In my 30 years in meteorology, I never questioned how NOAA climate monitoring stations were setup. It wasn’t until I stumbled on the Marysville California fire station and its thermometer that that I began to notice just how badly sited these stations are. When I started looking further, I never expected to find USHCN climate monitoring stations placed at sewage treatment plants, next to burn barrels, or in parking lots of University Atmospheric Science Departments, or next to air conditioning heat exchangers. These were all huge surprises.
I didn’t think I’d be surprised anymore. I thought I’d seen the weirdest of the weird, and that I would not be surprised again with bad station placement examples.
Then I saw this station, submitted from Fort Scott, Kansas:
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No, your eyes do not deceive you. That is an official NOAA USHCN climate monitoring station at a funeral home in downtown Fort Scott, KS
From a wider perspective, you can see all the things around it. Not only do we have a fountain (extra humidity), a nearby brick wall for heat retention at night, a large concrete driveway that curves around the station, a tree for shade in the late afternoon, a big brick building with a south facing brick wall, but we also have cobblestone streets and convenient nearby parking. The station is near the center of the city.
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This location has everything needed, except a BBQ. See the photo gallery here.
It seems that that station was moved into this location from the previous one about a block away on April 4th, 2002:
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Upon first examination. it appears that it “may” have been cooler at the previous location, once you get past the spike of the 1998 El Nino it seems the elevated step function remains. Though since the location was also downtown, about a block away, perhaps the UHI of the downtown has overwhelmed the station change.
From what I can tell of the towns history, most of the growth in buildings occurred during the first half of the 20th century. Many of the downtown buildings seem to date from that time. Certainly it appears cooler around 1900.
No worries though, GISS has “fixed” the temperature to reflect a cooler past:
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Of course, this GISS adjustment artificially increases the temperature trend of the last century. It appears to use the present as the hinge point.
Yes it probably was cooler in Fort Scott’s past, when it looked like this, when it was founded:
“A beautifully undulating prairie”. “An almost precipitous decent of fifty feet”. “A flat spur of high prairie”. “A small clear-water creek”.
In 1852, Assistant Surgeon Joseph Barnes used all of these phrases to describe the landscape surrounding Fort Scott.
reference here
Here is a recent view of downtown
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Thank you, Anthony Watts. I look forward to the (public?) resumption of the analyses. All the best.
barry.
I second the motion for a weather stations calendar!
XQ
Thanks to yourself and various people for your support for a weather stations calendar-as long as you all realise I am being ironic and us Brits have a strange sense of humour, here is a link to a roundabouts of Britain calendar which could be a model.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/features/swindon_roundabouts_calendar.shtml
Scroll down a little then use the button to flip through the photos. We could have mugs and T shirts as well…Perhaps it might be best to wait until after the judging…
TonyB
A pocket sized weekly daytimer calendar would be great. There are way too many surface stations reporting a 5+ degree error to fit into a 12 month calendar.
Plus, people could carry their weekly daytimer/scheduler with them and show people the source of GISS data. Maybe this graphic [or one like it] could be on the cover.
Heck, maybe there are even enough surface stations with bad data/bad siting to make up a daily daytimer. And this site could be used to provide a daily/weekly “fact” of all the disasters that global warming supposedly causes.
It might even be a money maker. Plenty of people are now questioning AGW. They’re a growing market.
Smokey
Anyone else interested in a range of sceptical merchandise of some kind? A percentage of the profits to those who supplied the image/ photo/text etc and a percentage to go towards properly funded (albeit very badly) research into a couple of selected areas of sceptical concern. It would also be nice to pay for an adverising link to participating sites with a view to blogs such as this and Climate Audit earning a little money
TonyB
where can you find unadjusted data and data from older stations 60 percent of which has been taken out of giss records?
at giss map, is the data adjusted?
I’m astonished that Green Machine Gore and his band of “experts” have not yet proposed capping all volcanoes, or better still promoting man made eruptions. The latter putting billions of tons of dust particles into the air blocking solar radioation and thereby cooling the earth. Where do people think carbon comes from? Are they blind to the fact that it has always been here and always will be in one form or another? Is the Carbon Cycle not taught anymore in schools? We have not the ability to create matter from nothing nor the ability to destroy matter. It can only be reduced to its purest forms and last time I checked they were all located in the Periodic Table. It may be too difficult of a concept to grasp for most, but humans just happen to be living in a time where speech, writing, and technology are all manifesting themselves at the same time. The realistic facts of the fossil record show that every dominant species from all previous eras are now exctinct. And we too will one day be nothing more than a fossil record posing countless questions to those who may discover our remains.
Well Anthony, my ribs haven’t recovered from last year’s ROFLMAO; so would you please stop it. At my age it hurts. I do like the fact that they moved the barbecue inside though; that was a real divine inspirational improvement.
Happy new year to you !
Are there no scientists among you? Watts is a man with no scientific cred. He’s a weather presenter, not a climatologist; he finds a few bad stations that produce bad data out of the huge number of NASA stations, and thnks the whole NASA thing is wrong. You need to be more intellectual and challenging of hobbyists like Watts.