural fertilizers.”…
End quote.
Having been around a lot of “natural fertilizers” I can assure you that it breaks down into large quantities of “greenhouse gasses” including many hydrocarbon containing aromatic ones! BTW, where do the sequestering trees go in 25 to 50 years? Or do we need to keep doing this on new land each 50 years (I assume they would be using a very high growth tree species that reaches maturity in 25-50 years for max sequestration.)
Before we head down this rat hole would it not be easier to just stop cutting down the existing rainforest? Oh right, since it’s mature it is not a net sequestration so no carbon credits. Guess we need to plant new forests then and let the old ones go… gotta get those carbon credits.
How can these looneytoons in one breath say farming causes GHGs and in the next breath say we can cure GHGs with tree farming. Sheesh.
(Disclaimer: Elsewhere on the net I’ve advocated tree farms for biofuel production and I’ve shown that if we wanted a one time short duration suck down of CO2 we could do in a rapid forest system. But I’ve not been from the “we must sequester CO2 forever” camp, so have no hypocrisy in tossing darts at the idea of trees as long term sequestration.)
To the poster who asked “why natural fertilizer?”.. Because artificial fertilizers (especial nitrogen ones) are made with hydrocarbon energy sources and are thus expected to be evil. Never mind that it takes far less energy to synthesize NH3 than to get it from animal pee (via feed, via farming…)
Thanks Anthony. That argument makes sense. An FE thermal model would indeed tell us the truth. I could likely do it too if it weren’t for this pesky need to earn money.
Interesting article about treeline in Polar Urals:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120091806/abstract
“Expanding forests and changing growth forms of Siberian larch at the Polar Urals treeline during the 20th century”
The aim of this study was to reconstruct stand structure and growth forms of Larix sibirica (Ledeb.) in undisturbed forest–tundra ecotones of the remote Polar Urals on a centennial time scale. Comparisons of the current ecotone with historic photographs from the 1960s clearly document that forests have significantly expanded since then.
However:
Because thousands of more than 500-year-old subfossil trees occur in the same area but tree remnants of the 15–19th century are lacking almost entirely, we conclude that the forest has been expanding upwards into the formerly tree-free tundra during the last century by about 20–60 m in altitude.
So once upon the time, there was no tundra, but forest…
Maybe its just me, but I looked at that data set you posted. If you start at around 1900 (when the data is actually pretty clean and error free) going until the present you get to me what looks like the ordinary. Using yearly averages, the overall average for the time frame is roughly -15 degrees celsius. If you run a 5 year trend line you see that it starts off above average, moves down to below average and moves back up to above average today. But, during the entire timeframe the moving average is + or -, 1 degree. In fact the moving average is showing that we are now heading back down towards cold again. How is this not normal.
In looking at the picture again it looks like a light switch on the right side of the enclosure with a wire running from it. (If someone already posted this I missed it.)
I would assume the person reading the temp comes up and turns on the light just before doing the reading.
Good catch, the switch is hard to see. Makes you wonder though how often it gets left on. Pretty easy to do if you are in a hurry to get the heck out of the cold at -30C
Looked at the daily trend data for the last 8 years.
The min and max data is only for the first 4 years. A trend on all the ave temp data using the max min data was -2.1 C/yr. Using only the March to March data it was -3.125 /yr. Using the eight years of 4 times a day observations gives a trend of +0.3 C/yr, the March to March 4 times a day observation for the eight years gives a trend of -.84 C/yr.
Doesn’t match the end of the yearly plot very well. Will look at the other data set.
Compared Daily data to GISS data set for 2001 to 2007
Year GISS Data Daily Data
2001 -16.46 -13.35
2002 -14.41 -12.28
2003 -14.51 -12.32
2004 -15.87 -14.38
2005 -13.19 -12.16
2006 -13.82 -14.42
2007 -13.12 -13.42
Obviously the GISS corrections change the data trends.
Trend GISS +0.45 C/yr, Trend Daily data -0.12 C/yr
Fred4D,
Sure looks strange. If anyone from GISS, NOAA or RC is reading this can you explain why there is such a big difference.
Fred4D, thanks for doing this.
Can you share your method and or files, such as an Excel file or other tool?
– Anthony
I have no idea if the method is correct, I have no background in metrology. For the all daily data i just graphed the entire T column, in the spreadsheet linked in the story, versus a summation of the date and time columns and got the linear trend line. For the March to March I obviously cut of the end of the data past March.
For the average of the Max and min I just averaged the max and min data for each day then plotted versus the date. This would have been easier if I had sorted the data to collapse the Max min data, but I just cut and pasted an average formula. For most of the data there were four hourly observations and the max min so it was regular, near the end of the four years there were more than the 4 daily observations. Like two 6 am observations with slightly different temperatures, Some days were missing data as well. I think the time frame, even 8 years, is too short to make too much of the trends. The difference in the GISS data I do not understand, but then I do not know what they are correcting for. I would assume correcting for altitude and such would give more of a constant change in the numbers not the decreasing correction seen.
Looking at the every 6 hour data it looks like data is not collected automatically especially since it appears that more midnight data is missing than others (would have to check to verify that), When they were doing duplicate data for each observation it is like they were changing thermometers or station sites perhaps and wanted a little bit of time to overlap the data to check for consistency.
Looked at the double temperature data from 4/30/04 to 6/16/04. Most days eight readings are recorded, two at 0:00, 6:00, 12:00 and 18:00 although for a few the double is missing. If I assume the first and second readings are consistently recorded in order corresponding to two different thermometers the difference between the two readings over the time was 0.14 degrees. The maximum difference between readings was 4.85 degrees and the minimum -0.50 degrees. Standard deviation for the differences was 0.73 degrees
Average, Average 0, Average 6, Average 12, Average 18,
0.14, 0.06, -0.04, -0.01, 0.59
Max
4.85,2.05, 0.50, 0.50, 4.85
Min
-0.50, -0.50, -0.50, -0.50, -0.50
STDEV
0.73, 0.41, 0.32, 0.30, 1.28
The table above shows the Average, Max, Min and StDev of the differences for each recording hour. The worst correspondence is for the 18:00 observations. It could be if these are different locations there is a shadowing that affects the 18:00 observations but not the others.
I think I have looked at this data enough. Strangeness abounds. Why the double readings? Why the changing GISS correction. Why does this data show no change over time but the GISS data shows warming?
Do enjoy reading your articles, especially on the weather station sites.
During the time period after the double readings stopped (6/14/04 on) there were not fewer 0:00 readings as I supposed in my last post but more 6:00 readings (6 more to be exact) than the 0;00, 12;00 and 18:00 readings.