One of the common themes seen with the surfacestations.org project has been the proximity of BBQ grills to official NOAA thermometers used in the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN). Despite now having surveyed over 77% of the 1221 station network, some truths continue to be self evident.
This station was photographed by our prolific volunteer, Eric Gamberg. The proximity to the concrete patio earns this station a CRN4 rating, it may be a CRN5 when they wheel out the BBQ away from the house. But who knows? The grilling schedule is not part of the metadata.
But fear not, NASA GISS adjusts for such problems of concrete and BBQ grills. Consider the following blink comparator:
Source: NASA GISS
USHCN RAW:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425744450020&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
GISS Homogenized:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425744450020&data_set=2&num_neighbors=1
I’m not sure why the hinge point is 1978, perhaps that’s when the homeowner acquired the BBQ? Sure, that is an absurd claim, but certainly no more absurd than the GISS homogenization adjustment itself. Adjusting the past increases the overall positive slope of the temperature trend.
For those new to the whole concept of USHCN stations, the NOAA thermometer is the white slatted object on the post in the center of the photo. It is known as an MMTS thermometer and a cable goes from it into the home where the volunteer observer will write down the high and low into the B91 logbook and send in the report once a month to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).There are more photos of this station which you can see in my online station database.
The Gallery of photos can be seen here
I am loving the ads as they are always so perfect for the post. In this case gas grills. I think these must be taylored. I especially laugh at all the green ads and the save the polar bears.
A brief summary of the GISS “homogenized” urban correction is here:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/CorrectCorrections.pdf
The bottom line: NASA applies an urban correction of its GISS temperature index in the wrong direction in 45% of the adjustments. Instead of eliminating the urbanization effects, these wrong-way corrections makes the urban warming trends steeper.
Every good BBQ grill needs an MMTS thermometer for accurate cooking. I’m ordering mine today (MMTS that is). Once I get it working, I’m going to call Bobby Flay and see if we can have an AGW (American Great Western) BBQ throw down. The winner’s recipe and temperature series will be added to the GISS database according to standard practices.
Sorry for the typo. I meant to say “The winner’s reconstructed temperature series will be added to the GISS database according to standard practices.” There’s no field for recipes in the GISS database. I knew that.
Jeff Alberts: “Tom, I don’t think the MMTS measures anything except temp (maybe humidity, don’t know). A separate rain gauge has to be installed to measure precip…”
Of course you are correct. I was responding to the comment that these sites should not be called weather stations because they only recorded temperatures.
bill (05:02:15) :
Can you prove that the adjustment is always one way ?
I’ve been hitting this site and others like it, as well as a fair selection of contrary sites, for years. In that time I have encountered examples of uptrend enhancing adjustments numerous times. I don’t have a precise count, but a good SWAG would put the number well into triple digits. I may have seen a down trend enhancing adjustment noted somewhere in the past, but I may be experiencing early Alzhiemer’s symptoms, since I can’t recall one just now. Perhaps you could help me out by posting links to 5 or 10 examples of that phenomenon. Being a firm believer in the scientific method myself, that would be sufficient to cause me to question the validity of the hypothesis.
I think if an alien civilization was observing Earth they would think BBQ grills and AC units are part of the station monitor accessories and that sewage treatment plants are ideal locations for MMTS units.
The best example of how the south side of a building raises temperature can be found by looking at the grass. Next to the house/pavement it is already green but look across the street and the grass in the open is still brown.
Also, the unmelted snow near the fence is a great example of how reducing solar isolation can affect the melting of ice/snow cover. Keep in mind the TSI would have been the same everywhere at the time the picture was taken. The point being that changes in solar isolation are much more pertinent to periods of glaciation than changes in TSI.
Don’t look now, Anthony, but the Weaverville, CA ranger station
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=31605
put 2 concrete barriers in front of the Stevenson box that you see in the above picture.
I’m thinking of offering to paint them Forest Service Green.
Egads.
Dave Wendt (13:42:28) :
Perhaps you could help me out by posting links to 5 or 10 examples of that phenomenon. Being a firm believer in the scientific method myself, that would be sufficient to cause me to question the validity of the hypothesis
Perhaps I’m doing somethng wrong but the first 5 station I pulled grom Giss give falling corrections to current date:
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/5382/gissraw.jpg
Warrington is UK
Coopers town rises in 1940 and falls in 1900
Base page is:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
then selected raw or after adjustment and then downloaded data.
I looked at some of the homogeneity corrections a few months back when I first started reading WUWT. The link shows a plot I made
http://gallery.me.com/wally#100002/Homogeneity%20Correctionsj&bgcolor=black
Basically for five sites the changes are sometimes positive sometimes negative and sometimes fairly neutral. 5 is a pretty small sample but not “all” the changes trend towards an increase in temperature.
Take away the house, trees, concrete and bbq and leave the fence and the associated ‘shadow’ it provides. What does this do to the temperatures recorded at the station? It is clear that the ground is snow covered and frozen directly beneath the sensor whereas the open ground visible in the distance has no obvious snow and is probably not frozen. A simple experiment measuring temperatures directly above ice as compared to grass-covered earth (of various temperatures) could be undertaken to establish a graph of temperature readings which would show the influence that this situation has on temperature recordings. Has anyone tried this?
What’s really needed is a complete revamping of the surface temperature station network. The network administrators need to do some site surveys to ensure that future sites are better sited than current ones. Secondly, the entire system should be automated, with sensors collecting temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure and uploading that data once a day to an orbiting satellite. That would remove several factors from consideration: poorly sited instrumentation, human error, and (at least for a short time) eliminating the need to correct for extended human activity. I’m sure a fully-modernized, solar-powered unit could be constructed for around $2000 each. A satellite is expensive, but there’s no reason NASA can’t put a package together that could be added to a previously-scheduled satellite. Since the areas populated by these sensors would only be in the northern hemisphere, a polar orbit would not be necessary. No one can make the types of decisions that we, the people of the US, are being required to make without first ensuring the truth of the data we’re relying on to make those decisions. That degree of integrity is not present in the currently publically-available data.
I’m saving up to buy the official GISS BBQ grill and nearby rusty trash-burning barrel to bookend my Stevenson screen.
I’ll try to get some pictures of the International Airport Climate Station. I hope not being arrested…
I’ll send you the pictures as soon as I have them. 🙂
For my own town (Weaverville RS), GISS has July 1986 beating out August 1932, for which there is no equal in the actual data record. There is no record for July 1986 in the data, so therefore it is assumed to be through the roof by GISS.
I see what you mean by GISS barbecuing where there is nothing to fry.
“That might make sense, except that GISS doesn’t use satellite data, only surface data. – Anthony”
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but I know that. About a year ago, I compared the monthly GISS global anomaly against both RSS and UAH, and once you correct for the differences in the base periods, the anomalies match quite closely for the period post 1979. My point was that the GISS team can’t play too loose with the data from 1979 onwards since it is easy to verify against a satellite record. Prior to 1979, however, they could engage in all kinds of shenanigans to make the past appear slightly cooler than it actually was.
E.M.Smith (11:02:57) :
That FORTRAN code is seriously poor style. I have done professional programming in FORTRAN for ~15 years (until about 1995). Such chaotic coding is always, always a sign of poor design and understanding. It is probably riddled with algorithmic bugs (in addition to the fact that the algorithms are wrong in the first place, as you indicate). The style of the coding looks like it has been done by someone taking a crash course in Fortran some time in the mid 1970s. The FORTRAN 66 standard (from 1966) would produce similar code (except for the lowercase and enddo’s). The FORTRAN 77 ANSI standard (it is still in my bookshelf) would at least let you program with almost no GOTOs, if-then-else and such.
Today, such code should be properly designed using a modern language and people with some competence in software design and implementation. Especially when decisions costing trillions are based on it.
Dave Wendt
Here are a couple more + the data from hartington (just to prove I’m doing the right thing)
To me it looks as if GISS are trying hard to correct measurement errors – not trying to falsify the temperature record.
http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/3074/gissraw2.jpg
the one I did earlier:
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/5382/gissraw.jpg
Also of interest to E.M.Smith (11:02:57) : is that 1979 hinge does not always occur and certainly is not always negative!
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (03:57:49) :
I’m not sure where the code came from but it is not the same code as giss use.
giss changes on years other than 1997 and will change either up or down – which e.m. smith claims is impossible.
There is a website devoted to converting the hodge podge of languages to python (just do a search on “dif.ushcn.ghcn.f” there are not many results) – If you would like to help out you can sign up!
bill (04:00:34) :
I’m sorry to be so slow responding to your comments, but I’ve been otherwise occupied. I’d have to grant you 4 out of 7 for meeting my criteria of down trend enhancing adjustments. The last 2 only work if the adjustment profile is a record of adjustments made in the past and not a present day revision of the historical record and Cooperstown is marginal. I suspect a full 1 degree reduction in the start point more than compensates for a 0.1 degree bump in the middle. But, though I’m not sure I’ve ever used the phrase “the adjustments are always up” in the past, if I have occasion to refer to this situation in the future I will do my best to insert an almost. Personally, I suspect that the entire surface station network is so throughly compromised that no amount of statistical manipulation, no matter how diligently it is performed, is likely to produce data that has real relevance to what is occurring in the actual world. My own objection to the AGW agenda has little to do with whether and to what degree warming has occurred in the past or will occur in the future but to my own conclusion that if humanity proceeds to produce and distribute as much energy as we can to as many people as possible the future that develops will be infinitely preferable to the one provided by following the carbon demonization scenario, no matter what the climate may be in a hundred years.
BTW, can anybody explain to me what’s going on with the adjustments to that ” Huron/ Huron R” station that bill linked?
OK to finally put to bed these idiotic and disingenuous statements that GISS are “adjusting” the temperatures to prove global warming here is a random selection of locations with their adjustments.
To me they look rather like someone trying to correct inconsistencies NOT someone trying to depress early temperatures.
I have plotted all I looked at (both up and down adjustments) – no cherry picking other than sites with long and recent measurements.
http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/7440/gissrawtemps.jpg
According to the weatherman tonight in Sydney, Australia, May 2009 was 0.8c above the “long term average”. Not sure how this “long term average” was derived however.
Hey Anthony,
You’re mentioned in my local newspaper today!
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/temperature-stations-global-2433763-heat-watts