The surfacestations project has now surveyed over 70% of the USHCN. I keep telling myself that there probably aren’t many surprises left. We’ve seen climate monitoring stations in parking lots, next to parked cars, next to burn barrels, near air conditioners, at airports, at sewage treatment plants, at industrial facilities, in people’s front yards, back yards, side yards, near BBQ grills, on top of telephone poles, on main street, next to houses, attached to houses, next to buildings, and yes even on the rooftops. One was painted blue, one brown, some hardly at all. Some were even found out of compliance in the Alaskan white north. We’ve seen them in the desert, on the DEW line and down under.
In all of those, it was either a Stevenson Screen or an MMTS type shelter, or the occasional Davis Vantage Pro weather station when the observer put in their own equipment. It was all within expectations, equipment-wise.
A couple of days ago, I had an IM conversation with Evan Jones, who has been surveying stations in New York state. A lot of them are hard to pin down. The one on Cortland NY particularly so, since it’s NCDC provided lat lon put in a residential area, but it is actually on top of a building downtown, which just happened to be the local newspaper office: the Cortland Standard. It looks like a place where weird things might happen.
The building has been there awhile, so has the weather station. NCDC gives this as the location:
Location Description: ROOF OF BLDG AT MAIN STREET & TOMPKINS ST WITHIN & 150 FEET S OF PO
Evan had called the newspaper editor and confirmed that indeed, it was on the rooftop.The NCDC equipment list was puzzling, because, well, why would they need a “Data Collection Platform – Other”? if they already had the standard MMTS and rain gauge?
| 2000-04-01 | 2006-09-11 | PRCP | SRG | PRIMARY | STANDARD RAIN GAGE | PRECIPITATION | — | — | COOP SOD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RIVR | ADR | — | ANALOG DIGITAL RECORDER | — | — | ||||
| TEL | DCPO | DATA COLLECTION PLATFORM-OTHER | |||||||
| TEMP | MMTS | PRIMARY | MMTS ELECTRONIC SENSOR | TEMPERATURE | COOP SOD |
I had a hunch about this station, so I asked him: “Is there any possible way you could get a photo of it?”. Being a “can do” sort of guy, Evan hopped a Greyhound bus there from NYC today.
I figured, well, he’ll just get a picture of the MMTS on the rooftop of the newspaper office, nothing we have not seen before.
Then, this evening, I saw this in my email:
and this:
and this:
Umm, its, ah its, uh…another “high quality” member of the US Historical Climatological Network on the roof of the Cortland Standard newspaper office.
Ok here are a few issues:
- On the roof, near chimneys
- Some sort of Amityville Horror shutters turned sorta Stevenson Screen
- Half painted
- Half open, half enclosed
- The MMTS shield is missing some plates, about half
- It is not a standard MMTS screen, it is something else
- Dirty darkened plates on the interior sensor housing
And I’m sure there is more. Here is the aerial view:
Click here for a live interactive view.
The tar roof makes for a nice albedo.
Oddly, NASA GISS modifies the temperatures circa the year 1900:
What we don’t know is what the plot above would look like if this station was properly sited and sheltered. I wonder how many high temperature records for Cortland are actually real or “roofed”? How many warmest overnight low temperature “highest minimum” records were set there because of this siting? We’ll never know.
In defense of the newspaper editor, Mr. Howe, who was kind enough to grant access for photography and reportedly was “puzzled” by the keen interest shown by Evan Jones in this station, he says that he “inherited it when he came to work there 37 years ago”.
37 Years? And in all this time nobody from NOAA/NWS spots this monstrosity of science and does something about it? Oh the shame. The NWS lack of responsibility makes a mockery out of the hard work these dedicated volunteers put in towards maintaining records.
My heart goes out to the volunteers who manned this station, they had no idea. As for the COOP manager of the National Weather Service Office in Binghamton, NY, who is responsible for this station. I’d like to shake your hand, then give you a well deserved smack upside the head and ask: “what were you thinking’?
The only positive thing I can say about this station is that the station stopped reporting to NCDC in December of 2000. The last B91 form from NCDC’s database is here (PDF). Maybe the decision was made to close the station, but the NCDC database didn’t catch up with that until a 9/11 of 2006.
| [ 2006-09-11 ] | 9999-12-31 | 2006-09-11 | NWS | CSSA | 9 | — | INACTIVATE A STATION |
|---|
More than once I have compared this site to the National Enquirer, but in
the best possible way.
When Dr. Barry Marshall first proved that bacteria caused ulcers, it was a
well known scientific fact, one with judicial notice, that ulcers were caused
by stress. Dr. Marshall posted his research on ulcers to many, many
peer reviewed journals. IIRC, 57 journals refused to publish and generally
ignored his work.
The National Enquirer took a look, and published Dr. Marshall’s work. It
was ridiculed. But reality has an odd way of rearing its head. Recently
Dr. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Yes, that is correct,
research published in the National Enquirer resulted in a Nobel Prize.
What we are doing here at WUWT shows remarkable parallels to Dr. Marshall.
Feel free to submit it to NE. I think that would be the single BEST place to
be published. I am sure the NE would like a second Noble Prize citation.
Reed: Thanks.
Evan, I will send a snail mail card to Mr. Howe in a style that should appeal to someone who runs such a nice paper as the Cortland Standard. If you get a chance, go to cortlandstandard dot net and click on Contact Us and then click on and read both parts 1 & 2 of the wedding announcement form. Oh, how I miss living in a charming small town like Cortland.
Frank P., we really enjoyed reading about Dr. Marshall and NE. Thank you for the perspective.
As for trying to figure out a way to keep a moose from wreaking havoc with the weather station I would love to install on my farm, I have been greatly entertained by the splendid products and methods recommended here.
Did you know that grizzlies stink? Both physically and in attitude. It would cost a mint in fermented cherries to keep a griz in one place (the only thing I have that’s heavy enough to put at the other end of his chain is a 2-ton 50’s Mack dump truck, and I rather doubt he’d enjoy jogging along when I need to haul stuff). Canny old moose would see the truck (and bear) going down the road and come over to rub against the weather station…
Realistically, an 8-foot woven wire heavy-gauge fence with 6″d poles set at four feet and sunk down at least a few feet would probably work. It’s what I used for both gardens and the hen yard (had a black bear scramble up and dive over the top once, though, trying to get to the fermented cherries a neighbor had dumped in the hen yard).
A 48″ square enclosure should accommodate a Stevenson screen adequately, right?, probably with just a small reach-through access door. A bit of cross-bracing could be easily climbed for getting inside the enclosure for fussier adjustments (rescuing the cat that got curious…). We get more wind than snow, and I don’t hay that field so that’s not an issue. One thing I would definitely want to measure is wind, but it would be okay to have the gauge up above the wire, wouldn’t it? Is it possible to set up a gauge that can handle being perched on by a golden eagle?
We may well end up moving back up there in a few years if the economy continues to tank. Enjoying the temperate climate of Silicon Valley in the meantime. Wonderful squalls lately, interspersed with bits of blue sky and drizzle. There was a huge rainbow fading in and out of intense color for over half an hour this morning. The yellow band matched the ripe lemons in our yard.
Thanks, Sylvia! Will do.
Cortland was a nice town, more so, than, say, Binghamton, which I passed through en route. Even the c. 3 hour wait for the bus was tolerable. Everyone was friendly, and they said hi to people passing by in cars or along the street. It seemed as if everyone knew everyone else. Clean, open, nice old buildings.
Yeah, I live in NYC. The City. But what with internet to break the isolation, I sometimes wonder if the advantages still outweigh the disadvantages. I used to spend summers in a rural environment (a beach), and sometimes miss the open spaces. The summer sky doesn’t make it, though. I crave a brilliant northern winter sky, dominated by Orion, not drowned out by the lights.
Paul Shanahan (03:44:25) : What’s going on with the blinker? Is there any info on the GISS adjustment? I have to say that the adjustment doesn’t make much sense. There could be legit reasons, but I don’t see what. It can’t be adjusting UHI because surely, you would see that kind of adjustment throughout the data.
GISS does not do UHI adjustment. It does “Reference Station Method” adjustment. This assumes that, for example, Lodi knows more about temperatures in San Francisco that San Francisco does. It is a fundamentally broken process that is apply at least 3 to 4 times in a row (at different scalings and to different things – i.e. raw vs infilled vs zonalized…). GISS also toss out lots of data (for reasons that are not at all clear and do not seem rational to me) that then creates more opportunities for RSM to do creative in filling… This is my opinion from having read their computer code in GIStemp. GIStemp pasturized processed data food product has little to do with actual temperatures… IMHO…
Danimals (07:53:10) : I agree in terms of proper setup the site is inadequate. However, could we not assume (aside from the nearby chimney issue) that this device at least gives adequate trends over time, since all the listed shortcomings do not change the possible error between dates of measurments?
One example: You have a nice silver roof. After 20 years, you get it recoated, but decide dark green gravel is prettier. After another 20 years, you get a black tar coat on it due to some leaks. In another 20 years, you get it all redone in silver again to save energy… Think that might cause changes in the recorded temperature “trends”?
Another? You insulate during an energy crisis and cut heat loss through the roof by 80%… Another? When re-roofing, you also re-roof the piece of plywood over the “shelter”. Think silver vs green vs ??? and variations of thickness might change radiative heating of the sensor? And does anyone know how often ‘roof maintenance’ was done to the shelter?
Reed Coray (10:32:06) : Anthony, You keep asking: “What were they thinking”? One possible answer is: …
Well, the question has as a premise the unproven assertion of ‘thinking’… IMHO it is better punctuated as: “What? Were they thinking?” 😉
Mark_0454 (11:26:03) : The other thing that strikes me is the graph. Can anyone explain the reason for the GISS lowering of temperatures around 1900? I am new to this and would genuinely be curious about the reasoning.
There is no ‘reasoning’. The GIStemp code adjusts temperatures based on what ‘nearby’ stations are doing. They can be 1000 km away and still be ‘nearby’. They can be in completely different climate zones and still be a ‘reference station’. And what’s even more fun, the last 10 years or so is used to compute an ‘offset’ that is then used to adjust all past data… So your 1900 data here can be changed because the thermometer was upgraded at a site 600 miles away in July 2000. Yes, it is that bad.
john peters (15:02:20) : So let me get this right! The site has not been reporting for almost 7 years now.
It is still important to know what the equipment is today since that tells us how bad the data are from when it was reporting…
Plus, why not publish the standards for siting equipment back in the 1880’s when the station was put in? Also, why not publish the fact that rooftop sitings up to a certain period of time were allowable
One would hope that when problems were discovered such that the standard was changed to forbid a practice, that the extant equipment would be brought in line with that new standard rather then left reporting broken data; this report shows otherwise (and thus brings the whole temperature record into question and with it the averages and with that the thesis of AGW…) I’m also fairly certain that the electric thermometer equipment was not installed in 1880…
All the data it recorded as part of the USHCN is part of the permanent record.
Sylvia (11:34:54) and others:
Some weather stations out in the wilds you can check on. Most have photos. Some do not. What used to be the US Soil Service is now NRCS – National Resources Conservation Service. In Washington State and other places they monitor weather, especially snow including its water equivalent. Snow and melting glacier ice contribute to the irrigation water. Thus, the interest.
Go to: http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/Washington/washington.html
Then chose a station. The first one – Alpine Meadows (908) — is the north most of the two ENE of Seattle on the map. Lat./Long. is given. . Google Earth image is crap for this spot so don’t expect to see anything, but you can see its approximate location.
Can someone explain why NASA GISS summaries say the 10 warmest years have occurred since 1997? I thought McIntyre had found an error in their data?