Maybe they can buy some new thermometers and shelters:
Contact: David Miller FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
202-482-0013 Mar. 3, 2009
202-329-4030 (cell)
NOAA Receives $830 Million Through Recovery Act
The Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will receive $830 million in funds as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The agency will use the funds, equivalent to 20 percent of NOAA’s 2008 budget, for projects that protect life and property and conserve and protect natural resources.
The act provides $230 million for habitat restoration, navigation projects, vessel maintenance, and other activities. An additional $430 million will be dedicated for construction and repair of NOAA facilities, ships and equipment, improvements for weather forecasting and satellite development. A total of $170 million will also be directed for climate modeling activities, including supercomputing procurement and research into climate change.
“Whether providing grants for habitat restoration or issuing contracts for construction and repair of our facilities, these funds will create jobs while advancing our vital mission to the American people,” said Mary Glackin, deputy under secretary for oceans and atmosphere. “We will ensure that the Recovery Act funding is used as effectively as possible and in a manner that will allow for maximum transparency and accountability.”
Department of Commerce agencies receiving one-time funds through the act are required to submit a plan to Congress with specifics on how allocations will be spent within 60 days of the legislation being enacted. Once completed, NOAA’s plan will be available to the public at the Department of Commerce and NOAA Web sites. Requests and applications for funding will be accepted when instructions and rules are posted for specific projects.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was signed into law by President Obama on Feb. 17, 2009. It is an unprecedented effort to jumpstart our economy, create or save millions of jobs, and put a down payment on addressing long-neglected challenges so our country can thrive in the 21st century. The Act is an extraordinary response to promote economic recovery and growth, and includes measures to modernize our nation’s infrastructure, enhance energy independence, expand educational opportunities, preserve and improve affordable health care, provide tax relief, and protect those in greatest need.
NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.
On the Web:
Recovery Act: http://www.recovery.gov
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Gary (09:15:31) : RegEM can infill those missing slats so it looks like it’s time to buy new computers.
ROFLMAO… In a way, I think it already did 😎
“American Reinvestment and Recovery Act” — do you mean The Friday the 13th Federal Government Stimulus Act?
Tom the OBHphobe
Ray,
Thanks, sorry I was not clearer earlier.
I would love to see an experiment set up to check what 19th century temperature readings would have been like without the dense smog that was typical of all cities at the time and was blocking some sunlight. I suspect that it would show that the 19th century was warmer than recorded and thus temperatures haven’t gone up by much since, if at all.
If that turns out to be true it would be a shock to everyone studying climate change. Industrialisation would be exonerated.
Talking of temperature recodings… do we have the global temperature anomaly for February 2009 yet?
Speaking of carbon offsets, while booking a car rental with National, I was offered a chance to purchase carbon credits with my rental. Talk about black holes…
Come on, you know it won’t go for anything useful, not with the current leadership, and “priorities.”
If I were up in the space station, I would be really eager to come back to earth, while they can still afford to do that.
voodoo (10:52:14) :
“…
Translation:
‘For projects that protect the habitat of noxious small creatures at the expense of jobs and prosperity’.”
… like hansen, gore, etc., who aren’t anywhere near as career endangered as they should be?
Speaking of temperature recordings… do we have the global temperature anomaly for 2008 yet?
Paul S (09:18:33) :
“ . . . including supercomputing procurement and research into climate change.”
Maybe they can build a model that works this time. For $170m, I would hope so!
A model with open, standardized, well-commented source code, written by professional code wranglers.
Global warming doesn’t come cheap.
Kinda looks like my barn cupolas. I have two on a 4900 square foot barn that is more than a century old. Slats are missing. Say! I should put a weather thingy in there and report to NOAA!!!!! From the looks of it, I would be in compliance!!!!
Ron de Haan (14:29:44) :
Global warming doesn’t come cheap.
Neither does freedom!
Maybe they DON’T want to upgrade ? Why ? Because by using old equipment in bad locations, there is a need to massage and modify the data to “fix” the errors. And as everyone here knows, that process of “fixing” the data can, and IS, used to push false science.
Anthony: So is the SAMPLING out of spec? Looks like the single day’s data you link to back in 2007 from your three test enclosures is showing quite similar readings and a consistent variation from the “true” temperature.
Of course your chart is based on an entirely different sampling methodology from the historical practice, so while it may highlight imprecision it doesn’t seem to speak to drifts in accuracy yet.
REPLY: In the “normal” sampling by manual thermometers, only two data points are taken. The Tmax and The Tmin. All I’m doing is capturing the Tmax and Tmin for each day for each screen coating type using a datalogger. The next run will capture the drift associated with aging and albedo change. The point is that the surfacestations project has found a wide variety of problems like these related to maintenance, materials, and sighting. These all contribute to drift, offsets, and increased errors. – Anthony
Anthony,
In your response to Ben (12:14:36) you note that “the shelter is out of spec, yet no adjustments are made for that in the data that it measures.”
My question is, how can we adjust the data now without also knowing how much “out of spec” shelters were in the past? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that you have done a fantastic job with the surfacestations project, but an implicit theme in the posts and especially the comments section is that the historical data are somehow without fault. But how do we know that the shelters in the past were adequate? To give one example, during the dust bowl, does anyone really believe that people were going out and regularly wiping down whatever enclosures they had? During the Great Depression, was there regular upkeep on the instruments and shelters? Was the coating used inferior to what it is used today? Just some thoughts. Sorry if you’ve covered this all already. Thanks.
REPLY: From about 1850 to 1900, the shelters varied widely. It was not until the USWB created and deployed that standardized Stevenson Screen that temperature measurement gained a measure of homogeneity nationwide. RWO followed. Maintenance and placement/encroachment has been the issue since then. There are no records of such issues, and thus trying to corect for them is difficult. Except for shading by tress/overgrowth, all other biases are upwards. – Anthony
There was a post here long ago citing accounting studies showing that something like 80% of “green funding” goes to “media services”!!!
It’s much worse than a black hole.
Well if you take just the Tmin and the Tmax daily, you already are in violation of the Nyquist sampling criterion just in the time variable; so you can’t even recover the correct average temperature for even that one station.
And when you get around to combining your false data with the false data fromt he rest of those owl boxes; then you once again are in violation; except this time by orders of magnitude.
So you may get a consistent GISStemp; or HadCRUT or whatever anomalie; but other than that there is no scientific validity to the results of your daily ritual.
And even if you corretced those failings there owuld still be no scientific significance to the answer you come up with; other than inside your Climatology Temple.
George
Don’t forget that the Earmark free spending spree bill contained $140M for “climate data modelling”; no that is not Climate modelling, but climate data modelling; so they are going to make up the data on their Playstations too.
Who said the MMGWCCers didn’t have an economic incentive to keep this racket going.
If a fraction of that money were spent on public education on the science, then they wouldn’t have to waste the rest on “climate data modelling”.
George.
PS; Yes I am all in favor of improved weather forecasting. In the 8 years following the first successful moon landing; the entire cost of the manned moon project had already been saved just in reduced crop losses in the American South East, due to better long range weather forecasting. The weather and communications satellites that made that possible, were only launched because there were men on those ships; so they wanted round the lcock round the globe weather and communications cover.
With an unmanned program; none of that would have been necessary. So I’m in favor of weather research.
Thoughts about surface temperature stations, urban heat sinks, etc. prompted me to dig into regional historic temperature data for the state of Western Australia.
I’ve uploaded the result today at http://www.scribeworks.com.au/temperatures/
From the Australian Met Bureau’s public database on the web, I found 32 cities/towns/outposts with adequate comparative data from ~1900 to ~2000. Some locations show a small drop in average mean maxima and/or minima over the ~100 years. However, I calculate that in the 32 locations across Western Australia the average mean minima and maxima both increased by .53 degrees C over the 100 years.
The average increases from ~1900 to the specific year of 2008 were minima up .36 degrees C and maxima up .74 degrees C. However, the 2008 data history comparisons in the 32 locations are slightly irrelevant because it’s only year and statistically unreliable – albeit recent.
The stats are a bit rough because the Met Bureau only has x number of suitable historic records, inconsistent chronologies of record-keeping, shifts in some surface stations over time, etc, but I think it’s a reasonably accurate calculation of historic temperature trends in most Western Australia towns and cities – well, the best a rank amateur like me can get together from publicly accessible data.
The upward trend will satisfy global warming enthusiasts but I think closer inspection of each location raises various questions. For example, the capital city of Perth (current population 1.5 million) saw the average mean maximum increase by 1.7 degrees C over the hundred years. However, Rottnest Island about 12km off the coast directly west of Perth saw the average mean maximum increase by .5 of one degree. The country town of York, about 100km due east of Perth, saw its average mean maximum increase by 1 degree over the same duration. The weather and prevailing coastal winds are west to east.
It appears that only certain locations in Western Australia are suffering “global warming” and there is an inconsistent trend with the highest maxima increases in either cities or large towns – i.e. heat islands.
Among the 32 locations, three small towns (Balladonia, Wyndham, York) and five large towns/cities (Albany, Bunbury, Busselton, Geraldton, Perth) had max increases of 1 degree or more. About 80% of the state’s population live in these five large towns/cities. The other 24 locations had either decreases in average max or increases less than 1 degree, and the overall increase over 100 years would be quite a bit less than .53 of a degree if the eight hot spots were ignored.
Australia’s hottest town, Marble Bar, saw its mean max fall by .5 of a degree over the hundred years. The average minimum in Perth has fallen over the past 14 years to the lowest level in 100 years (even though the average max is up by 1.7 degrees), totally upsetting the urban heat island theory but illustrating how difficult it is to understand climate trends.
Whatever, I’ve knocked the page together to provide a more direct historic temperature comparison than available on the Met Bureau website for anybody interested in Aussie data. I’m definitely biased after two days of number-crunching and coding, but I think it’s an interesting 100 year comparison of min/max temperatures across the massive state of Western Australia – said by gurus to be on the coalface of global climate change.
George E. Smith (13:58:55) : So you may get a consistent GISStemp; or HadCRUT or whatever anomalie; but other than that there is no scientific validity to the results of your daily ritual.
And even if you corretced those failings there owuld still be no scientific significance to the answer you come up with; other than inside your Climatology Temple.
George, you are coming at this from the idea that the goal is to create a valid data set where there can be none. I think the goal is more to demonstrate the degree of error and the direction. Showing that it can’t be fixed is a feature…