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.
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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.
Simon Evans (16:16:21) :
So was snow burial more of an issue in the 1950s or ias it more of an issue now? Let’s accept that getting data from the Antarctic is a tough call. Why the concern about this now, following Steig’s paper which found a warming trend, when there was no concern expressed about it before, when the general meme was that the Antarctic was cooling? Why do you energetically challenge findings that suggest supposed warming whilst uncritically accepting any evidence of supposed cooling?
Simon, there is no concern but every reason to challenge the Steig paper:
1. All data, except the Steig paper indicated cooling.
2. The Steig paper has a toxic background.
These people were also responsible for the famous hockey stick temp.
Quote Anthony: “Co-authors of the paper are David Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., a former student of Steig’s; Scott Rutherford of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I.; Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University; Josefino Comiso of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. The work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.
Anytime Michael Mann gets involved in a paper and something is “deduced” it makes me wary of the veracity of the methodology. Why? Mann can’t even correct simple faults like latitude-longitude errors in data used in previous papers he’s written”.
3. The Steig report was produced for Publicity objectives promoting the AGW doctrine which is a hoax. (as was the hockey stick temp)
4. This site is all about data, correct measurement and debunking false claims.
5. see: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/page/2/
What more arguments do you want.
The next question I have is, will Stieg correct this error?
Will Nature make a retraction?
Perhaps we should just wait until Steig, Mann et al release their data & methods.
I’m not holding my breath.
DaveE.
Horace (17:00:45) :
‘Now if Anthony will do a “site bias” examination of the manned Antarctic stations.
I can’t imagine that at 50 below temps the heating of the buildings, runways, etc. at the manned sites don’t influence the readings. Are the temp sensors on top of the buildings to avoid cover by the snow?
Just a thought . . .
H
Horace,
Take a look at the pictures, read the article and you have the answer to your question.
I had already been having a very good day before reading this post and the comments so far. I am now having a great day.
Huge congratulations, and thanks, to Anthony and Steve McIntyre.
Glorious!
The Amundsen-Scot station chart from GISS might be of interest to WUWT readers. There appears to be a discernable human influence on temperature.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=700890090008&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
This shows a zig-zag pattern from 1957 to about 1977 with a temperature range of about 1 degree. From 1977(?) onwards the amplitude of temperature range dramatically increases up to about 3 degrees C.
Could this reflect human influence from 1977 onwards as station size increased?
Perhaps. According to Wiki the original South Pole station was abandoned in 1975 and moved and replaced with the dome. Additional building was undertaken in the late 1990s. The current station includes three power generators running on JP-8 jet fuel and a green house.
I couldn’t find where the actual weather station is located but I hope its not next to the green house or under a BBQ.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmundsenScott_South_Pole_Station)
Simon Evans, you wrote, “And does it also destroy all claims of falling Antarctic temperatures?”
The SST anomalies for the Southern Ocean have been falling since the mid-1990s.
http://i44.tinypic.com/2uen29u.jpg
If Antarctic temperatures are following those of the ocean that surrounds it, Antarctic land surface temperatures are dropping.
Gary A. (16:45:09) :
Note that they do have batteries and a data logger in most cases, so it it quite possible that they will operate long after the solar panels are covered.
I know this because I designed and now sell a similar AWS solar powered station, which you can see here:
http://www.weathershop.com/WWN_wireless.htm
It will operate up to two weeks or more (depending on data logging and transmit intervals used) on the 36AH gel cell battery in he electronics NEMA enclosure. Most of the time the station draws less than 100 milliamps. Only when transmitting data does it draw larger currents. If they have these Antarctic AWS units set to log data for 24 hours or longer, then transmit, they may very well operate for weeks or months without solar power.
I would assume that being situated in the place of the long Antarctic night, they are designed to do just that. Otherwise they’d all croak in the long night.
“If maintenace of stations has improved over the record period, then one would expect a cooling bias”
I disagree. What you would see is the warming bias decrease.
There is almost no such thing as “cooling bias”. I’ve never heard of a rural cool island….
Anthony & moderators & various article contributors and learned commenters, thank you for such an interesting blog.
Since in the north country of the USA the response to deep snowfall is to raise your satellite dish up a bit, why don’t they use taller towers for the stations in Antarctica? Or, do measurements need to be taken at a specific number of feet above the snow pack, which would mean they are only accurate when conditions comply?
Mr. George E. Smith, you are a gem. If you do end up going to visit Harry, Theresa, et al, email me and I will spin and knit a pair of cashmere (or qiviut if I can get some) mitten liners for you to wear.
When Harry Met Gill? Now that’s quite a match, considering the geographic spread between the two.
So I just had to go check out CA to see what all the fuss was about. Why am I not surprised, Steve McIntyre doing follow-up work on the Steig et al study, which was also covered on WUWT a couple weeks ago. Antarctica warming? An evolution of viewpoint. And while Steve gets the ball rolling on transparently checking out the problem with Harry, the RC group gets all in a hissy fit. Now I wonder why credibility keeps shifting?
Simon,
You asked:
So was snow burial more of an issue in the 1950s or ias it more of an issue now?
I’m puzzling over whether you are a) being argumentative for its own sake or b) if you really envision some process whereby the 1950s era procedures for measuring temperature were subject to the same burial effects as the modern AWS temperature stations are.
In trying to capture the spirit of your argument, I’m envisioning some poor 1950s era chap who plows through the snow on a twice-daily basis to read the thermometer. And I’m trying to see how a thermomter that is read twice daily (one hopes) would get buried in snow over the course of a couple years. I’m just not seeing it happening.
Perhaps there is some documentation from then of folks digging out the monitoring station, while at the same time having taken daily readings. I dunno, seems rather preposterous. Maybe, just maybe, this is associated with unmanned stations that are visited once every couple of years? How long has that been going on, I wonder. One might find that it coincides with the AWS deployment.
Ron de Haan (17:34:17) :
‘Horace,
Take a look at the pictures, read the article and you have the answer to your question.’
Ron –
The pix are all of AWS’s?
H
Good job guys. The pictures are great. It’s easy to see how bad conditions are and how tough it is to try and get it right.
. . . and Steig et al said they relied only a tiny bit on the AWS’s?
Re: P38 rescued from glacier in Greenland:
http://p38assn.org/glacier-girl.htm
And there is NO such thing as a cooling bias. All bias is going to be toward warm, which should be self-evident if you consider how temperature sensors work. Those solar panels create a bias too.
Just finished reading a Scifi book a week or so ago that made the Antarctic a terrible place to visit from its description of the hardships. It’s been interesting reading stuff on these blogs in the interval since that show the author didn’t really do a good job of research – the Antarctic is even worse than described.
Glenn (16:11:19) – It’s obvious the poor AWS has a broken clock when it comes to hours and can’t make the three hourly reports.
Simon (16:16:21) – While I freely admit that many of us skeptical folks read this blog to get an alternate view of what appears to be blindly reported in the media, the real point here is that if one performs a scientific experiment the results of which are expected, it is of little interest other than it fills in a few more decimal points for reference books like the CRC Handbook of Physics. It’s when the results are contradictory that things get interesting. If your experiment has contradictory results, you had better be prepared for, as Harry Truman put it, Heat in the Kitchen. Of course we have two groups of people with widely disparate expectations which inexorably leads to hate and discontent.
Along other lines, I have been contemplating in recent weeks that icon of physics, Albert Einstein, and his General Theory of Relativity which has been tested innumerable times ranging from the 1919 eclipse photos to the implementation of the GPS system (it had to use relativity to correct for being in earth’s gravity well) so obviously the science of relativity is settled, but then it falls apart in the quantum realm, and it fails with the rotation of galaxies (hence dark matter). The end result has been any number of alternate theories.
This has led to the second thing I have been contemplating lately: where does science end and sophism begin? The US Supreme Court Justice who said in relation to a case, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” is of no help; both the skeptics and the believers “know.” Again, hate and discontent. If our tax dollars and life style were not at stake here, it would be an amusing fight to watch.
Having dug in snow to retrieve pipelines, I know firsthand how much warmer it is to stand in a trench in 4 feet of snow than it is to stand on the frigid surface.
Nice. Now we know how good the data has been. How then do the stations in Western Antarctica rate as opposed to the previously colder East?
When they remodeled the data recently, it seems someone forgot to add the minus sign to the modification.
The warming models are getting buried in investigation.
Very good work.
I wondered why the Steig paper is being so heavily promoted and defended. Svensmark has used Antarctic cooling as part of his cosmic ray/climate work.
For the CO2 people it is important that Svensmark’s work is discounted, esp in next IPCC report.
So proving that the Antractic is warming would be a good start.
I tried wading through some of the discussion about this last night or so, both at CA and RealClimate. Other than getting really confused about which data stream goes with which AWS, and RC getting bent out of shape after SM found and reported (on CA) some suspicious data without Emailing GISS about it at the time (these are children who cannot share the same playground!), it’s left me writing incomprehensible sentences.
Let’s try that again. From
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=644#comment-111376
Less clear is:
I haven’t figured out if “occupied” means “manned”, if there are 42 manned stations, if every weather station ever placed around manned stations counts as 1 of the 42 and hence we wouldn’t have 42 continuous traces.
While this article about “subsurface stations” is interesting, we may be barking up the wrong tower.
I don’t have time to wade through all dialog and sniping, I’m behind on a “State of the Climate” presentation I’m writing, but if someone else has time, feel free to post a cogent summary.
Maybe they were expecting these Antarctic stations to be windswept and not get buried?
Richard, you beat me to it. I was just going to say that buried temperature sensors HAS to be the fault of school teachers. HAS to be!
Simon Evans,
you reference the fact that Satellite IR data was used in the paper. Have you bothered to research the “unique” adjustments applied to the data for cloud adjustment??
Have you bothered to check the IR data coverage and dependability BEFORE the “unique” adjustment?
You really should before you continue commenting.
Simon Evans (16:50:03) :
I’m sure you can see my point. The impression is that the obvious limitations in Antarctic data are only challenged if it suits the agenda. If I had posted here before the Steig paper saying that the Antarctic station data was unreliable and that, therefore, the ‘cooling’ was meaningless I fully expect that I would have been howled down. It’s fair enough if people are expressly pursuing one side of the argument, so to speak, but any suggestion of scientific disinterest is hard to swallow.
I’ll take a stab at a fair answer to your comment.
We all, including you, understand how burial in snow would insulate the instrumentation and lead to false-high readings. If you had asserted the cooling data was meaningless with no explanation, yes, we would have howled you down. On the other hand, if you had shown pictures of the instrumentation and provided an explanation of how the setup was biasing the data toward false-low, you’d probably have been congratulated.
Ric Werme,
ask Gavin whether the AWS station data were used to help compute the infill in the “manned” station data. I don’t know, but, SOMETHING has to give the warming and what was available previously could not with standard practices.
Maybe it was the “cloud adjustment” of the IR data??