The USHCN Climate station of record in Milton-Freewater, Oregon. Note the beige smoking stand.
The casual way that NOAA treats quality control of the measurement environment of the surface network has been evident for some time. The above photo is of course just one of many examples. Now before anyone jumps to a conclusion thinking that I’m suggesting heat from cigarettes might affect the temperature reading, let me be clear, I am not.
But a couple of guys hanging around the temperature sensor on a cold day shooting the bull and puffing, maybe. Body heat carried by wind to then nearby MMTS sensor “could” be an issue in making Tmax just a bit higher than it might normally be.
But that is likely swamped by the larger local signal near the temperature sensor –
Click for larger image
– the waste heat from the sewage treatment plant.
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Mike D. and Glenn
What you seem to be calling a barbeque looks like a push spreader for grass seed or fertilizer. This site shows the butt receptical:
http://www.belson.com/scfcr.htm
climatebeagle (20:43:38) : I assume that since historically the ground stations have recorded daily max & min that the monthly average is really (at worst):
No, it’s worse than that…
monthly arithmetic mean of daily (min +max)/2
This is what is done by NOAA. You get an average of min/max over the month. I’ve not swum up stream enough to be certain, but what I think they do is the:
summation(((min+max)/2) for each station over month-days)/#days
Also NOAA applies some corrections (TOB time of day bias for example) and present this to the world. (How to get the data is listed in the comments under the resources tab above).
GIStemp then concatenates this data with the data from Antarctic stations, stirs in a couple of hand rolled sites (where they have special sauce access to data…) and does a merging of the USHCN data from NOAA with the GHCN data (that originally came from NOAA but has a different ‘correction’ history). In an attempt to merge these two disjoint data sets (Gee: Merging disjoint data.. where have I seen that before!) an ‘offset’ is applied to make things line up nice (but only applied when both USHCN and GHCN exist! Which ought to be very often.) as described earlier.
Oh, and there are several steps where chunks of data are tossed out, and a couple where things are filled in if missing… often just after you tossed it out… A lot of smoke and mirrors, IMHO.
Then you get to the anomaly and zonal anomaly stages and finally those zonal anomalies are available to make the One Grand Global Anomaly… Which, IMHO, is absolutely useless.
Much of the historic data was reported with 1F precision AND accuracy. You can not manufacture 0.1C of accuracy out of 1F precision. It’s just a broken idea…
Jeez… Call me picky….. But it would be nice if someone used a set square once in a while ….. That useless rooftoop data station looks like something outta Dr Seuss.
Don’t focus too much on the cigarettes, they are a minor factor compared to the operation of a waste treatment plant.
Typical treatment includes an ‘activated sludge’ process – the tank is like a long open top swimming pool with lots of air injected along the bottom to keep the ‘bugs’ working to digest the influent wastes. I think I found the Milton-Freewater treatment plant on Google map, and it looks like they have two such open-top aeration tanks side by side in the middle of the treatment facility. There is also a clarifier (round open top tank) and probably a settling or carbon filtration pond (also large round open top).
As someone mentioned, the influent waste stream from underground pipes is likely about 55 deg F, and of course you don’t want the ‘bugs’ to get too cold or they stop working. So all that air injected at the bottom of the sludge tanks comes out the top of the tanks at around 50 deg F and saturated with humidity. That concrete ‘wall’ with the metal stairs in Anthony’s first picture looks like the clarifier, so the activated sludge tanks are either behind us in that view, or on the other side of that building. Either way, close enough for all that pre-warmed air from the treatment process to affect the climate station results.
Some treatment facilities might also have an ‘anaerobic’ process (closed and no air injection). Anaerobic process gives off methane, which is then burned to provide the heat to keep the anaerobic process going. Hard to say if Milton-Freewater has one of those, but a larger municipal waste treatment facility might very well have both types of processes.
There is a picture of PRIMARY AERATION TANKS at this link (second picture down). Note the white froth on the surface where the air is bubbling up from below.
http://www.college.ucla.edu/webproject/micro7/studentprojects7/Rader/asludge2.htm
The picture is very clearly a percolating / trickling filter.
This provides the biological treatment.
It is a high rate filter, the concrete and access stairs both look new (cf the more rickety yellow stuff). All of which suggests the treatment has been built recently.
This means it is highly unlikely they also built an activated sludge plant at the same time, so it is highly unlikely there will be aeration tanks.
Trickling filters do give off modest amounts of heat, this particular filter might warm the air by a couple of degrees.
It will give off lots of humidity, as will the primary and secondary settlement tanks.
If the site has a sludge plant it will also have generators and or a flare stack to get rid of the methane, which will produce a significant amount of heat.
Long and the short of it, a sewage works is a completely inappropriate site for measuring temperature of humidity.
kagiso,
I went back to the Google satellite picture, and agree with your comment that it is probably a percolating / trickling filter. So the other ‘tanks’ are probably the settling basins (no aeration), as you describe.
We are in agreement that, with all that liquid surface nearby, “a sewage works is a completely inappropriate site for measuring temperature or humidity”.
That is not a rain gauge. It is a urinal. (KIDDING! ☺ )
Keep up the good spying on the wx stations.
Clive
“Peter (12:03:43) : ….as long as they are always present, they may influence absolute readings but the trends from the data would be unaffected. This whole project to try to discredit sensor placement is a little too “gotcha” and seems aimed at swaying the opinions of the, how shall I put this…less “analytical” among the population”
You need to step back and be more “analytical”. The date that this station was placed there is important. It looks like a fairly modern station. I think you could agree it is less than 150 years old, and that it was placed there less than 150 years ago. The time period under the microscope for AGW believers is the last 150 years. And the temperature increase under that microscope is measured in tenths of a degree. The influence from the surrounding heat sources would skew temperatures upwards and could account for more than those tenths of a degree in this station.
But you say “trends” are still intact. Let’s take a quick look at that :
Skewing of temps would be higher on days when wind blows heat from the wastewater treatment plant directly to the station. Wind is a random variable. Winds cannot be relied upon to follow “trends”. Temps would be skewed higher, and then even higher, in a random pattern. Trends may not stay intact at this station.
This station is just one example of many where temp stations have been placed (I would say in almost all cases unintentionally) near heat sources in the last 150 years.
I still am looking for an explanation for this station :
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/images/Tucson1.jpg
This “project” may be more “analytical” than you had at first thought Peter.
I should have been more detailed but I don’t like to see looong posts (like this one 🙁 ).
But one last thought : in the last few years data shows a cooling “trend” in the earth. So the manmade co2 hypothesis doesn’t work. (data are 😉 )
“Hank (15:00:18) :
As the town grows so does the throughput of waste treatment plant. I would say that the waste treatment plant not only corrupts absolute temperatures but also trends.”
Interesting.
Just want truth… (09:05:25) : “Winds cannot be relied upon to follow “trends”.
Yes they can. These trends are called “prevailing winds.” Most airfields depend on this information to construct runways in the right direction. I would also suspect that most sewage treatment plants are constructed, if possible, downwind of nearby population concentrations.
Winds also affect climate even though these ‘climate history’ installations apparently neither measure nor record it. Worse yet, the climate models don’t even consider winds, or moisture, or clouds, or pressure, or for that matter anything but max/min temperatures. I find that extremely strange.
On this cold February we are focusing on the warming effect of the local environment. However, in the summer that same 55 degree waste stream will cool the area of the plant.
Any trend will be moderated by the constant temperature of the waste water.
Although not a temperature effect the chemicals in the air around a sewage plant are corrosive. After a few years exposed to that smell exposed copper gets a black non-conductive coating.
“Rod Smith (10:16:40) : Yes they can. These trends are called “prevailing winds.” ”
I understand prevailing winds. And I suspected someone would say something about that. That’s why I said “I should have been more detailed”. I didn’t want to add more to that comment because it was so long already.
My point was that winds will carry warmth to that station more on some days than on others within the prevailing winds. Also the winds that will come from other directions on various days will have varying speeds, with no reliable trend. There will not be a constant wind speed. The trend caused by prevailing wind would not correlate well enough with the temperature trend to say the temperature trend at the station would be the same as temperature trend a distance away from the treatment plant.
Looking at the lower photo there is new construction going on too, judging by the reinforcing rods poking up.
E.M. Smith,
Your points are all valid. I just wasn’t willing to wade into them in my earlier response!
🙂
I’m trying to convince myself that there is a better way to construct a global mean temperature (whatever that is) than by abusing already abused time series. I’m thinking instead that one should construct a grid of the actual temperatures, not the anomalies. Using a method like kriging you could generate a grid of the temperature field and also create a matching grid of uncertainty values corresponding to each grid cell temperature estimate.
Peter, you make me smile. Keep the faith!
As a AGW believer years ago, it was my son asking questions that got me digging into the detail. I was surprised by what I saw. I’m not beholden to one answer, I’ll gladly switch sides when I see I’m wrong. AGW theory looks like a castle built on sand. That’s why I read the comments and look for what an AGW beliver says about the lot of sand shown in this post. I was mostly looking forward what Ms. Hinge might have to say – there are times when she’ll provide links to facts that are worth considering.
I’m trying to convince myself that there is a better way to construct a global mean temperature
Take the temperature records from the best locations you have and simply average them.
The main problem with approach is that the locations are a non-random sample, but then any use of existing stations would suffer from the same problem.
IMHO, the whole concept of gridded temperature data is wrong (has no statistical validity). The gridded dataset was originally developed to provide data to validate the climate models. The grid sizes correspond with the precision of the climate models. Or at least they used to.
At last something I can speak on with authority, smoking.
Every experienced smoker knows that external smoking areas must be supplied with a source of heat in cold weather, otherwise we have to smoke three cigarettes at once, two to keep warm and one for the vitamins and other benefits. Hence the placement of the ciggy-end bin right next to the thermometer.
It’s obvious really. We have all been getting colder over the last few years, yet Dr Hansen and his friends tell us it’s actually getting warmer. Where does he get that information? Answer: from thermometers. Therefore it must be the thermometers that are getting hotter. It follows from this that the ashtray must be placed next to the thermometer so that the smokers can warm themselves while doing their duty and ensuring a future flow of tobacco tax revenue.
You scientist chaps just don’t think these things through.
If you were starting with a blank sheet of paper, to measure a property of the surface of a sphere, I would think you would want to measure a specific number of uniformly spaced points on the surface of the sphere and then take an average of them.
For a concept, suppose you were to construct an icosahedron where the surface of the earth was its intersphere. You would then have 20 uniform triangles that touched the surface of the earth at their centroids. Use a satellite to measure those points and average the readings for a weeks time.
I know 20 data points would be a bit slim for a statistically significant sample but you could construct a similar geometric solid with more uniform faces (or multiple icosahedra ) if you needed higher sample counts.
At least that would have some rational plan to it. An icosahedron would give you approximately 15 of the triangular faces centered on an ocean and 5 centered on a land mass.
Larry