UPDATE: the question has arisen about “occupied” aka “manned” weather stations in Antarctica (Stevenson Screens etc) versus the Automated Weather Stations. This picture on a postage stamp from Australia, celebrating the Australian Antarctic Territory in 1997, may help settle the issue. Note the Stevenson Screen near the “living pod” on the right.
Here is the larger photo of the first day of issue card, the Stevenson Screen is also just visible above the snowbank in the lower right. Rather close to human habitation I’d say. Looks like its in the middle of an AHI (Antarctic Heat Island).
Here’s another picture of a Stevenson Screen close to a building in Antarctica, from the British Antarctic Survey:
![[10004058]](http://www.photo.antarctica.ac.uk/external/guest/image/water/70/10004058)
Location: Fossil Bluff, Alexander Island
Season: 1994/1995
Photographer: Pete Bucktrout
It seems that folks are all “wild about Harry” over at Climate Audit, with the revelations occurring there, and no good kerfluffle would be complete without some pictures of the weather stations in question. It seems a weather station used in the Steig Antarctic study , aka “Harry”, got buried under snow and also got confused with another station, Gill, in the dataset. As Steve McIntyre writes:
Gill is located on the Ross Ice Shelf at 79.92S 178.59W 25M and is completely unrelated to Harry. The 2005 inspection report observes:
2 February 2005 – Site visited. Site was difficult to locate by air; was finally found by scanning the horizon with binoculars. Station moved 3.8 nautical miles from the previous GPS position. The lower delta temperature sensor was buried .63 meters in the snow. The boom sensor was raised to 3.84 m above the surface from 1.57 m above the surface. Station was found in good working condition.
I didn’t see any discussion in Steig et al on allowing for the effect of burying sensors in the snow on data homogeneity.
The difference between “old” Harry and “new” Harry can now be explained. “Old” Harry was actually “Gill”, but, at least, even if mis-identified, it was only one series. “New” Harry is a splice of Harry into Gill – when Harry met Gill, the two became one, as it were.
Considered by itself, Gill has a slightly negative trend from 1987 to 2002. The big trend in “New Harry” arises entirely from the impact of splicing the two data sets together. It’s a mess.
So not only is there a splice error, but the data itself may have been biased by snow burial.
Why is the snow burying important? Well, as anyone skilled in cold weather survival can tell you, snow makes an excellent insulator and an excellent reflector. Snow’s trapped air insulative properties is why building a snow cave to survive in is a good idea. So is it any wonder then that a snowdrift buried temperature sensor, or a temperature sensor being lowered to near the surface by rising snow, would not read the temperature of the free near surface atmosphere accurately?
As I’ve always said, getting accurate weather station data is all about siting and how the sensors are affected by microclimate issues. Pictures help tell the story.
Here’s “Harry” prior to being dug out in 2006 and after:
Harry AWS, 2006 – Upon Arrival – Click to enlarge.
Harry AWS, 2006 – After digging out – Click to enlarge.
You can see “Harry’s Facebook Page” here at the University of Wisconsin
It seems digging out weather stations is a regular pastime in Antarctica, so data issues with snow burial of AWS sensors may be more than just about “Harry”. It seems Theresa (Harry’s nearby sister) and Halley VI also have been dug out and the process documented. With this being such a regular occurrence, and easily found within a few minutes of Googling by me, you’d think somebody with Steig et al or the Nature peer reviewers would have looked into this and the effect on the data that Steve McIntyre has so eloquently pointed out.
Here’s more on the snow burial issue from Antarctic bloggers:
The map showing Automated Weather Stations in
Antarctica:
Click map for a larger image
The Gill AWS in question.
From Polartrec
Theresa was placed at this location partly to
study the air flow in the region. Looking out the window of the plane we can
definitely see the air flowing!!! Jim estimates the wind at about 25 miles per
hour.
Wind blown snow at Theresa
With the temperature around 0F the wind chill
was about 20 below, it is obvious this is going to be quite a chore.
Starting to dig out Theresa
The weather station has not been working, so
George needs to figure out what is wrong with it and then fix it. The station is
almost buried in the snow so we will also need to remove all of the electronics,
add a tower section and then raise and bolt all of the electronics and sensors
back in place.
George unhooking the cables.
After refueling the plane, with the fuel in
the 55 gallon drums, Jim and Louie helped dig down to the electronics boxes that
were completely buried plus they built us a wind break that made huge difference
in helping us not be so cold. After about 4 hours we are almost through. As I am
hanging onto the top of the raised tower in the wind, one bunny boot wedged onto
the tower bracing, the other boot wrapped around the tower, one elbow gripping
the tower, my chin trying to hold the wind sensor in place and both bare numb
hands trying to thread a nut onto the spinning wind sensor I really appreciate
the difficulty of what is normally Jonathan’s job. After checking to make sure
Theresa is transmitting weather data we board the plane and head to Briana our
second station.
Notice the difference between this
picture and the first one of Theresa.
From Antarctic Diary
More movement
It’s been another flat-out week. The vehicle team have dug
up and moved the Drewery building, which was getting do buried snow was
almost up the windows. Team Met have been on the move too – all the
remaining instruments are now bolted securely to the Laws roof, so we headed
up the the Halley VI building site to relocate the weather station.
Jules starts digging out the weather station
Only 15km away, the Halley VI site looks a lot like Halley V. It’s flat,
white and snowy. Very snowy. The weather station had about 1.5m built up
around it!
Jules and Simon recovering the solar panel
In the hole!
The weather station was a survey reference point for the build project so we
had to find a suitable replacement. Could this be Antarctica’s first
pole-dancing venue?
Penguin Party memories…
After an hour or so sweating it our with shovels, the weather station popped
out and was loaded onto the sledge. Like the reference point, the station’s
new location had to be precise as vehicles are banned from the upwind
section of the site to keep that area ultra-clean for future snow-chemistry
experiments.
Weather station on the move
Driving on a compass bearing and GPS track, we found the new site just under
a kilometre away.
The final setup
UPDATE: here’s another buried station story from Bob’s Adventures in cold climes. Apparently this station is used as a reference for some sort of borehole project.
I dig weather stations
My main task for today was to get a start on raising my weather station. I’d installed it 2 years ago, and with the high accumulation at Summit, it’s getting buried. The electronics are all in a box under the snow, and the only things visible at the surface were the anemometer for measuring wind speed and direction, the thermistor for measuring air temperature, and the solar panel to keep the batteries charged.
The buried weather station. The flat green bit is the solar panel, which was about 1.5 meters off the surface when I installed the station. Can you guess why I would mount it facing down?
In the morning I downloaded all the data from the station, and checked to see that it was all in order. Then it was time for digging. I’d carefully made a diagram when I inastalled the station, so I knew exactly where to dig. A couple of hours later I’d found my box!
At the bottom of the pit with the datalogger electronics.
I brought everything up to the surface, and then was about to fill in the pit, when I realized at least one more scientist at Summit might want to make measurements in it; the pit’s already dug! So tomorrow I’ll help Lora with some conductivity measurements, then fill in the pit, re-bury the box just beneath the surface, and it’ll be ready to go for another 2 years!
And there’s more….
The Australians seem to have AWS problems as well. From the Australian Antarctic Division:
On Monday two groups headed out, with Largy and Denis going up to the skiway to check on the condition of the equipment stored there for the winter and beginning preparations for the coming summer flying season.
Bill, Brian and Ian went up to the Lanyon Junction Automatic Weather Station (AWS) to check its condition and retrieve some of the sensors in preparation for the annual servicing of the various remote units.
|
|
And the University of Maine, participating in USITASE, has the same troubles, they write:
We reached our first major destination at the end of today’s travel, the site of the Nico weather station. There are several automatic weather stations spread out over the surface of Antarctica. These stations measure things like temperature, wind speed and wind direction and then relay this data back to scientists via satellite. Anything left on the surface of the snow will eventually be drifted in and buried by blowing snow. This particular weather station (NICO) has not been seen in several years. They tried to locate it via airplane a few years ago and were unsuccessful. Our task was to find the weather station, record its position with GPS, and mark the location with flags so that in the near future, the weather station can be raised and serviced.
We arrived at the coordinates of the station around 10 pm. Our initial scans of the horizon were not productive, so Matthew and John took the lead tractor (with our crevasse-detecting radar) out to survey a grid near our stopping point. The radar should detect a large metal object like a weather station, but the survey was also unsuccessful. After a fine pasta and tomato sauce dinner, John went outside for an evening constitutional. He saw a shiny object out in the distance – further inspection with a pair of binoculars determined that it was the top of the NICO weather station! Several of us marched out to the station, which was actually about a half mile distant, marked the location with bright orange flags and recorded the position via GPS for future reference. Only the top foot or two of the station was still visible. John was in exactly the right place at the right time to see a reflection from this object while we were near the kitchen module, and so allowed us to complete our first task successfully.
Tomorrow, we drive on.
This regular burial and digging out of stations brings the whole network of AWS stations to be used as sensitive climate measurement stations into question.
Sorry, whenever I tried to embed a link here, strange things happen.
However, the provides much more details.
should read: the U wisconsing AWS ftp site “ftp://amrc.ssec.wisc.edu/pub/aws/10min/rdr” provides much more details.
REPLY: You are making this too hard on yourself. Just type in the loink or paste it, WordPress will figure out the rest. Goin to lengths to put it in code only makes trouble. For example:
ftp://amrc.ssec.wisc.edu/pub/aws/10min/rdr
and
http://www.wattsupwiththat
were simply type in as you see them above, except that I did not put http:// before the www in the WUWT link, WordPress figures this out too. Voila! instant link upon pressing the submit button. – Anthony
George E. Smith (11:15:11) :
Wow, a lot of info there. I’ve occasionally wondered how people deal with growing some of those crystals. Drawn silicon crystals seem so much easier by comparison.
Perhaps you were combing memories looking for cold vapor deposition and didn’t check the hot corner.
gary gulrud (07:27:18) :
“sceptics’ reservations over Antarctic temperature measurement seem a trifle ad hoc,”
Does this seem like cognitive dissonance, anyone? The issue here is a paper using WA stations with frequent gaps, one cause here illustrated, is interpolated and then used to replace EA data regarded as relatively reliable.
What part of ‘incorrigible’ do you not understand?
You left out the bit about having errors with order of magnitude of degrees and then becoming panicky over variations of 1/10 degree in the fictional composite from the erroneous data from the compromised thermometers.
But yeah, I can live with ‘incorrigible’… nice summation.
Brendan H (23:24:08) :
EM Smith: “A sudden and unexpected report of ’something changed’.”
Any major change will attract comment. However, sceptics’ reservations over Antarctic temperature measurement seem a trifle ad hoc, given the previous acceptance of the temperature record, and slightly off target, given that the new assessment also depends on satellite measurements.
Ad hoc? Certainly. We’re watching science unfold in real time. Messy. Ad Hoc. Vital and very interesting! This is how science ought to be, with a sense of wonder and discovery. Yes, I previously accepted the antarctic data too. And as of right now if a “new” study came out showing Antarctic cooling by 1 or 2 C I would reject it out of hand until the thermometer issues was resolved.
Reliance on satellites? I’d call it a something else. We take satellites (that have their own issues) data then modify them based on land stations (that we just found “have issues”). The result is the union of both error sets. That pollutes the whole thing no matter if the result shows warming or cooling.
And that’s what science is all about: studies, debates, more studies, all very productive. The other interesting aspect of this event is that we’re possibly seeing in real time the process of convergence as a scientific theory evolves.
On this, we can completely agree.
jarhead (17:03:23) :
I agree: you will get rather similar results for the South Pole/Scott Base data, I believe, and indeed for many if not most of the stations with long-term data records. The SP downward trend was presented here (and has been on other blogs), without any comment on its statistical significance, as ‘evidence’ of the Steig findings being unsound. I therefore referred to the Vostok upward trend with the same absence of qualification. I observed a long way up this thread that the Antarctic data is hardly satisfactory. (My first comment on this matter was: “Your links show a negative trend for the South Pole. That is exactly what the Steig paper reported! One station does not tell us the temperature trend for an entire continent – have a look at Vostok data, for example, which has a positive trend for the same period.” Steig et al does illustrate both the SP negative and Vostok positive trends, but without comment upon their separate significance).
George E. Smith (16:16:49) :
“So why the heavy emphasis on statistics?
George; who just wants to know”.
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/02/antarctic-warming.html
“Whew! Finally we had proof that Antarctica as a whole was warming, and not cooling, after all. Global warming really was global now”.
Anthony,
looking out for some possible Antarctic BBQ effect, you might like this one:
http://www.gdargaud.net/Antarctica/WinterDC3.html
Realitycheck:
“In the case of an igloo, there is a sizeable air cavity – is it not the air cavity that provides the insulation rather than the snow itself? The same theory with a duvet – it is the air gaps between fibers that provide for the insulation, not the fibers themselves.”
Snow IS mostly air, about 80 % by volume when loose and about 60% when packed – thats why it is a good insulator.
“In the case of a buried thermometer, I am assuming snow is in contact with the sensor and any air cavities are significantly smaller (basically the small air bubbles between each snow flake which of course would compact as more snow accumulated on top). I definitely accept that some minor heat will be released from the sensor, but in contact with snow, I wonder if that excess heat would be detectable as most of it would be used up in some minor local melting of contacting snow rather than in a discernible increase in temperature at the sensor. Its not like the sensor is in an igloo – it is in contact with the snow.”
I don’t think you realize how cold it is in Antarctica. It would take one helluva heat source to cause even local melting, but not very much to raise the temperature of a sensor from say 50 to 40 below, since it will be well insulated by all that packed snow that is still 60% air space by volume.
Wolfgang Flamme (07:52:36)
Yes, very interesting commentary. There’s a heated anmometer set. Then there are the reported problems with the AWS data.
“Another part of the problem is that the data is very dirty: it relies on very old satellite protocols and errors creep into the messages by the truckload (about one message out of two has errors). The AMRC is supposed to clean the data but they seem to have stopped doing that a few years ago.”
http://www.gdargaud.net/Antarctica/WinterDC3.html
Well just yesterday at lunch, I was sitting in the local Starbucks, sipping my daily post lunch coffee de jour (it’s even cheaper than at Dennys, and better too), and working on the daily Soduko puzzle; in walks a young (relative to me) lady, that only an hour earlier I had been searching for in her department (at the firm), because somebody had told me she was a Physicist; so I wanted to hit her up for some words of wisdom on phase diagrams. We had chatted at the coffee pot before, and she seemed pretty smart to me; even though she may be a Cal grad, or perhaps Stanford. I’m betting she has a PhD.
Well dang it; she professes to not being a Physicist the way she sees it; strike one !
Well she’s a “Materials Scientist”. Lucky me, so I smacked that one clear over the center field fence.
“We are known for being able to understand Phase diagrams”; quoth she, “And I’ll bet you have the entire Iron/Carbon Binary Phase diagram committed to memory.” she followed up with. Ah ! she has a nice sense of humor too. I admitted to being an expert on the Gold/Silver diagram.
So we hiked back to the plant together sipping on our Starbucks, and chattering about how CO2 snow can’t possibly form at Vostok Station, or at the South Pole; Phil and Ric have disabused me of that idiocy. So I have the GPS co-ordinates of her Cube committed to memory, and plan to extract some further wisdom from her in the future. We never had “Materials Scientists” when I went to University. There were Mathematicians; Physicists (applied mathematicians), and Chemists (applied Physicists); and then the biological sciences.
I’m acutely aware that one of the books mysteriously missing from my library, is that wonderful two volume tome; “The Composition of Binary Alloys.” Maybe it’s Constitution rather than Composition; and I’ve wracked my brain trying to figure out how and when I came to lose that from my library; but I haven’t seen it in several years.
If you have it; hang on to it; it’s a mine of information.
George E. Smith (13:07:49) :
Definitely a scene that doesn’t happen on primetime TV.
Next week, buy her the coffee, maybe she’ll lend you her copy of Binary Alloys.
Actually I was referring to the annotation in this screenshot (upper right):
http://www.gdargaud.net/Antarctica/Graphs/ConcordiAWSday2.png
Discussions with the Engineer friend who does robotics resulted in this idea:
Make a tower base with 3 or 4 ‘snow screw anchors’ of about, for example, 4 m long. Screw them about 2 m in the snow. Wait. When snow approaches top, motors drive the screw anchors out of the snow to the 1/2 way (2 m) point. Wait. Repeat.
Requires snow top sensors, motor driven snow anchor ‘feet’, battery, charger, controller package, level sensor, ‘stuck screw’ sensors. Snow screw anchor feet & motors need to be sized to the weights and loads of the tower package with enough strength to avoid bending when ‘screwing in’ or under load.
Simple. Elegant. Fairly easy.
Oh, and the guy wires ‘pay out’ from winches proportional to height.
Brendan H (23:24:08) :
Whatever, the report is sure to generate further study, especially since some other climate scientists have expressed reservations over the findings. And that’s what science is all about: studies, debates, more studies, all very productive.
The other interesting aspect of this event is that we’re possibly seeing in real time the process of convergence as a scientific theory evolves.
True, science dances into knowledge, one step forward two steps sideways etc., true of any scientific discipline.
BUT let us not lose sight that what should have been a measured debate between scientists has become a big clobbering stick used by politicians to stampede the world governments into disastrous energy policies, and pyramid schemes that will make some people very rich while the hoi polloi will be getting poorer and poorer if not dying off like flies.
“Children icely nicely” is really not the issue.
“” Ric Werme (15:00:47) :
George E. Smith (13:07:49) :
Definitely a scene that doesn’t happen on primetime TV.
Next week, buy her the coffee, maybe she’ll lend you her copy of Binary Alloys. “”
Ric, it turns out she doesn’t havea copy of “The Constitution of Binary Alloys.”; I would almost bet she’s never seen a copy.
But she soon will; I ordered a used copy (2nd Edition) from Amazon, and also the First Supplement; so in about two weeks I will have it in my library again.
It turns out, that we have outsourced so much of our work to “overseas” and lost so many technical people to attrition and “work force management” that we don’t have a lot of people who seem to know much basic stuff any more. Everybody knows how to Google; but there are few around here that could hold a conversation with sticks on a desert island sandy beach.
And by the way; to Phil, thanks for posting the Shakespeare text of “Sylvia”. I’m not surprised to find its origin.
I was never a Shakespeare fan at school; well English was the only foreign language I ever studied, and it was mostly literature, which bored the hell out of me. But I know I have seen Othello on the stage, and pretty sure I have seen no other of the plays. What a loss.
But I’m probably the only person on this planet, who ever read the entire eight volumes of “The Prose Works of Richard Wagner.” A couple of years ago, I mentioned that on a Sailing website, and a friend at the UofA went into the Library, and found that the Library Cards for those books were still in the back of the books, and still had my signatures on them from the 1960 era. They had been so little read, that the library staff hadn’t gotten around to inputting them into their computer data base. Two of the volumes had no other signatures but mine; either before or since I read them.
She flogged the Library cards out of the whole set, and sent them to me.
George
Anna v: “…what should have been a measured debate between scientists has become a big clobbering stick used by politicians…”
Well, scientists can become quite passionate in debate. However, the IPCC has warned of the risks to humans of climate change arising from the continued emission of greenhouse gases, and politicians have a responsibility to take these warnings seriously.
Given the tardy record of politicians in this matter, I’d say that they would rather ignore the problem. Their primary concern is the interests of their own territory, which very often overrule the wider interest, as we are now seeing with moves towards trade protectionism.
“…some people very rich while the hoi polloi will be getting poorer and poorer if not dying off like flies.”
That’s a very alarmist view. I doubt very much that any developed country would accept an economic system where a few became rich while the poor were allowed to die “like flies”.
As for poor countries, the IPCC makes specific mention of the need to provide assistance to poorer countries so they are not disadvantaged by climate change action.
And it may well be that newer technologies would be of great benefit to poorer countries, allowing them to leapfrog past the fossil fuel stage, in the same way that Asian countries were able to quickly industrialise by borrowing western technology and avoiding the development stage.
Brendan,
Isn’t that what the whole political climate change debate is all about. It has very little to do with climate, and virtually nothing to do with catastrophe, but it does have to do with crippling the economies of the developed world.
The old world socialists have seized the trappings of ecology and environmentalism and used that to foster fear among the ignorant.
It used to be that the witch doctors preyed on the fears of the natives, to gain controlling power over them. This evolved into the organised religions of the world which do the same thing, with the Priests demanding allegiance fromt heir flocks.
So the climate scaremongers, ar elittle more than the witchdoctors of primitive tribal voodoo. The worse they picture the coming calamity which they alone predict, the more political control over behavior they obtain.
Now they teach their tripe to our kids in school, so the kids are all brain washed, before they ever get out into the world. They even have young kids committing suicide to avoid the coming climate catastrophe. Little do they know that whatever climate catastrophe may come next, it is highly unlikely to be global warming; far more likely to be an ice age of some sort.
George E Smith: “Isn’t that what the whole political climate change debate is all about. It has very little to do with climate, and virtually nothing to do with catastrophe, but it does have to do with crippling the economies of the developed world.”
I don’t follow your argument. In the political arena the debate is about mitigating climate change. I don’t see anyone suggesting the best way to cripple the economies of developed countries.
In fact, most of the commentators that I read are concerned at preserving our existing civilisation and way of life. Sure, you’ll always get your Luddites and back-to-nature types, but I don’t think they represent the majority of people who are concerned about global warming.
As for witch doctors and voodoo, I think science does a better job of explaining the causes of climate events than witch doctors could offer. One of the reasons I frequent a website like Real Climate is because they offer explanations for the AGW theory in language that is reasonably accessible to the intelligent layman.
Brendan, as a layman you may like the simple, black and white expositions at Real Climate. As an (ex-)scientist I found them sickeningly political, one-sided and intolerably offensive towards any doubts and challenges.
RC is a total travesty of what I believe science is all about – as Feynman put it, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”:
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html
The reason only one side of the story appears at RC is that all other sides are either ruthlessly suppressed or distorted and ridiculed.
Brendan says:
You are naive in the extreme if that is what you see.
I come from the working class, although I am a long way from there now, but there is lots of scepticism about the actual motives of the elites and political classes. They always claim that are trying to help prevent catastrophes all the while ensuring their pockets are full. Perhaps you are an aspiring political animal.
Richard Sharpe: “I come from the working class, although I am a long way from there now, but there is lots of scepticism about the actual motives of the elites and political classes.”
I’m sure there is. But the fact that the working class is or may be sceptical of “elites and political classes” does not necessarily say anything about the motivations of the latter. Moreover, I don’t believe that the elite are any more or less greedy than the working class. The difference is that elites have more opportunity to fill their pockets.
In any case, the thoroughgoing cynicism that you exhibit is ultimately counterproductive. If the “elites and political classes” are indeed thoroughly corrupt, you will have to discount the views of the likes of Christopher Monckton and Senator Inhofe and all those elite sceptical climate scientists.
I think what you might be trying to say is that you will trust some people but not others. If so, we would be on the same page.
Alan Wilkinson: “Brendan, as a layman you may like the simple, black and white expositions at Real Climate. As an (ex-)scientist I found them sickeningly political, one-sided and intolerably offensive towards any doubts and challenges.”
I guess one’s judgement depends on one’s perspective. Many climate sites – pro and con – are heavily political, one-sided and dismissive towards opponents.
But I wasn’t talking about tone, rather about the amount and depth of information about climate.
“If correct, then the paper is not discredited. If incorrect then Gavin/Eric’s credibility becomes zero.”
Have a gander at CA on Harry. As stated above, despite false assertions to the contrary, the data are not available.
‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is not an accreditation of scientific practice. ‘Show all work’ is a minimal requirement. Your delusion is not contagious.
“The article that heads this thread is all about problems with measuring temperatures in the Antarctic. Nothing there about the actual methodology of the study.”
The post associated with this thread clearly acknowledges Mann, Steig 2008, as the context. Many commenters above have had no difficulty ascertaining this fact.
You are obstructing discourse with deliberately obtuse misdirections and misrepresentations of your counterparts’ reasoning.