Some long time WUWT readers may remember this famous picture of the USHCN climate station of record in Detroit Lakes, MN.
This is what I wrote on July 26th, 2007 about it in:
How Not to Measure Temperature, Part 25
This picture, taken by www.surfacestations.org volunteer Don Kostuch is the Detroit Lakes, MN USHCN climate station of record. The Stevenson Screen is sinking into the swamp and the MMTS sensor is kept at a comfortable temperature thanks to the nearby A/C units.
The complete set of pictures is here
From NASA’s GISS, the plot makes it pretty easy to see there was no discernible multi-decadal temperature trend until the A/C units were installed. And it’s not hard to figure out when that was.
And as you know, that curious jump in the GISS record, even though it coincided with the placement of the a/c heat exchangers (I checked with the chief engineer of the radio station and he pulled the invoices to check), it turns out that wasn’t the most important issue.
Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit saw something else, mainly because other nearby stations had the nearly the same odd jump in the data. That jump turned out to be discovery of a data splicing glitch in the NASA GISS processes joining the data pre and post year 2000.
It became known as The GISS Y2K glitch. It changed the balance of GISS surface temperature reporting, bringing 1998 down as no longer the hottest year on record. Here’s a writeup on it from Steve on the data itself.
Yesterday, volunteer Mark Ewens sent me some updated pictures of the Detroit Lakes site. It appears the embarrasment of having such a terrible station siting has forced the local NWS office into making some siting improvements:
As you can see, the MMTS has been moved away from the a/c units and the building. The Stevenson Screen appears to be gone. Interesting story about the Stevenson Screen, it was originally moved out of that center location where the MMTS has been now, because there was concern that somebody might break the mercury thermometers inside, and the mercury would prompt a “wetlands hazmat response”, which would be any EPA field agent’s dream, a double whammy.
Here are more pictures:
Mark writes:
About a year ago I indicated that the MMTS at the Detroit Lakes 1NNE Coop site was moved. See attachedthe pictures I took last week while on a trip. Obviously not optimal, but much better. Like almost all radio stationsthis one is located in a swamp, so I’ve got limited options to work with. The observer did note that he has noticeda marked decrease in the average temperatures since the move – and not just due to global cooling!The MMTS is ~80 feet from the building. The brown stalks are the left over winter kill of the saw grass thatis common in the swampy area of west central Minnesota.Mark EwensGrand Forks ND
Apparently, the NWS thought enough of the criticism of the siting next to a/c heat exchangers to do something about it. And, I’ve been hearing from time to time, that stations that volunteers have visited and we have showcased in “How Not To Measure Temperature, Part X” have been quietly cleaned up.
While that is encouraging, the fact remains that it took a team of concerned citizens and some international embarrassment to get NOAA to fix quality control problems in climate monitoring stations that they should have recognized and corrected long ago.
Great work Anthony and crew of dedicated volunteers; one weather station fixed, but sadly how many more to go?
Now if we can get them to move this station :
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/images/Tucson1.jpg
or at least get them to paint the pavement Stevenchu white.
Just Want Results… (16:20:20) :
Now if we can get them to move this station :
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/images/Tucson1.jpg
or at least get them to paint the pavement Stevenchu white.
Hah!!! Have you seen the tiny patch of grass below the Stevenson screen?
I am a radio engineer.
I see an even bigger issue here;
RF. The MMTS has been moved to within mere inches of an FM transmission line enclosure.
I’d be concerned with any electronic equipment that close to RF sources.
OT… GISS is applying 2000 Lean’s database on Total Solar irradiance:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/solar.irradiance/
I don’t know why Hansen et al ascribe only 0.3 to solar forcing if from Lean’s database the change of the intensity of solar irradiance has been 1.62 W/m^2 for the period 1880-2000). That magnitude of change of solar irradiance would cause a change of temperature of about 0.42 K, which would correspond to a solar forcing of 0.77; more than twice the magnitude that Hansen et al have assigned to solar forcing.
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The FCC database says that is a one kilowatt AM radio station on 1340 kHz, the tower is electrically 171.7 degrees (350 feet) tall, and looking at the photos, it appears that the MMTS is within less than one wavelength (~700′) of the radiating tower, or in the near field as the term is used. The proximity of the coaxial cable is not of concern, it is the radio frequency energy radiated by the antenna which could cause problems in the MMTS. Note one confounding factor, this is a half wave radiator, instead of the expected quarter wave design, when calculating the E and M fields at the MMTS. I would do it, but I’m so out of practice, it is guaranteed to be wrong.
j.pickens (17:58:42) :
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Heh! This will be my very first correction on a foreign language grammar… Change “viola” for “voilà”. But don’t look at my grammar gremlins, ok? 😉
Steve (Paris) (13:52:40) :
I told it to search for Catlin for this year and got:
Note the .xls URL above. That appears to be the data. I don’t understand some of what gets display, but that might be because I have Open Office, not Excel, but I think it’s fair to say the organization of the data is they worst I have ever, ever, seen. A 12 year-old could have done better.
It looks like they have 113 data point in March, 142 in April, and 30 in May (10 per day in May). It’s not clear what some of the cells have – 46 is a popular number. Clearly it’s not the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Oh, it’s the number of cells that have snow depth information for a day’s sampling. I don’t understand how a day with 10 samples can fill a column of 46 cells.
The spreadsheet has graphs, X-axes are date, Y-axis likely depths, but you get to figure out depths of what.
The summary data has things like (please, format god, be good):
------N------|------W-------|--Date--| Thick|Std Dev| Snow|Std Dev 81°49 ' 32''N|129°58 '21 ''W|3/1/2009|375.00| 158.98|16.78|10.19 81°56 41' ''N|130 09 56' ''W|3/2/2009| | |13.23| 5.76 | |3/3/2009| | | | 81°51'36 ''N |130°04 40' ''W|3/4/2009|154.20| 15.16|11.87| 6.85 81°59'36" |130°04'42" |3/5/2009|153.33| 1.15| |Look at the incredible range of styles in recording lat/long. I don’t know if I could write software to parse them all. The data is crying out to be euthanized, it may not be useful in any stretch of one’s imagination as anything but several anecdotal data points. Even Steve McIntyre would have trouble finding anything meaningful in it.
Clearly, Catlin got ZERO data points from that radar they faithfully dragged for part of the trip (it was picked up for repair at the first resupply, and returned at the second).
I’m sure glad I didn’t help foot the bill.
So is this now tacit acknowledgment that the data taken before the move is crap? I would like to see how the fudge is/was applied.
You would think with all that taxpayer money, they would have a better monitoring and upgrade program in place. But I guess that like all bureaucracies, the least possible is the common goal.
Nasif Nahle (16:38:26) :
Just Want Results… (16:20:20) :
Now if we can get them to move this station :
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/images/Tucson1.jpg
or at least get them to paint the pavement Stevenchu white.
Hah!!! Have you seen the tiny patch of grass below the Stevenson screen?
As Tony Blair once said: “Location, location, location…”
“Ric Werme (18:28:46) :
I’m sure glad I didn’t help foot the bill. (Catlin expedition)”
Don’t worry, after Copenhagen, we’ll all be footing the bill for idiotic studies, surveys, policies and taxes.
Elizabeth (10:26:39) :
Criticism of your surface station study fascinates me.
With all their grim predictions of climate doom, you would think the folks at NOAA would be vigilant about maintaining surface station requirements.
Wouldn’t the scientific community and the public also expect higher standards?
Elizabeth – you appear to be assuming that the AGW Movement is interested in finding out the truth wrt Climate.
The nature of advocacy science is too only show interest in reports that validate and reinforce the accepted theory. Contrary facts, and poor data, are simpy ignored or attacked.
I suspect that the broader scientific community and the public are simply un-aware of the poor state of the land based temperature data.
An eminently wise decision. You’re obviously the better man.
j.pickens (17:58:42) – It’s not hard to find ad blockers. I don’t block what is trying to pay for what I’m reading. I’m expecting the ads to initially be more amusing than relevant, particularly because AGW people seem to feel it’s necessary to advertise panic and solutions.
Mike Bryant (13:19:38) : In fact we may be forced to soon. I’m gonna miss my air conditioner the most.
FWIW, back during the “Greyout Davis” years when California had persistent rolling blackouts, after putting small portable UPSs on all the electronics and a light in every room, and after getting an emergency gasoline generator, I decided to investigate a “longer term” solution ( I think it was in the 2nd or 3rd year… groan… )
IIRC, there was a very nice efficient Diesel portable generator that, when all the math was done, made electricity for the price of “Diesel oil per gallon divided by 10 per kW-hr”. So if Diesel was selling for $2.50 it cost .25 / kW-hr. A convenient metric to keep in mind. At the time Diesel was about $1.80 and electricity was .15 or so and I let the idea pass.
Now, with Diesel at $2.50 and the “peak over baseline politically incorrect yes I want AC at the hottest part of the day” rate pushing .35 it is probably worth a re-visit…
There are also relatively low cost Lister type Diesel generators that run on vegetable oil (designed to do so from the factory!) so if you have a friend with a hamburger stand … or if they tax Diesel to death but subsidize food like Soybean oil, well, there are ways…
My ‘base plan’ is to just use my Diesel car to provide about 1 kw if I need to go there due to gasoline being too expensive for my Honda generator (I already have the inverter, from the last time…)
Golly, remember the days back when the electric utility just provided steady reliable cheap electricity all the time? Before the government decided to start “fixing” things and put the fix in, I mean, gave things a fix, um, oh never mind … 😐
(Dusting off my gasogen and methane fermenter plans… and looking at natural gas prices vs gasoline / Diesel and thinking about a nat-gas generator plumbed in… Reminds me of the time I was looking at getting electricity in a 3 rd world country on a reliable basis…)
The only good news is that out here under The Big Blue Blob of cold, we’ve had exactly zero need for AC so far this summer. Did need the heater a bit, though, and I already have a fireplace insert and wood pile.
I have noticed that the sky has a peculiar thin high haze / cloud to it. Mid day it looks like feint fog or thin cirrus at, I’d guess, 5,000 to 10,000 feet. Late in the afternoon / evening it gets a bit more like normal cumulus. Very odd in that we’ve typically had stark clear blue during summer in the past 30 years. Maybe that GCR thing… ?
Can we then expect an impending ice-age scare in a year when we see the average temperature drop over 4 degrees C in 12 months? Lol.
George,
I hadn’t looked it up (forgot that I could check with coordinates), but yes it is indeed an AM at 1340 (a “local” frequency.”)
1000 watts is not an enormous amount of RF, but the ground system from that tower, if still in tact, essentially puts the proximity of the instrumentation “right on” the antenna.
AM would actually be more likely to cause trouble with such equipment, but at 1000 watts it may not matter.
Oh, good point Tom: “IR cameras would measure the heat of nearby surfaces, not the heat content of the air itself. Useful for showing possible local biases but not useful for the primary measurement.”
Ok, so we have a way to validate that the existing air temperature sensors aren’t being influenced by local biases then. Plus a way to measure surface temperature over a wide area from the ground. Two purposes for one. Excellent.
Well then how do satellites measure temperature of the ground, lower, mid and upper atmospheres? Let’s use that technology from ground based sensors. Does that make any sense?
What about using Atmospheric Infrared Sounders from the ground?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_Infrared_Sounder
Or Advanced Microwave Sounders from the ground?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Microwave_Sounding_Unit
There must be some ground based methods for measuring air temperature accurately within a local volume of air.
Perhaps, before long, we’ll see the onset of an honest temperature record for the US. Is anyone doing similar research into stations in the UK?
What this and many other stories like it highlight is the absolute need to get the powers that be to sit down and agree the following:
1. Criteria for weather station siting.
2. Methods for monitoring any events which may compromise ongoing consistency or integrity of data gathering.
3. Cost-effective methods for carrying that monitoring out.
4. A moratorium on religious pronouncements on warming or cooling until the above three have been instigated and monitoring continued for a few decades…
Any chance of that folks?
“Rhys Jaggar (04:04:41) :
What this and many other stories like it highlight is the absolute need to get the powers that be to sit down and agree the following:
1. Criteria for weather station siting.
2. Methods for monitoring any events which may compromise ongoing consistency or integrity of data gathering.
3. Cost-effective methods for carrying that monitoring out.
4. A moratorium on religious pronouncements on warming or cooling until the above three have been instigated and monitoring continued for a few decades…
Any chance of that folks?”
No chance. The political beast is on a “crusade”, and, unless we find another “Guy Fawkes” type, will not be stopped. The Mesiah *is* in The White House after all.
The other issue is *most* people are unwilling to research and question “authority”. I, personally, have been doing that since the late 60’s. My main point being is that some people focus on getting fried chicken from the local takeaway, rather than really understanding what our elected politicians are doing and where food, actually, comes from. That’s why Obama got elected, that’s why *most* people support “saving the planet” via reducing C02 emissions. It’s all politics and emotion (Smoke and mirrors).
Reported accuracy of the MMTS design is quoted as “+/- 0.3F ( random google search). If the MMTS circuitry is digital, it will be relatively immune to 1430kc, although the thermal sensor could suffer some inductive heating. The ERP at the distance from the antenna as indicated in the picture would not likely be enough to induce much heating, and would be much less than 1000w. Certainly, if you were to grab a 1000w rf radiator at a current node, you might be a tad surprised at the experience.
There is at least one paper that discusses the cover design in terms of its heating response to solar radiation (Hubbard, Lin & Walter-Shea): http://tinyurl.com/kndk4z
Phooey – that tinyurl link didn’t work, and I’m not getting one that does. If interested google “The Effectiveness of the ASOS, MMTS, Gill, and CRS Air Temperature Radiation Shields”.
E.M.Smith (22:12:05) :
I have noticed that the sky has a peculiar thin high haze / cloud to it. Mid day it looks like feint fog or thin cirrus at, I’d guess, 5,000 to 10,000 feet. Late in the afternoon / evening it gets a bit more like normal cumulus. Very odd in that we’ve typically had stark clear blue during summer in the past 30 years. Maybe that GCR thing… ?
I mentioned that earlier this spring. Kind of an opaque layer. I definitely remember clear skies, especially a day or two after a rain. Now it seems to stay cloudy for a day or two, then the opaque layer. Weather. Tornadoes are more interesting here in Kansas.