WUWT readers who have followed this blog and the surfacestations.org project for a long time know that the USHCN climate station of record in Marysville, California, is the station that gave me that moment “when the light bulb went on”. I still remember my cellphone conversation (shortly after surveying the site) with my friend Russ Steele, saying:
“Russ you won’t believe it, they are measuring the temperature of a parking lot!”.
Some of the pictures I took that day are below, I’ve annotated them to point out things of interest.
I made Marysville the very first of the “How not to Measure Temperature” series on May 26th, 2007.
I realized in discussions at this Climate Audit thread, since Marysville was one of the first stations I surveyed, I hadn’t looked at the metadata for it in almost two years. Time for a look again given the discussion of this thread. I’ve been busy chasing hundreds of other stations but haven’t looked back to that one where I had the light bulb go on.
I found some interesting things last night in the NCDC Metadata (MMS) for Marysville at http://mi3.ncdc.noaa.gov/mi3qry/login.cfm (use guest login button)
First in The UPDATES Tab
[2009-02-04] 9999-12-31 2009-02-04 MSLAGLE AD HOC NONE — CLEAN UP OF COOP-A STN TYPE ISSUE MSLAGLE 2009-02-04
This in the REMARKS Tab
[2008-07-01] 9999-12-31 GENERAL REMARK REASON: UPDATE PUBLICATION; DATA NO LONGER PUBLISHED. DATA ONLY GOES TO WFO/STO. DATA THAT IS RECIEVED FROM THIS STATION WILL BE USED AS BACK UP TO TO MARYSVILLE AIRPORT DATA (04-5388) WHICH IS NOW BEING PUBLISHED. — INGEST_USER 2009-02-10
It seems to me like they gave up on it. There is not much that can be fixed there in terms of siting like they did at Detroit Lakes. Marysville Fire Station property is 98% Asphalt/concrete/buildings, with a small patch of grass in the front by the street/sidewalk.
I decided to check the B91 Forms, and sure enough, NOAA bailed on Marysville in October of 2007, just a few months after I first brought it to national attention with “How not to Measure Temperature“
See the screencap of the NCDC B91 database showing the span of record:
It is sad really, a station with a long record, since Feburary 1897, climatically “out to pasture” after more than a century, likely a victim of lack of quality control by NOAA. That being said, why should we retain questionable station data in our climatic database?
Here is the very last B91 form submitted from the Marysville Fire Department in October 2007:
So I guess NOAA saw enough problems at Marysville to put it “out to pasture”. So now they use the airport.
Ironically, since the data from Marysville is now going directly to the NWS office in Sacramento/Stockton, rather than NCDC’s climatic database, the station mission has come full circle. It is likely now used for forecast verification, which is what the original mission of the COOP network was.
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E.M.Smith (02:09:29) :
Thanks for the stoll down memory lane. I especially liked the barefoot parking lot part. I remember doing that at Jones Beech, Long Island, NY. I only started wearing shoes outside when I didn’t have to about 5 years ago (I’m 52). Maybe I’ll stop.
I wonder who will get the BBQ?
Parking lots have also gone through seasonal and climate changes. The overall climate of a parking lot next to an agency has shifted from regular patterns to regular patterns plus conference patterns. These days, if you don’t have a conference at your headquarters you are not part of the “it” crowd of agencies. Hotels have also seen this same shift. There is a “season” for conferences if you will. Didn’t use to be that way. Parking lot sites could very well be measuring the increasing heat of conference season wall to wall, or stripe to stripe, cars, if you will.
So just why do you expect to see some kind of “step function”?
Actually, there are some dramatic examples of step change. But mostly it’s as you say.
Great post! I’ll subscribe right now wth my feedreader software!
An Inquirer wrote:
“First, crops have extended their range northward both because of genetic engineering and because they are heartier with more CO2 in the atmosphere. Second, some plants have not extended as far north as their range was during the MWP.”
It is sometimes claimed that animals and plants are extending their ranges to higher elevations than they occupied in the 19th century. (I recently saw a snippet of a TV interview describing a comprehensive 19th century survey of plants and animals and their locales in California in which this claim was made.) This is taken as supportive of a global warming trend–and no doubt there is one. But what may be overlooked is that these plants and animals had been driven down to lower elevations during the LIA, and that what has been seen since is a lagging rebound effect. (Part of the lag would be due to the length of time it would take for new trees to establish themselves, a few feet per year, at higher elevations before animals that rely on their presence would move up there.) IOW, the rate at which the animals are reestablishing themselves is not dependent on the more recent, manmade, temperature changes, but on mostly natural increases going back centuries.
I hope someone can develop this possibility as a partial rebuttal to one of the warmists’ strongest arguments.
Roger: Good observation about the slow “rebound” BACK to higher elevations after the LIA.
What is the “nominal” degrees C per 100 meter elevation increase” compared to “degrees C per degree latitude increase”?
Sean Ogilvie (05:29:53) : Thanks for the stoll down memory lane. I especially liked the barefoot parking lot part. I remember doing that at Jones Beech, Long Island, NY. I only started wearing shoes outside when I didn’t have to about 5 years ago (I’m 52). Maybe I’ll stop.
You are most welcome. I do suggest going barefoot in the summer a bit more… it certainly brought back some of these memories to me 😉
Even the ones of “bull head stickers” that I didn’t want 8-(
Then there was the “flat flip flop”… When we got enough money to have those cheap plastic ‘flip flops’ and toward the end of summer the strap between the toes would break… And you had to learn how to walk with a flip flop flopping on a foot, or do the the “flip flop hop” where the good flip flop foot would stay on the ground a long time and bare foot would do a quick hop step…
Just think of what grand experiences we are denying to our children today!
😎
One year, in desperation from too many leaks in a bike tire full of bull head stickers and no money for a 3rd tire / tube that year, and being a somewhat bright 8 year old: I ran the hose over the hand air pump while filling my tire and filled it with water (figuring the greater viscosity would keep the water in longer). After one day or two cycle (that got most of the residual air bubble out) I had a tire that held pressure for many days… Used it that way for the rest of the summer / fall.
It really would coast a long ways, but the turns at speed were “interesting”… (It was the front tire 😉
If only I’d have taken it a bit further I could have been the inventor of tire “Slime”. Oh well, it was a pretty good effort for an 8 year old and I got what really mattered to me at the time…
BTW, the fishing in the Feather River near Marysville can be very good… and they have a nice “off road park” (hope it is still there!) in the river overflow area next to the river between the two cities.
A decent “cruise” cycle was to enter town (Yuba City) from the north on (what was then 99E back when what is now I5 was 99W) highway 99, turn left on the first main drag (hwy 20?) and cruise the new part of town, over the bridge to The Other City (Marysville) and just after downtown, near the theatre, turn right on “bridge street” to take the old bridge back to Y.C. eventually cycling back around to your entry point. Repeat until low on gas, then stop at the Dairy Queen on the way north on the OLD 99E for burger, fries, and frozen dairy which was near the Very Cheap noname gas station (it only pinged if you floored it, so don’t floor it!). If we had lots of money, we would add a movie at the drive in theatre that was toward the river…
Now we watch TV and play nintendo games with the climate…
BTW, at the hottest part of the day it is ALMOST 70 F on my patio and it is very overcast. This is running on several weeks (month?) now. It ought to be sweltering hot and family complaining at me about it. My “45 day” tomatoes that are typically set out as gallon sized in April / May ought to be giving plenty of fruit and the beans ought to be more than we can eat “where did I store the canner and jars last year?” plentiful. I’ve got kale and onions and a few grapefruit sized green tomatoes…
Sunday we were at a graduation (she got Summa Cum Laude) at San Louis Obispo. Outdoors most all day. Absolutely beautiful day. But I noticed that it was not horridly hot… Briefly, about 10 to 11 am, the sun was “too hot” which ought to be “normal” and one expects a swelter into the afternoon.
Instead, that “high haze” started… About 12 noon a couple of jet contrails didn’t go away (instead starting a slow expansion into broad cloud bands) and some cumulus puffy bits filled in. Just enough to make it perfectly comfortable and only “too hot” if you were stuck in a patch of direct sun.
It was predicted that the weekend would be warmer, and it was, for about 24 hours. Now we’re back to “Will it sprinkle soon?” (Don’t know how better to describe it. Not rain imminent, and not cold winter… that odd spring / fall state with thick overcast and a feeling like charged air before a storm a bit – and cool, but well, just, like it’s going to sprinkle just a little Real Soon Now.)
Maybe I’ll change my handle to “Eternally Waiting For Summer”…