I know many of you have wondered when I would post an update about the www.surfacestations.org project. That wait is over.
You can now download the PDF of the publication reporting on what the project has found with 70% of the network surveyed, See the link at the end of the article.
I’ve been exceptionally busy in the past few months. Since November 08, I’ve made 4 trips in the US to get more stations surveyed in areas that were lacking, and these trips have been funded entirely by donations from individuals.
Evan Jones and I have been actively working on logging new aerial surveys. Plus there has been a lot of review and quality control taking place to make sure that surveys and ratings are correct. Google imagery has now improved in many places, and it is now fairly easy to spot some stations from the air. To make certain that we’ve actually got the right station location, telephone calls are made to the curator and descriptions and measurements compared to the aerial photos. I also have 4 digital cameras that have been sent to station curators for them to “self survey” with and mail the cameras back.
With additional aerial surveys done plus a few new hands-on surveys that have now come in, we are now at about 79% of the USHCN network surveyed. The sample is large and representative, with good spatial distribution and broad coverage.
The figures below from my Spring 2009 report represent coverage @ 70% of the network surveyed.
See the PDF report below for references on how the surveys were done and how the site rating system was arrived at, based on original work at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) new Climate Reference Network.
For those WUWT readers that want to survey stations, there is still time to do so before my final report is issued in late summer/fall 2009.
My advice is to visit the Surfacestations Gallery and see what stations remain in your state, or states you may be traveling through.
I realize that we’ll never get 100% of the network surveyed, as over 30 stations have been closed, and some are inaccessible, but with a sample size exceeding 80% and broad spatial distribution as shown above I am confident that we’ll have the character of the network quantified and representative. Sure, there will be critics, but with an 80% or more sample size it will be an uphill battle to criticize the sample. Thousands of peer reviewed papers have been written with much smaller sample sizes. I prefer a “brute force” approach to getting the maximum sample possible compared to statistical extrapolation of a small sample.
The push has been on to get as many surveys done as possible, so I haven’t had a lot of time to update web pages and the like. WUWT itself has been becoming a black hole of time, sucking up more time than I care to admit. My email load has become huge also. Just a note to everyone who has emailed me. I read everything, but I can’t always respond, especially when I’m asked to do additional research to answer questions.
I’m also a bit under the gun as like many of you, my business has taken a financial hit due to the economy, and I’m short a person who is out for extended medical leave. So I’ve been doing 4 jobs instead of my usual 2 or three 😉 Even so, progress is being made.
Finally, I want to take a moment to thank Evan Jones, a frequent WUWT commenter and sometimes contributor. Evan has been working tirelessly to help me with this project, and now like many of you, is unemployed thanks to our current economic situation. Even through this, he has worked very hard to help me on all levels, doing everything from hands-on surveys himself, to QC checks, to aerial surveys, to data analysis.
Without Evan, this project would be a lot further behind. Please give him your thanks. He is truly a “screeching mercury monkey, first grade“. Evan, download your patch and wear it proudly.
Sadly, the alternate weekly that coined the phrase is now out of business.
Since Evan suffered the same fate as the alternate weekly editor (unemployed) and still doing a yeoman’s work for this effort, I have an offer for interested readers to help him out.
I have 25 professionally glossy color printed and bound copies of the report which I’ll provide signed, postpaid via US mail, to anyone who wants a copy that donates $30 or more. Just use the PayPal button at right, and I’ll make sure he gets it. (NOTE: SOLD OUT BACK IN STOCK Thanks to everyone who helped!)
For those that just want to read the report, please feel free to download and read the free copy here (PDF, 4 MB).
I also offer my sincere thanks to everyone who has helped make this project go from an idea to now near completion. The data analysis report will determine once and for all if station siting matters or not.
– Anthony
TO ANTHONY OR ANY KNOWLEDGEABLE PERSON
On Surfacestations.org, if a station does not have any pictures linked, does it mean that it is not surveyed. I looked at Stillwater NY, which is close to me and it does not have any photos. If it is not surveyed, I can do so. If “no photos” does not indicate that the station has not been surveyed, could you pls tell me how I can find the un-surveyed stations?
Thanks
11% are within one degree C? Holy crap! Is there any possibility of this getting published?
Congratulations for your work. As a Portuguese, I can only believe that the next step is an international survey!
Ecotretas
Absolutely fabulous report.
It effectively challenges the accuracy of the data sets.
And that’s in the United States.
What about Russia?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, scientists were living off crackers.
And then you had the Russian economic collapse in the late 1990s.
If you think that American data is haphazard, what about Russian data?
And don’t forget – much of the global warming is attributed to North Eurasia.
(Not to mention switching September and October data sets – heh heh.)
Kudos to Anthony, Evan, and scores of volunteers.
And now we can all share a bit in the first harvest of all that hard work.
A must-read for all Congress members and staff.
Anthony
Thought you might be interested in this new report on UHI covered today in a UK newspaper.
I have always been very sceptical of the notion that UHI only accounts for a fraction of a degree rise in temperarure so this latest report confirming the current and likely future impact of uhi therefore makes interesting reading
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6256520.ece
In effect UHI dwarfs the notional impact of co2 and is something that observationally can be felt to happen. As over half the worlds population now live in cities perhaps the city temperature becomes the ‘norm.’
Short of drastically reducing the population and curbing our instinct to cover everything with concrete in order to create homes, jobs and leisure opportunities, it is difficult to see how we can reduce any uhi effect by any appreciable amount in the future.
Tonyb
Anthony, I came across a site that I thought you might like, especially the picture in this link:
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:GHCN_Temperature_Stations_png
I thought it was interesting as a visual record in the whole surface station debate, and highlights the importance of the sites here in this country.
Anthony,
I will plan a trip shortly to cover some of the Colorado sites. I noticed Collbran just got data, and there is Google-based info for Canon City, Cheeseman, Lamar, Manassa, Saguache, and Steamboat Springs. There is no data at all for Del Norte, Durango, and Hemit. If I had to prioritize, would you like me to get the ones with no data first?
Anthony,
Ellen and I are going to Idaho and Montana in the Middle of August. My book on Cobalt Mining in Idaho is hot off the press and we are planning a book tour in the Region and we will be picking up our new dog in Stevensville Montana. We are planning to visit as many of the unsurveyed surface station we can on the western side of the Idaho and Eastern Oregon on our return trip. We have these stations on our list:
FENN RANGER STN Idaho
CHALLIS Idaho Which we missed last time
WALLOWA Oregon
Great job, I’ve just read the report.
Why don’t you produce a Summary for Policymakers instead? 🙂
Google Adsense, Terms of Use:
“Prohibited Uses. You shall not, and shall not authorize or encourage any third party to directly or indirectly generate queries, […] or impressions of or clicks on any Ad. […] You acknowledge that any attempted participation or violation of any of the foregoing is a material breach of this Agreement and that we may pursue any and all applicable legal and equitable remedies against You, including an immediate suspension of Your account or termination of this Agreement, and the pursuit of all available civil or criminal remedies.”
All in all the public promotion of clicking or just clicking too often to a certain Ad from the same IP adress is not adviceable. With this behaviour, we are risking the immediate suspension of Anthony’s Adsense account (!). As far as know it from experienced Hungarian users Google has a very effective surveillance algorithm to ‘filter out’ any efforts like this.
One of the UK’s leading weekly broadsheets, “The Daily Telegraph” has an interesting article about UHI. Apparently the Met Office claim that “urban areas can be several degrees hotter than the countryside”.
Needless to say the “spin” is that this will lead to increased deaths as the clinate warms.
No mention, of course on the effect of UHI on the temperature record!!
Gary Pearse:
Unlike geological data, temperature data show spatial gradients that are by no means constant over time. In fact, the variabilty between simultaneous measurements at neighboring stations is often not very much smaller than the year-to-year variabilty at each station. This, plus the quiltwork of microclimate zones in mountainous areas, is what dooms gridded interpolations and other “homogeneity” adjustments. The real problem is one of sampling from an inhomogenous, time-varying population, with all the travails that ensue therefom. It is best approached sans any preconceived framing, much like sampling rapidly changing political opinions in a diverse, mobile human population.
Anthony,
I would be great if you could post a pin-map of the unsurveyed station. That way volunteers could easily spot something a few hours drive away.
I am interested in doing a thermo-gradient map of an especially unfit USHCN site near my home.
I wonder if anyone is thinking of doing something similar, so we could trade notes.
Also how does one get ahold of the raw USHCN data? I would like to see something to the effect of (Sat. June ?? at 10:00Am the station recorded a temperature of ??F). I could then tie that into my thermo-gradient.
The site I am thinking of is on a south facing slope with an asphalt parking lot within 10 feet of the MMTS.
Anthony Watts:
You should be widely lauded for your enormous effort to bring attention to siting problems that exist at many of the USHCN stations. Regrettably, you can only do that for the present siting and not the past. Yet, it is the past history that frequently determines the suitability of a particular record for analyzing potential climate change. May I suggest that, along with documentation of present conditions, you include meta-data of station moves and instrumentation changes in you rating system. Also, during the surveys, knowledgeable locals should be querried about massive changes in local land-use, crop and irrigation changes etc. that might influence the historical record. Exemplary present siting is by no means a guarantee of an unbiased record of historical development. I’d personally would take an urban record from a fixed station in a no-growth city over a record from a suburban or rural area around which everything has changed dramatically over the decades.
Congratulations Anthony!
I still remember when this whole effort began at Roger Pielke Sr’s climate blog. You were interested in the effect that the condition of the exterior paint on the stevenson screen had on the temperature measurements.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/01/14/a-typical-day-in-the-stevenson-screen-paint-test/
You and Roger knew the implications that poor siting and generally poor condition of climate montioring stations would have on the historical records. The unknown was (up till now) how many of the climate stations were in fact in poor condition or had siting issues. Of course, all of us who frequent WUWT were treated to examples of these stations with the now famous “how not to measure temperature” series.
I also remember that vigorous and vocal resistance you initially encountered with the whole surface stations project! People from all corners of the AGW movement were lambasting you as to the waste of time this was, or that you didn’t know what you were doing. And as you uncovered example after example of lousy surface stations, the critics tried even harder to discourage you and the many volunteers. We now know why…
To this day, I will NEVER understand why certain people at NOAA, NASA, and elsewhere in the global warming movement, who supposedly should be interested in encouraging scientific discovery and inquiry, would have such an irrational and visceral response to the surfacestations project. Maybe you can write an addendum to your report explaining how much resistance you encountered, and from whom…
all the best,
Frank K.
This could well be the most important piece of climate science ever performed. My congratulations also on an outstanding job.
Anthony,
I donated $50, but I don’t need a copy of the report–just wanted to help out. Please make sure Evan gets it. Thanks!
Anne
Looks like things are going well in the surveys. I just checked (at the web site) the location nearest my house, which is at a water treatment plant. The Williamsburg 2N, VA has some Google images and some information supplied by an employee of the plant. I assume they would not allow an observer on site. I also noticed that Google Earth now has much higher resolution images up for the site that probably show the actual temperature instruments. So slow but steady Google improvements may make some of the more inaccessible sites easier to grade.
Is the surface temperature data the same data that is used at the National Climatic Data Center of NOAA.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
I ran the numbers for 1895-2009 (oops i see my trend date was off by 5 years) and they tell me temp. has only gone up by .12 F/decade or 1.2F per century. Is that what IPCC tells us is so worry some and produces the hockey stick type temp graph. I guess it depends on you x and y axis scales.
http://www.nofreewind.com/climate.html
This is terrible! The trend from 1998 to 2008 is -.77 per decade or almost 8 degrees F per century. I PREDICT we are in for a terrible ice age. Ice Scrapers for sale, 80 dollars.
Splendid work!
Is the Fortine, MT, site at the Murphy Lake Ranger Station? I plugged the coordinates from your website into Google maps and it pinpoints an illogical spot in the woods. If the site is actually still at the USFS station, they’re really nice people (and it’s a popular picnic spot with a lovely lake with loons and mergansers and bass…). Betty Holder is the District Ranger listed on the fs.fed.us site. Fortine, Murphy Lake, 12797 U.S. Highway 93 S, Fortine, MT 59918–0116, phone 406–882–4451, fax 406–882–4835. If one of your traveling surveyors is out and about in NW Montana, highway 93 is a beautiful drive, or whoever did your Kalispell or Libby surveys could hop up north. The county fair (with a rodeo!) will be the last week of August and the ranger station is right on the way from Kalispell… I’d do it if I could, but my health doesn’t permit.
I am curious if your final publication will include some comparative analysis with ‘infilling’ NASA numbers and any other ‘corrections’ they have made? Assuming that data is available.
I have also noticed with interest that more than one commenter her has raised the issue of publicity after the publication. I agree and think the impact could be enormous. If this gets picked up by Drudge, Fox and some of the press, this could be enormously damaging to AGW proponents but more importantly on a political level as people may not understand the complexities of science, they are very impacted by images and what they imply. The country is turning more and more away from what they believe is exaggerated warming hype and this would have great potential to complete their growing skepticism. If this were also to include Steve Mc’s experiences with stonewalling and deception by AGW scientist, it could be all over and your work could have been the deal breaker in behalf of and to the benefit of millions. This may appear a bit sensational but at the least, the possibilities are now real. Is there a ‘tipping point’ where the press turns on AGW after feeling manipulated for so many years?
At least on a human level, the plot of a small band of scientist standing up against the establishment and eventually prevailing can be very appealing. Could there be a screenplay here as well?
I have also donated to Evan and hope you can find additional ways over time. We are greatly appreciative of both you and Evan on this project.
Thanks for being there.
Anthony,
A short summary, and a link to the pdf, of your work was just posted at Topix under the global warming forums. That should give it some more exposure [and a lot of snarky comments].
Anthony,
We should send a report to all the members of Congress, the Senate and the Government.
It could prevent a Cap & Trade bill and it could prevent EPA acting on CO2.
This report is a killer.
If a short introduction is made with info about the ice caps, the ocean levels and rise-trend, the “weather disaster graph” and a short version of Goklany, short headers with good visuals this would be a strong message.
A personal hand out would even be better.
Do we have people available with the right connections to get this done?
I am sure that the politicians lobbying against the cap & trade could use such a
“hand out package” very effectively and it could help them to convince others.
Excellent work, I believe this represents an important piece of work in understanding how reliable land based temperature records are.
I would love to see a spatially weighted mean of all grade 1 sites vs a spacially weighted mean of all grade 2, 3 4 and 5 sites just to see the difference site quality has on temperature over a long timescale. I think the results could be very important indeed, particuarly to records such as GISS and HadCRUT etc…