A report on the Surfacestations Project with 70% of the USHCN surveyed.

A most inconvenient diagnosis…

I sent Benny Peiser a link to the report. That might help with getting it distributed widely.

A hell of a lot of footwork to be congratulated.
Mr Watts, you advised you would publish the temperature record of the best sites this May. Does that deadline hold, or when do you expect to do so?

And will you please reopen a thread for the analysis to be done publicly again? I can think of nothing more fitting than to do this work openly: to demonstrate a standard of transparency disappointingly absent from some elements of the other side.
If you have the data, please post it as soon as possible to get the numbers crunched in the public domain. Don’t make this effort vulnerable to suspicious minds. I will follow with great interest.
Thank you.

I don’t often laugh aloud at a computer screen, but the famous burn barrel did it for me. I forwarded it to my brother and we’ve been wuwt addicts since.
The station that impressed me most was the state park in the Sierras where one could see the date of the tennis court being paved on the temperature record. So much for rural settings being free of urban effects!
Great job, great service. Keep it up, donations sent.

TonyB,
You seem to be mixing a couple of issues. The actual percentage of Earth that is directly covered by pavement, foundations, or something like pit mining is still mind-blowingly low. And the Surface Site contamination contains two separate issues: Urban Heat Islands and micro-site issues.
When you’re in an urban center with skyscrapers everywhere and no dirt to be found, it is tough to wrap one’s mind around the fact that open spaces are still ridiculously large in comparison.
What this means is: One can have a strong UHI effect, and still not have that actual warming strongly influence the true average global temperature. Essentially because the areas influenced by UHI are minuscule.
But microsite issues are issues are a different issue. You can cause microsite issues by just placing the sensor next to a cliff wall. Or clearing the dirt off of the bare rock. Clearing brush – or letting it grow up. Or, as seems to be the most common, placing it next to the heat exhaust of an air conditioner.
For the microsite issues to actually represent a true measure of the actual surface temperature, the air conditioners would need to be spaced uniformly across the globe at the same density the measurement sites experienced! That is: if we say the average distance to the nearest AC unit from the surface station pictures was 15 meters, then we’d need an AC unit (or equivalent) every 15 meters across the globe to make the sample mimic reality.
Which would be nuts.

I’d wager that some of the most problematic microsite problems would be anything that is a significant change, either abruptly or slowly over time, such as tree growth providing shade where there was none originally, cutting down an overhanging tree, sudden-asphalt-syndrome, equipment moves or changes, changing/removing the ground cover, installing a light inside the shelter, and so on.
Great report, btw. Thanks for making it available.

At last, a Nobel Prize Winner with brains: http://jer-skepticscorner.blogspot.com/2009/05/skeptics-from-around-globe_6773.html#0

Icecap.us down again!

Alan S. Blue (09:44:18) : said to me
“TonyB,
You seem to be mixing a couple of issues. The actual percentage of Earth that is directly covered by pavement, foundations, or something like pit mining is still mind-blowingly low. And the Surface Site contamination contains two separate issues: Urban Heat Islands and micro-site issues.”
Alan, I had shortened my original post on this report and think the second post you must have seen has therefore been taken a little out of context.
The original context was that many stations are situated in UHI areas but UHI is not considered a major factor by those recording local temperatures or quantifying their effect on global temperatures. The ‘mind blowingly ‘ tiny percentage of the land covered by development (0.046%) would be fair enough to largely discount if there were only around 0.046% of stations situated in urban areas, and UHI had only contributed 0.05C to the warming experienced, instead of the likely greater amount that seems probable because of the number of stations affected.
UHI problems and problems with station siting may or may not coincide-for example an A/c outlet blowing on to a sensor is poor siting rather than a direct impact from the surrounding uhi.
I have made a series of related links and comments below. This from Real Climate;
“There are quite a few reasons to believe that the surface temperature record – which shows a warming of approximately 0.6°-0.8°C over the last century (depending on precisely how the warming trend is defined) – is essentially uncontaminated by the effects of urban growth and the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. These include that the land, borehole and marine records substantially agree; and the fact that there is little difference between the long-term (1880 to 1998) rural (0.70°C/century) and full set of station temperature trends (actually less at 0.65°C/century). This and other information lead the IPCC to conclude that the UHI effect makes at most a contribution of 0.05°C to the warming observed over the past century.”
This from wiki
“A number of scientists and scientific organizations have expressed concern about the possible deterioration of the land surface observing network.[18][19][20][21] Climate scientist Roger A. Pielke has stated that he has identified a number of sites where poorly sited stations in sparse regions “will introduce spatially unrepresentative data into the analyses.”[22] The metadata needed to quantify the uncertainty from poorly sited stations does not currently exist. Pielke has called for a similar documentation effort for the rest of the world.[23]
The uncertainty in annual measurements of the global average temperature (95% range) is estimated to be ~0.05°C since 1950 and as much as ~0.15°C in the earliest portions of the instrumental record. The error in recent years is dominated by the incomplete coverage of existing temperature records. Early records also have a substantial uncertainty driven by systematic concerns over the accuracy of sea surface temperature measurements.[24][25] Station densities are highest in the northern hemisphere, providing more confidence in climate trends in this region. Station densities are far lower in other regions such as the tropics, northern Asia and the former Soviet Union. This results in less confidence in the robustness of climate trends in these areas. If a region with few stations includes a poor quality station, the impact on global temperature would be greater than in a grid with many weather stations.[26] “
That UHI has apparently no real impact on global temperatures is further clarified here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
“Peterson (2003) indicates that the effects of the urban heat island may have been overstated, finding that “Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures.” This was done by using satellite-based night-light detection of urban areas, and more thorough homogenisation of the time series (with corrections, for example, for the tendency of surrounding rural stations to be slightly higher, and thus cooler, than urban areas). As the paper says, if its conclusion is accepted, then it is necessary to “unravel the mystery of how a global temperature time series created partly from urban in situ stations could show no contamination from urban warming.” The main conclusion is that micro- and local-scale impacts dominate the meso-scale impact of the urban heat island: many sections of towns may be warmer than rural sites, but meteorological observations are likely to be made in park “cool islands.”
A study by David Parker published in Nature in November 2004 and in Journal of Climate in 2006 attempts to test the urban heat island theory, by comparing temperature readings taken on calm nights with those taken on windy nights. If the urban heat island theory is correct then instruments should have recorded a bigger temperature rise for calm nights than for windy ones, because wind blows excess heat away from cities and away from the measuring instruments. There was no difference between the calm and windy nights, and the author says: we show that, globally, temperatures over land have risen as much on windy nights as on calm nights, indicating that the observed overall warming is not a consequence of urban development.[14][15]
However, Roger A. Pielke has claimed that Parker 2004 has “serious issues with its conclusions” [3] due to his research published in Geophysical Research Letters which states: “if the nocturnal boundary layer heat fluxes change over time, the trends of temperature under light winds in the surface layer will be a function of height, and that the same trends of temperature will not occur in the surface layer on windy and light wind nights.”[4].
Another view, often held by skeptics of global warming, is that much of the temperature increase seen in land based thermometers could be due to an increase in urbanisation and the siting of measurement stations in urban areas [5][6]. However, these views are mainly presented in “popular literature” and there are no known scientific peer-reviewed papers holding this view.[16] “
This from;
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_Part3_UrbanHeat.htm
The IPCC Physical Basis report [http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html] makes the following statements:
“Urban heat islands result partly from the physical properties of the urban landscape and partly from the release of heat into the environment by the use of energy for human activities such as heating buildings and powering appliances and vehicles (‘human energy production’). The global total heat flux from this is estimated as 0.03 W m–2 (Nakicenovic, 1998). If this energy release were concentrated in cities, which are estimated to cover 0.046% of the Earth’s surface (Loveland et al., 2000) the mean local heat flux in a city would be 65 W m–2. Daytime values in central Tokyo typically exceed 400 W m–2 with a maximum of 1,590 W m–2 in winter (Ichinose et al., 1999). Although human energy production is a small influence at the global scale, it may be very important for climate changes in cities” [emphasis added]
“Over the conterminous USA, after adjustment for time-of-observation bias and other changes, rural station trends were almost indistinguishable from series including urban sites” [emphasis added] [The problem is that the data don’t support these IPCC statements, as shown below using examples from around the world.]
This is commented on here:
“Since most of the long-term temperature stations are in cities, this is more significant than implied by the IPCC, because that’s where the data is recorded. While reading this document comparing the effects of urbanization on temperature trends, keep in mind the IPCC’s position that ): “Urbanisation impacts on global and hemispheric temperature trends have been found to be small. Furthermore, once the landscape around a station becomes urbanized, long-term trends for that station are consistent with nearby rural stations” (AR4, Chapter 3, 2007).
The Surface Stations web site [http://www.surfacestations.org/] is accumulating physical site data for the temperature measurement stations (including photographs) and identifying problem stations — there are a significant number of stations with improper site characteristics.”
So UHI-which we can all feel-is likely to have a considerable impact on a large number of stations which no longer represent the area in which they were first established. Compound this with poor siting/methodology/equipment etc and the likely extent of the inadequacy of the temperature records becomes even more apparent.
My original link to which Alan was referring is repeated here.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6256520.ece
As an aside, it is said that more than half the earths population now lives in urban areas, so going from the figures above some 3 billion people are squashed on to .046% of the earths surface. Makes you think.
Tonyb

Great effort Anthony
I’ve made a small donation-sorry it’s not more but our Prime Minister is busy trying to bankrupt us all the moment so money is tight.
TonyB