Surfacestations now at 70% of the network surveyed

I have only recently found this site and the associated surfacestations.org, but have found both interesting.
Have you tried any analysis on the data yet? I think I read somewhere that none had yet been attempted. I am very curious to see a 30 year temperature anomaly analysis on stations rated 1-3 verses 4-5 stations. As well as an estimated temperature deviation as a result of the stations poor siting.
G
REPLY: Having reached 70% I’m starting some analysis efforts now in parallel. However I will not be publishing those analyses here (beyond the simple census counts you see above) until the paper being written is accepted by a journal – Anthony

So we’re flipping out over 0.6C of warming in the 20th century as told to us by a surface station network that, from the looks of it, isn’t even accurate to within 2C?
Sounds about right. Hansen and Gore are using the same math banks used to determine who to give home loans to.

The link:
http://www.surfacestations.org
Does not seem to be working…?
REPLY: Works for me, must be a local routing issue. Update: wordpress problem, found and fixed. – Anthony

I imagine John V. is pretty much chomping at the bit by now.
REPLY: He’ll have to wait. If somebody publishes an analysis on the data I’ve gathered, by many journal rules it will preclude publishing there because they have policies to not publish prior published works. I figure that I have the right of first publication. Of course once accepted for publication, I’ll release the data and code so that it can be replicated. – Anthony

This is fantastic news. I can’t wait to see the results.
Thanks everyone.

The UK attempt has gone missing, web site giving 404.
Was here http://www.wacv.co.uk
Anyone know what has happened?
REPLY: Well its a weekend and they’ve had major snowstorms creating infrastructure havoc there. Let’s give it a couple of days. – Anthony

I’m going to assume an average rating of surface stations to be at an error rate of +1.5C, so the .6C of warming currently is modified to -1C, and that we’ve already lost 1C to the fall of the Modern Maximum.
Raging fires in Melbourne aside (my heart goes out to them), the mass of the planet has cooled. Land, oceans, air is all colder.

Anthony, How long until you can click on a specific station on that map and have the referenced picture/data pulled up. That would be a powerful tool for the users of this website to be able to access.

Anthony, your study shoud have been government funded.
Maybe it’s in the stimulus package?

Anthony, you may have some problems publishing in a research journal without co-authors. Damnable practice but it is what it is. However, a scientific magazine would be open to such articles. Besides, us schmucks can read the non-journal articles without paying a subscription price or belonging to the professional organization that controls journal access. The other great thing about magazine articles is that sometimes the publisher will give you an upfront paycheck while you are finishing the article. Do you have potential publishers in mind? You can start feeling them out right now if you haven’t already. There is nothing wrong with putting your bait in the water and let the fish fight over who gets the goody.

On my side, I wouldn’t be surprised if you actually obtain a larger warming trend doing that. Remember that since the beginning of the 20th century, many American cities “de-industrialized” in the sense that many “hot” industrial plants left the cities themselves to go the countryside (because of pollution concerns). Including chemical plants, steel industry, and the like.

So, 70% of stationed are surveyed, of those nearly 80% have an error potential of >2C.
Even if the remaining 30% are absolutely perfect, CRN 1 class, the majority of stations will be producing inaccurate data.
Time for that $140million to be spent on updating the existing stations and applying good correction factors to data already supplied by them.

My feeling is that when all stations are accounted for, all data collected and evaluated, the results will very likely embarass those responsible for running the stations and collecting climate data.
There are just so many 4 and 5 rated stations. It’s as sloppy measurement as you can get.

hmmm…i havent had time to read all of the other posts so forgive me if its been repeated but….it seems to me that alot of these stations are rated “poor” quality or even “worst”….and this is who we trust to keep weather data when they cant even keep their instruments calibrated to within a degree.

Evanjones:
Remember that a heat sink not only exaggerates a warming trend, but likewise exaggerates a cooling trend (as the effect “undoes” itself).
Not so fast there. I’m no expert, but a lot of those “heat sinks” are also absorbing solar energy. They’re warmer when it’s warmer, but they’re also warmer when it’s cooler if there’s sun out.
So, it’s not exatly likewise. At night, they’ll get colder and stay cold for while, but the sun will quickly obviate that, I think, in many cases.
I’m actually rather amazed at the effect of solar heat sinks. I used to live in a little row house in a Midwestern city. It had a great garden in back due to buying a ramshackle house behind it and tearing it down. In any case, this garden would stay green late into fall/early winter. I’d harvest sage in January and parsley in December. Then, in late winter I’d get the spring flowers blooming before anyone else. Why?
Well, in addition to a nice south face, and a few dark rocks in the garden, there was a large black top parking lot directly to the west and a bit north, and then there was another larger one one more block to west.
That thermal mass never made it any cooler during the winter.
Mark

Flanagan (22:38:57) :
On my side, I wouldn’t be surprised if you actually obtain a larger warming trend doing that. Remember that since the beginning of the 20th century, many American cities “de-industrialized” in the sense that many “hot” industrial plants left the cities themselves to go the countryside (because of pollution concerns). Including chemical plants, steel industry, and the like.
I have to disagree. This isn’t a study of urban heat island effect. This is about siting issues. In fact, your explanation would probably increase the trend. If you use rural stations to calculate UHI of the non-rural stations, and the the rural stations are warmer because of industrialization, then the rural staion isn’t going to allow a good calcuation of the UHI.

Anthony,
Regardless of disagreements we have had in the past, you’ve accomplished quite a feat crowdsourcing surface station ratings and gathering everything together. It will be interesting to see how the analysis pans out, though I suspect that unless there was an obvious bias in early station survey choice the results will be similar to the earlier effort: http://www.opentemp.org/_results/20071011_CRN123R/crn123r_gistemp_5yr.png.
I’d also suggest potentially bringing on JohnV as a coauthor. Your differing opinions on climate science would help legitimize the objectivity of the end-result (though, peer review and transparency of methods helps as well).
REPLY: Zeke, thank you for the recognition. While you do raise an interesting suggestion, I’ll point out that JohnV never so much as bothered to contact me before writing his code and releasing his very first results using only a handful of stations. Later I did some discussion with him, via Climate Audit, and the result you reference above is a result of that but uses only 17 CRN1/2 stations with poor spatial distribution. That you see his very initial effort, sans any early collaboration in the design or even courtesy notice to me to say that he was doing the project, as somehow legitimizing my own effort now speaks to your own bias. If you visit opentemp.org and type in my name in the search box in various ways, you won’t find it mentioned there, which seems a poor way of providing attribution for the work upon which his was predicated.
As I’ve pointed out many times, if I had done an analysis at that stage, in late summer 2007, with so little coverage and poor distribution, and found a significant difference that went the opposite way of JohnV’s finding’s, you and many others would be all over me crying “foul” and pointing out why my effort was flawed and premature.
Yet JohnV did exactly that, and not only is his work held up as an example of why the surfacestations effort itself was flawed in many of the forums you frequent, including your own (and I’ll point out that you also didn’t bother to even contact me before writing your own opinion on the project, an objective reporter gets both sides first), but JohnV gets a “free pass” for publishing an analysis prematurely.
But instead of doing a premature analysis, I’ve kept at the task of data gathering, and only published updates of the census data and distribution, while highlighting interesting issues with stations. JohnV’s opentemp effort appears to have no updates since late 2007. At this point I have no idea what the analysis will show on national or regional scales. Does siting matter on a national scale? I think so, but I’m not excluding the possibility that it does not once the data is appropriately filtered. We’ll find out.
Had this been a funded project from the outset, few people would even know about it, but making this an all volunteer effort, the only way to make it happen is to keep it visible. I’ve taken a fair amount of flak for that, but given that NOAA, NWS, NCDC, and GISS have not taken on this task of quality control evaluation of siting, I think the fact that we’ve been able to get as far as we have means that I made the right choice.
Besides, as Even points out, the issue is more complex than just comparing stations due to regional trends. Opentemp may have some useful tools, but the way it was presented at outset certainly didn’t lend itself to collaboration later. I won’t rule out the possibility of using opentemp for some portion of the analysis, but collaboration probably isn’t in the cards without some public fence mending.
I will say though that your suggestion legitimizes the effort, having gone from early vocal complaints of “pictures don’t matter” to now suggestions of collaboration with an early critic, points to the recognition that maybe pictures matter after all.
Anthony Watts

evanjones: “Then there is the issue of raw vs. adjusted data.”
I have been round and round trying to locate “RAW” data.
I checked out WUWT & CA Resources links.
I checked out Craig Ipso’s CO2Science climate data.
There is a data set that is “raw + USHCN adjusted”.
Every data set was raw + something.
And none matched the B91 handwritten observer forms.
Anthony, what data set(s) are you using for your study?

zeke.
Since you followed JohnVs work on Crn123, you should have followed my work on CRN45? So what did I show about CRN45? and why did JohnV agree with it? It strikes me as Odd that the early work done my JohnV and me has receieved such uneven coverage. Basically I found and JohnV confirmed that CRN45 stations had warming trends higher than CRN123.

This is a great accomplishment. Any macro environmental studies, and their accompanying conclusions, have to start with good data otherwise their conclusions are flawed. Garbage in, garbage out. Everyone involved in these surveys deserve a pat on the back.

Anthony,
JohnV’s analysis (posted above) used 62 CRN123 rural stations with a reasonably comprehensive geographic distribution (http://www.opentemp.org/_results/20071011_CRN123R/map_crn123r.png). That said, there is certainly the possibility that the analysis may change now that more data is available. My hunch is that it will not, but part of the fun of science is being proven wrong.
I do (and have) apologized in hindsight for not emailing you when writing up that story in October ’07. My only concern with the project early on was statements by you and others involved that seemed to imply that siting problems in individual stations implied that the overall GISS reconstruction for the U.S. was seriously flawed, with no analysis at the time to back it up. JohnV presented the first thorough analysis of the data collected, and his preliminary conclusions were interesting (though, admittedly, they only relied on 34 percent of all stations).
OpenTemp itself seemed to be created out of a legitimate interest in creating a transparent easy to use analysis tool for the Climate Audit community, and a number of other folks (mosh among them) used it for various things. It is a shame that it was discontinued, though real life does have a habit of getting in the way of our hobbies. It might be interesting to revive it or create something similar for your analysis, so that others can use the tool to perform various tests. For example, if will be interesting to look into why CRN45 stations trend higher than CRN123, and if that is confined to urban areas or extends to rural as well (which will hopefully tell us a bit about UHI!). An open source independent reconstruction of surface temperature will be a great resource (given the mess that is GISS code) for use by everyone, and now that the data is finally to the point at which you feel that it is ready to analyze, it would be a shame for a useful tool to go to waste.