Sometimes, words fail me in describing the absolute disregard of the placement of NOAA official climate monitoring sites. For example, this one in Clarinda, Iowa submitted by surfacestations volunteer Eric Gamberg:
Click for larger image
The MMTS temperature sensor is the short pole next to the half pickup truck.
For those of you that don’t know, this station is located at the wastewater treatment plant there. I’ve written many times about the placement of stations at WWTP’s being a bad idea due to the localized heat bubble that is created due to all the effluent coming though. The effect is especially noticeable in winter. Often you’ll see steam/water vapor in the air around these sites in winter, and more than one COOP observer has told our volunteers that snow sometimes does not stick to the ground at WWTP’s.
The larger pole appears to be a gas burnoff torch for excess methane. I can’t say how often it is activated (note the automatic ignitor circuit on the pole) but I can tell you that putting an official NOAA climate thermometer within a few feet of such a device is one of the worst examples of thoughtless station placement on the part of NOAA I’ve ever seen. Here is an example of a methane burn-off device at another WWTP.
We’ll probably never know what the true temperature is in Clarinda because untangling a measurements mess like this is next to impossible. How many days was Tmin and/or Tmax affected at this location by gas burnoff and to what magnitude? We shouldn’t have to ask these questions.
And, adding insult to stupidity, the GISTEMP Homogenization adjustment makes the trend go positive, especially in recent years:
According to the NCDC MMS database for this station, the MMTS was installed on October 1, 1985. Who knows what the data would have looked like if somebody had thought through the placement. Whether or not the temperature sensor has been significantly affected or not by this placement is not the issue, violation of basic common sense siting guideline that bring the data into question is. Anything worth measuring using our public tax dollars is worth measuring correctly.
Dr. Hansen and Mr. Karl – welcome, feast your eyes on the source of your data. You might want to think about changing this description on the NCDC website for USHCN:
The United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) is a high quality, moderate-sized data set of daily and monthly records of basic meteorological variables from over 1000 observing stations across the 48 contiguous United States.
I suggest to NCDC that “high quality” doesn’t really apply in the description anymore.
I really could use some help, especially in Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas to get the USHCN nationwide climate network survey completed. If you have a digital camera and can follow some simple instructions, why not visit www.surfacestations.org and sign up as a volunteer surveyor. If you can’t help that way, donations to help fund trips such as these that I’ve been doing are greatly appreciated.
UPDATE 11/20 4:20PMPST: Some commenters such as Krysten Byrnes and Steve have suggested that the blink comparator above is wrong due to the fact that the scale on the left changes in offset. I realize that may create some confusion. A couple of clarifications are needed to address that.
First, these graphs are generated by the GISTEMP database, not me. I simply copied both from the GISTEMP website into my animation program. This includes the scale offset which is part of the difference in the original GISTEMP generated images. You can do the same thing also by visiting here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/ and putting Clarinda in the search box. Use the pulldown menu to select either data set you want. The above is the “combined sources” and also “after homogeneity adjustment”.
Second what is important to note here is that the slope of the trend changes as a result of the adjustment applied by GISS. It becomes more positive in the “homogenized” data set.
Third, in the “homogenized” data set, the past has been cooled, the present also made warmer, making the slope more positive over the timeline. Here is the Clarinda GISTEMP Homogenized data plot overlaid on the “raw” data plot. Again these are the original unmodified GISTEMP generated graphs using a simple cut and paste with transparent background technique:
Click graph for full sized image
Note how the hinge point appears around 1980 where the data appears to match. Note also how the divergence between the two data sets increases either direction from this hinge point.
Anthony – Is anyone doing surveys of the quality of met stations outside the US. If the UK hasn’t then I am sure we could get it done given that we talk of little else in the UK. Weather and climate vane would be a good community to get involved .. unless that is it has been done already?
REPLY: No it hasn’t been done, and given how labor intensive the USHCN has been I haven’t the time to start one. – Anthony
hhhh
Mike,
I’m sure it’s set alarm bells ringing 🙂
By the way, genuine question here (not trying to be funny) – does anyone know why NASA doesn’t have it’s name to a satellite-derived global temperature record, considering it provides the satellites? I mean everyone’s heard of NASA as in NASA-GISS, but how many people have heard of RSS or UAH? Why isn’t there a NASA-GISS and a NASA-SAT for example? Why are the MSUs used to derive the satellite records carried on satellites called NOAA, yet NOAA is synonymous with yet another (warm-biased?) surface record? I’m probably being ignorant here and missing something stupid, but I thought I’d let someone else work it out for me.
Cheers,
Chris
Thought I would take a look at my local weather station record which is and has been at Kew Gardens in west London in GISSTemp. For some reason GISS stopped using this station in 1980. It’s still there in the same place. I will ask them why they stopped sending data in.
M White (11:34:42)
Truly insane. What happens if no one makes a bid?
steven mosher (15:13:05)
Mr Mosher, what you refer to is the different classification that Hansen created. The brightness index is very much used in determining how much to adjust the station for low frequency variation. I would refer you to Hansen et al 2001 to correct yourself. Neverthe less, since this is an R2C station (R = rural and 2 = dim only being relevant here due to it’s location), there is no reason that it got an upward adjustment when it should have been adjusted downward.
Pardon me as I take my foot out of my mouth. The brightness index is used to determine the PNB which Mr Mosher referred to. So brightness index creates classification and is not involved in weighting.
That technicality out of the way, the point still remains the same, this station should have recieved an adjustment that cooled the station, instead it got an adjustment that warmed the station.
Anthony,
This is off topic but may shatter the illusions of anyone who thought that an ETS is not just an excuse for more taxes.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article5192585.ece
Here is how the hottest October in history looked to a satellite.
http://climate.uah.edu/oct2008.htm
Unless, that is, the greatest “anomaly” that creates the overall “warming” happens to occur in an area where few people live and those that do live there generally have little contact with the outside world. Like, say, Siberia and far Northern Canada …
“And, adding insult to stupidity, the GISTEMP Homogenization adjustment makes the trend go positive, especially in recent years:”
I do hope I see the day that James Hansen is exposed for the charletan he is.
@Patrick H,
“Southern Hemisphere: +0.07 C (about 0.13° Fahrenheit) above 20-year average for October.”
Sure is A-GLOBAL-W – That global signal in the SH sure is a big one…
Thanks for the link
Anthony:
My daughter lives in Arkansas and I have been recruiting her to obtain the surface station data.
It has been very frustrating finding the information for her on the http://www.SurfaceStations.com website, when I knew darn well that a KML file for Goggle Earth was available.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/06/surfacestations-ushcn-ratings-in-google-earth/
Anthony, could you please make this KML file VERY EASY TO OBTAIN on your primary website?
When I work hard recruiting people to help, it would be rather nice to make it easy for them.
REPLY: I thought it was, here is what I’ve had posted for over a week, right at the top:
NEWS Updated 11/06/2008
Google Earth Station Rating Map now available – download here.
Sincere thanks to Gary Boden for this contribution!
Nice post!
@crosspatch (19:03:46) :
I’m hoping that the average Citizen in Main Street USA is shoveling snow this winter of their driveways while being told that it’s the warmest January on record…
It’s going to be interesting to see how the disconnect unfolds.
I know that the KML file was at the top!
“Google Earth Station Rating Map now available”
This KML file can locate the surface stations closest to their homes, and this should be VERY OBVIOUS!
This resource is way too important waste, because of a bad title on the website.
Change the title to:
Download this Google Earth KML file to locate the closest weather reporting station to your home.
Yikes, I already knew about this file, but and had to search for it.
“” Philip_B (14:51:46) :
, I am prompted to ask how many for real high qualtiy sites are required to evaluate the surface temperature trends in the U.S.?
60 ‘randomly’ located stations would be sufficient to determine the temperature trend for the whole of the USA or any area for that matter.
BTW, the main problem with the current network is that none of the stations is ‘randomly’ located. It doesn’t matter how many non-random sited stations you have if you don’t know what biases the non-random siting introduces. Which is the surface stations problem in a nutshell. “”
I’m puzzled; what scientific basis is there for “adjusting” any of these measurments at any of these stations?
The whole idea of measuring things in the real universe is to find out what they really are. One man’s “adjustments” are another man’s data falsification.
The whole problem with the whole concept of GISSTemp; and your “randomly” sited stations, is that the resulting measurement is improperly assigned to areas that it does not truly represent; the UHI problem; and then the GCMers compound the felony in that they don’t use those numbers properly to evaluate the resulting energy losses via EM radiation et al; so there is no way that you can get any valid climate information as far as the big question; are we heating or cooling, and once you homogenise the data from a bunch of stations you can’t determine energy transport from one point to another either.
The whole idea of NOAA’s isothermal planet in dynamic equilibrium, with mysterious GHG or other perturbing “Forcings” driving the system up or down in total energy, is simply preposterous.
It may be a “Climate model”; but it isn’t a model of ANY planet which human beings are interested in.
The UHI problem would completely disappear, if the measured temperature was assigned to the correct surrounding area, and was correctly modelled in the energy transfer equations.
So heat islands get warmer in the day time, than the original pasture got; so what, during that same mid day sun, those heat islands are radiating like crazy, and doing more than their fair share to cool the planet.
Just look how fast the ground cools in a UHI after sundown.
George
PS And I’ll repeat my assertion that the global sampling network and procedure violates the Nyquist sampling theorem, by many orders of magnitude in the spatial sampling, and by integer factors for the time sampling, so there is no way that such a “random” sampling process can recover the true average surface temperature of the earth; let alone at some nebulous five feet or so above the ground (which can be minus several hundred meters to over + 8000 meters altitude.) Some system!
According to NOAA, the solar constant (incoming solar flux) is 342 W/m^2.
Actually it is 1368 W/m^2, which is roughly 4 times what NOAA puts out on their website as comprising the earth’s energy budget, and moreover the sun puts that same 342 Watts/m^2 down on the south pole in the middle of the Antarctic winter night, and every other place on earth. Total balderdash !
The sensor looks to be far away from any buildings, at least compared to other stations. I assume (dangerous) that it is an MMTS type sensor, which Anthony says seem to have cable length limitations. Am I missing something here ?
REPLY: Yes you are missing something, but not your fault. The surveyor did not include pictures of the office for this site but it is nearby. See this aerial photo of the site.
The specified length limit for the MMTS cable is 1/4 mile according to NOAA tech specs. But it seldom, if ever gets extended that far. The reason is quite simple.
The NWS is responsible for installing these. The NWS WSFO that services the area has a position called “COOP Manager”. One of the jobs of that person is to install these. Typically they have a day. They have to drive to the site, choose a location, dig a trench, lay the cable, bring it into the building, install the readout unit, test the system, then train the observer, all in that day.
Since they typically have only hand and garden tools, such as a spade shovel and pickaxe, and seldom are given budget or time to rent a motorized trencher, they often have to take shortcuts. Simple surface barriers such as sidewalks, driveways, gravel and asphalt roads often can’t be trenched around or under with such basic tools and time limits. Hence the MMTS almost without exception gets closer to the observer residences and offices than the Stevenson Screen was, which could be placed anywhere. of course such proximity has been shown to create a positive bias in the temperature record. Such step changes may not be caught and corrected for.
A perfect example of this problem is this photo from Bainbridge Georgia, which shows where the Stevenson Screen original location is and where the new MMTS was placed due to these limitations
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=5645&g2_imageViewsIndex=1
They simply couldn’t get the wire under the road.
Hope that explains it – Anthony
Here are some videos of the recent Governors Global Climate summit.
http://www.uctv.tv/climate/videos.asp
Some of them are kind of annoying to watch.
Note that the most recent videos get bumped as newer ones are added to the list.
We all know the hoary acronym GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). But for this project on weather stations to be really useful, it becomes necessary to go to the next step. To compile the percentage of really egregious sitings and show that the already-understood concept of the Urban Heat Island has actually been significantly understated up to now, even tho the AGW crowd claims to have already corrected for it.
Otherwise, the axe grinders on the other side will just continue to sniff that individual anecodotal sites may be poorly placed, but that their culminative effect is “non-material” in the beloved big picture. . . .
Do 1,000 sites, even if they were perfectly sited and maintained, give us a better answer than 500 or 200 sites of the same quality?
The new NOAA/CRN network is either started or about to be up and running. They have 83 on line so far as I could figure out. They are a complete network, for the most part extremely well sited and have 24-hour automated data collection (No T-Min/T-Max. No TOBS) and all data raw. No adjustments required.
If this is indeed so and if NOAA would give CRN some face time we might actually find out what’s going on around here!
I am waiting for more word on this.
Slightly off topic, but it’s another example of the nonsense behind AGW, I actually heard Arnold Schwarzenegger blame the recent wildfires in Southern California on global warming. Then we just learned that a bonfire set by college students caused one of the fires. But the other ones must have been caused by global warming!
The cylindrical tank to the left is an anaerobic digester. These are typically heated to 95 degrees F using the biogas generated by the digestion process. As this gas is a free byproduct, and would be flared if not used to heat the digester, these concrete walled tanks are typically not insulated.
Geez, I didn’t know they were heated, but it sure makes sense. I was envisioning only sewage composting w/o heat added, which produces some heat itself, along with a lot of gas – that’s one reason why you have a “stack” on your home drain system venting above the roof, and “traps” in the drains. Once one of my traps dried out and I nearly blew up my house, before I realized what had really happened to produce that special gassy smell.
It is an essay by our good friend. EVAN JONES – Go Ev!
Thanks, Anthony!