Like tornados and trailer parks, USHCN temperature sensors and barbecues seem to have mutual attraction.
This is the official NOAA USHCN climate station of record in Fairbury Nebraska.
Click for a larger image
Photo taken by surfacestations.org volunteer Eric Gamberg
Here is the station temperature plot from GISS. Care to guess when the station was located here?
Click for source image
According to the NCDC MMS database the station was placed here in 1998.
[1998-12-07] 2004-10-01 40.135560 (40°08’08″N) -97.171390 (97°10’17″W)
GROUND: 1360 FEET JEFFERSON 09 – SOUTHEAST CENTRAL (+6)
Location Description: OBSERVERS RESIDENCE WITHIN AND 0.5 MILES NW OF PO AT FAIRBURY NE
The step change seen in the temperature record is quite pronounced and continues today.
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Anthony, you’ve done it again. Great catch on this one. The only barbecue that should be happening right now is to the folks at NOAA, GISS, [snip]
Jeff… “If the feds were sticking to their AGW guns like the Euros, we could be in more trouble than we needed to be.”
Perhaps there is a chink in the Euro resolve too…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3353430/EU-facing-revolt-over-climate-change-target-enforcement.html
is there hard evidence out in the public domain that could definitively prove that the global temparature is being over estimated?
In science, there is no definitive proof of anything. Anyone who asks for it, is just throwing out a strawman argument or doesn’t understand science.
You want hard evidence, take a look at the picture above. It is hard evidence that data used to calculate the ‘global temperature’ includes local influences on temperature and therefore the ‘global temperature’ does not result (completely) from a global effect (aka global warming).
Without hard evidence that any proportion of the measured global warming is due to a global effect (as opposed to local effects), we are left with the conclusion that we simply don’t whether the Earth’s climate has warmed, or cooled for that matter.
That BTW, is the scientific answer.
Ya know, it’d be easy to pick on the Dems if the GOP weren’t in the same mindset. Although AGW doesn’t pass the sniff, giggle or motorcycle cop test (Officer I was only doing 35! Oh, you had me on radar at 55?? Well, your radar must be out of caliberation!) We’re still going to wind up paying through the nose for gov’ment idiocy. Only good thing about the “research” going on is there is some good stuff on fly ash and soot that will help in the future, if there’s enough mony left to fund scrubbers!
I seem to remember that polysci majors don’t have to take science or other technical courses to graduate. We are reaping the benefits of that.
Mike
In addition to Hebron, the plots for these stations also exhibit a similar steep jump in the years following 1996, followed by a levelling off at a new higher average ..
Geneva (53km from Fairbury) http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425744400030&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Beatrice (54km) http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425744400020&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
Fairmont (63km) http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425744400040&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
York (89km) http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425725520060&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
The pattern is there but less obvious in other nearby sites. Looks much more like a real physical phenomenon rather than a microsite artifact to me. After all the ‘Fairbury rise’ starts in 1996 and lasts for 4 years, as has been pointed out.
REPLY: It may be natural, it may be a combination of station moves and natural changes, it may be a combination of all that plus microsite biases. Those things need to be checked. However, if NOAA was doing its job properly, we should not have to ask those questions. What is for certain though is that this station rates a CRN4 due to proximity to the building, parked vehicle, etc, which even by the simplest of measures, NOAA’s own 100 foot rule, makes it out of compliance. – Anthony
Very nice, it looks like the house has the most effect to me but the offset at the same time as the move is very telling. I wonder how they decide when and where to move these things.
At least this solves the mystery of why it’s warmer in the summer.
Well, the site above seems to have it all except that I don’t see the obligatory air conditioning unit anywhere. Perhaps it’s hidden behind the storage shed, eh?
Just missed being the perfect bad example by…
|_____| (hold thumb and index finger to vertical lines, please)
…that much.
In the shade of a flowering plum with the music of laughing children and shrimps on the barbie; is there any other way to measure temperatures in Suburban Heaven? You people are too technical. Try to appreciate the Feng Shui here.
John Philip –
It very well may be a real phenomenon, but the stations you cite need to be checked for microclimate bias as well. With half of the stations surveyed so far, 85% or so are out of compliance with standards.
PaulM
Found Lerwick Shetland GISS
http://www.geomag.bgs.ac.uk/bulletins/ler/2008/ler_sep08.pdf
Looks very good.
60.139120°, -1.184482°
Anthony
I think it’s reasonable to say that the station above is not in a good place, and may contribute to non-optimal data. Let’s focus on the “step” you see on the graph. Just how much of the temp increase do you believe the position of the thermometer could be contributing? These are yearly averages – I have difficulty imagining that a grill has any effect on the year. Give me a ballpark estimate for the bias contributed by residential placement. It’s hard to imagine that it would push the yearly average up enough to eliminate that “step” you see, but I may be wrong.
I’m a fan of your work here, but I’m a skeptic, not a nutter. I need to see the numbers.
BBQs are, on average, only rarely used, and this, for a quite limited amount of time.
I find large driveways, large heat sinks, rooftops, air conditioning units, warm parked cars, and whatnot that produce much more reliable temperature bias to be way more troubling than a bbq in the overall scheme of things.
“We’re still going to wind up paying through the nose for gov’ment idiocy.”
The following is strictly ad hom, for which I apologize. Clip for its bad taste as necessary. But that metaphor had unfortuane verisimilitude.
Saturday’s WSJ “Waxman takes over energy panel”
http://sec.online.wsj.com/article/SB122719899567444501.html
Waxman’s role in castigating CEO’s for bailing out of auto-piloted businesses in midflight had projected a certain grandiosity… largeness. It was never the truth. Not until he came down from his high chair, where he must have been sitting on a Greater Beverly Hills Phone directory, did I have any idea how short he really is. I have a sinking feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of this activist energy czar’s uptuned schnozolla in the near future, especially given his need to elevate his head for the microphones which the press is wont to thrust in front of reformers by the bushel-full.
I fear we should expect to see images of Waxman, like Woody Allen’s Will-o-the-wisp, “Zellig”, peering importantly over the hoods of diminutively reformed hybrid autos, around the carbon sequestration pipes of retrofitted power plants, and over the clasped hands of chief executives and environmentalists, grimmacing awkwardly at the cameras.
And looking back through the pages of old newspapers, one might almost imagine Waxman’s serious mug faintly materializing, ghostlike, into the frames of grainy old black-and-white photos, as if to remind us that even back “then” (he was active at the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), his imprimatur was on things.
Hollywood, your time has come. You are a fiction no longer.
JFA,
You are correct about the BBQ, but doesn’t it display a lack of proper care, considering the new importance of the records?
Isn’t the above pic eerily reminiscent of the cartoon on WUWT’s “Grilling the Data” of Sep 19, 2007?
Do you think the NOAA USHCN people in Fairbury get inspiration from WUWT jokes to locate their climate stations?
BBQs are, on average, only rarely used, and this, for a quite limited amount of time.
so very true.
and heat tends to rise pretty straight up.
the measurements are taken with a min-max thermometer. a typical evening barbecue after a hot summer day, will struggle hard to push the temperature above the max temperature of the day.
unless the barbecue is placed directly under the thermometer, which would give pretty strange results (and still could have a minimal effect over 365 days..)
i am pretty sure that a simple test could show, that a barbecue will have minimal effect average annual temp. it is a distraction to this discussion…
Since such incidental appendages are just distractions, just what is Dr Hansen’s rationale for not just taking the readings verbatim, as they are registered on this min-max thermometer.
The readings of any min-max thermometer, by the way are absolutely guaranteed to be invalid, even for a 100% cloudless day; and a complete fiction for any day on which variable or broken clouds are part of the daily weather.
So don’t fret that the barbecue issue is being raised; and even if not lit, it still represents a source of anomalous excess radiation; or haven’t you ever placed your hand on one like that under full summer sun.
It would be nice to have a short statement on the scientific basis for “adjusting” each and everyone of the official GISStemp measurement stations say since the start of the 20th century, and of course for each time the installation is altered in any way that calls for readjustment of its “fudge factor”. That would seem to be a reasonable request for taxpayers to expect in exchange for Dr Hansen’s annual budget funding.
Here’s an idea that would make a wonderful “news peg”: Set up weather stations close to a half-dozen “heat island” official stations, using the same model of station, and compare their temperature profiles and averages after six months, a year, etc. This would be very simple to understand and would be especially effective in the media in conjunction with the refusal of Jones et al. to release their detailed data for examination. This could force them to do so–or make them look bad. This is a story 60 Minutes (or perhaps John Stossl) would go for.
Heck, even a single “shadow station” would be a worthwhile project–and somewhat newsworthy. (Maybe individuals could be encouraged to purchase and obtain installation-permissions in their local areas. As long as they had information on where and how to buy a station, and the location and model number of the official stations near their homes, they could do get this project on the road without any central direction. (This would also make their efforts more newsworhty, maybe, for being a grass-roots effort.)
From JFA in Montreal (10:05:32) :
BBQs are, on average, only rarely used, and this, for a quite limited amount of time.
end quote.
Um, BBQ usage is idiosyncratic. My neighbor loves his BBQ and fires it up religiously just about every evening (5 ish) during non-rain non-cold weather. He takes about an hour to get the coals going, an hour to cook, then cool down is about another hour. (I can smell his cooking in my yard…) Also, a BBQ is often a social affair. Add a dozen bodies and some rum, maybe a portable space heater for cold old Aunt Em … bingo a high day.
While I agree that it is probably a distractor, that is not guaranteed. Also, ‘straight up’ depends on the breeze. Mine often drifts out at about a 45 degree angle. 2 mph up in a 2 mph light breeze…
BTW, Southern Brazil had unexpected snow … Not unheard of, but unusual. The local weather is increasingly globally cold…
Bill P (13:47:08)
“We’re still going to wind up paying through the nose for gov’ment idiocy.”
The following is strictly ad hom, for which I apologize. Clip for its bad taste as necessary. But that metaphor had unfortuane verisimilitude.
Saturday’s WSJ “Waxman takes over energy panel”
The possibility exists that all the politicians already know that the earth is getting cooler and are trying to push legislation through asap so they can point to the change and say ‘see – we told you that cutting back CO2 would stave off disaster…’
Mine often drifts out at about a 45 degree angle. 2 mph up in a 2 mph light breeze…
what you see “drifting” is smoke, not heat.
moving significant amounts of HEAT several meters horizontally along the ground requires wind conditions that don t really favor barbecues…
read about cold smoke here (in buildings though..)
http://fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/fire97/PDF/f97218.pdf
The local weather is increasingly globally cold…
no. “globally cool” would indicate temperature below a long term average. this simply is NOT the case.
I really have to ask…
has anyone actually verified that this is the OFFICIAL NOAA climatological station in Fairbury?
Because it seems to be more of a volunteer station than an OFFICIAL station…
See page 13.
http://mcc.sws.uiuc.edu/FORTS/histories/NE_Fairbury_Doty.pdf
I really must ask…
Has anyone confirmed that this is the OFFICIAL NOAA CLIMATE station for Fairbury?
Because it looks more like a volunteer station to me.
See page 13 of the following.
http://mcc.sws.uiuc.edu/FORTS/histories/NE_Fairbury_Doty.pdf
Does that area get snow in the winter? Looking at the temp charts, not just the graph, indicates that there is an overall increase in temperature after the move to that location (there is a series of invalid data points at the end of 98 – coincides with a December activation. One would assume they probably don’t use their BBQ during the cold winter months, yet there is a noticeable spike on the January data, as well as across the rest of the year. I agree that the BBQ presence may taint the data ever so slightly, but unless these are die-hard grillers, we don’t know whether the aberration is within the statistical noise or not 🙂