In my previous post I pointed out how when Warren Meyer asked a simple question; “is this chart representative?” of himself, he needed only one phone call to disprove that a chart in the newly released Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States from the National Climatic Data Center (see NCDC GCCI Government Report). The chart purported to show a threat increase to the national electrical grid due to severe weather was really not a weather trend at all, but a trend of increased reporting thanks to increased diligence by the owner of the data in getting electrical utilities to cooperate and send in their data.
In another recent post on the FUBAR climate records from the failed ASOS weather station temperature sensor at Honolulu International Airport, I showed a nearby comparison station, the Honolulu Observatory, that is a GISS station that apparently no longer reports. I wrote –
But the nearby Honolulu Observatory temperature record doesn’t seem to have much of a trend, though it no longer measures temperature for climate records, a pity:
Honolulu Observatory GISS surface temperature record plot – click for larger image
Yes it sure seemed like the Honolulu Observatory stopped reporting in 1981. It also looks like the station was moved about 1949, or something happened around the station environment.
UPDATE: I got this via email on the morning of 6/19
The Geomag operations of the Honolulu observatory were moved in 1947.
Jeffrey J Love
USGS Advisor for Geomagnetic Research
Steve McIntyre, who has pointed out on many occasions to NASA GISS how they can find some of their long long stations that are actually still running popped in today to ask a simple question about reporting. It was not unlike the question about reporting Warren Meyers asked:
Does anyone know why the Honolulu Observatory data ends in the 1980s? Did they stop measuring or did GHCN stop collecting the information from them?
It was a simple question, with a surprising answer.
A couple of days ago I had looked at nearby stations to the Honolulu Airport to use for a data comparison to see just how much bias the failed ASOS sensor had generated. My first choice was the Honolulu Observatory, but like Steve I quickly found it had stopped reporting, at least according to GISS.
But with Steve’s question today, and remembering that he and Climate Audit readers have found missing GISS stations that are not updated in the GISTEMP database, but are actually still live and reporting, I thought I’d check again. I reasoned that observatories don’t generally close or relocate, so why would they stop doing a science service like measuring climate?
When Warren needed to get an answer to his question, all he needed to do was to make a phone call (presumably after a Google search). In my case I did a Google Search and sent a single email to get Steve’s question answered.
My first stop was to NCDC’s MMS database of station information. I looked up “Honolulu Observatory”. Sure enough, there it was, and listed as “current” too.
Eureka, it is still in operation! It is an MMTS temperature sensor and it looks like they have a backup thermometer in a Stevenson Screen aka “Cotton Region Shelter”.
“That was easy”, I thought to myself. followed by, “OK, let me get a look at the data”. So I zipped over to the NCDC COOP data section where I could look at the B91 reports from the station observer which are raw data archived as PDF’s.
It was there I hit a brick wall.It looked like it had been long closed. After all that’s what GISS reported.
The closing dates on the two “”Honolulu Observatory” entries didn’t match, but I’ve seen plenty of fouled up dates and locations on station data in the MMS database so it didn’t raise an eyebrow with me. More on that later.
But oddly, I had the NCDC MMS database telling me it was open. So I pressed on. My next task was to locate the “Honolulu Observatory” and find out if it was still in operation. Some Googling turned up this:
I located the USGS web page for the observatory, and from there found the name of the curator, Dr. Jeffrey Love. Since this is a geomagnetic observatory, I figured our resident solar physicist, Dr. Leif Svalgaard might have some connections, and asked him for an introduction. He was happy to assist, and within the hour I had an email contact from Dr. Love. He asked what I was looking for, and I explained the NOAA COOP station setup. He immediately replied saying:
“We don’t operate that station anymore, NOAA does. We used to be part of NOAA, but became part of USGS in the late 1970’s”
I was initially worried until I read:
“It is now operated by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.”
Oh. Well, I still figured the station had moved, and was nowhere near it’s original location, which is why GISS couldn’t get any data from it. Then I noticed this on the USGS observatory web page:
“The observatory is operated for the USGS, under terms of a memorandum of agreement, by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center of NOAA.”
Hmmm. A little more checking and I discovered that these two organizations do indeed share a common address. Better yet, the weather station apparently had not been moved. Both the USGS observatory and the PTWC were within a hundred yards of the station coordinates I got from NCDC ‘s MMS and plotted on Google Earth:
My first thought was that the location looked a bit cooler than the acres of asphalt surrounding the ASOS at Honolulu International Airport:
But I still had to find the data. My next stop was an email to the media contact for PTWC, Delores Clark, to inquire if she knew where to find it. A few hours later I had my answer:
Mr. Watts:
The data are available online at:
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/hnl/hydro/daily_rosa_archive/rosa_archive.php
If you need further assistance, please let me know.
Aloha,
Delores Clark
I was dumbstruck. Because, just a couple of days ago I had in fact looked at that very archive, trying to find the data I was seeking. Not finding “Honolulu Observatory” in the NWS COOP report, I didn’t look much further:
But at the time, I had no way of knowing that PTWC was the new name for “Honolulu Observatory”. Up until today after my roundabout search I never would have given that four letter acronym another thought.
The name changed when the jurisdiction changed, but apparently nobody notified NCDC, and the change never found it’s way into the GHCN database.
For all practical purposes, the station was dead to the climate world, known only to the local NWS office in Honolulu. Plus, their main interest is in rainfall, not temperature, since they place the data on their hydrology page:
A simple lack of interagency reporting caused a whole cascade down the line, and a climate station that was once “lost” has now been “found”. It wasn’t quite as simple as Warren Meyer’s phone call, but if a citizen outside of the governmental loop can figure this out in a couple of hours, why can’t agencies like NCDC and GISS? Especially when knowing this sort of thing is is their job? Are there no flags that go up anywhere when data suddenly disappears?
So from this point it was easy for me to find the data I was looking for and run the comparison between the “Honolulu Observatory” and the Honolulu International Airport ASOS station. First a geographic comparison from Google Earth:
Downloading each daily report from PTWC and PHNL individually, I manually collated the data from both stations and put them into an ASCII file for import into my Dplot graphing program. I’ve saved a combination file of the two datasets here as a PDF for inspection. PHNL-PTWC-June09-data If anybody needs the individual station reports, the source URL’s are in the PDF file, they’ll still be on the NWS server for a few days before they get rotated out.
Unfortunately, there were two days of PTWC data missing, though all days of the PHNL ASOS data were intact. Also, I had all of the false record event reports from the PHNL ASOS previously archived.
So I plotted the two high/low datasets side by side to get an idea of just how much bias there was between the two stations. Fortunately, the stations were only 3.9 miles apart, and about the same distance inland from the beach, though the airport station ocean exposure suffers a bit from the extra runway that was apparently added as ocean fill at some point. Geographically the stations seem reasonably compatible in their placement on the south coast of Oahu.
The data from the two stations, when plotted side by side, was telling. I marked missing data, the record high events, and when the ASOS was repaired.
Note when the highs (Tmax) converged for the first time this month to within one degree of each other, right after the equipment was repaired. The greatest separation is in the nighttime lows, which would be expected due to the runway asphalt influence at PHNL Lows tend to be affected more by heat retaining surfaces at night.
Note also that during the string of record highs from the 10th to the 15th, the two stations diverged mostly by six degrees F, The NWS originally admitted in their TV Interview to two degrees error, and that may be true from the HNL airport location since it is indeed a sea of asphalt.
“ASOS…placed for aviation purposes…not necessarily for climate purposes.”
Six degrees difference in the Tmax for at least 5 days. Many other days of record were 4 or 5 degrees difference. One day was 9 degrees difference.
But, which station is more representative of Oahu’s climate? The airport, or the observatory in the grove of native ground cover? I don’t think all of Oahu is paved yet.
So the big question to NOAA/NWS Honolulu is:
Do you still think these records are valid and worth keeping in the climatic database and record events database?
The big question for GISS is:
Would you like your lost station back so you can update the data?
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Well Dr Wattsup; you should have been able to psych that one out as soon as they told you they don’t do temperature any more but concentrate on rainfall; everybody knows that when you get a Tsunami, you have this wave of rain rushing across the planet, as a result of an earthquake somewhere.
Clearly you aren’t British, or you would know the place is now the Pacific Tsunami Water Closet; hence you should have been looking for PT WC all along.
George
Anthony, how do you sniff out all these birds nests; do you have a little black cloud overhead that follows you around. This one was a gem.
BTW, I just downloaded the annual GISTEMP data for Honolulu, Oahu and Barber’s Point. Looking at the periods where coverage overlaps, from 1980-1999 Honolulu reads on average 0.2C higher than BP, and from 1949 to 1980 on average 0.8C higher than Oahu.
I’m sorry, I’m creating a diversion from this excellent investigation and the point that the NHL temperature readings are unreliable for climate research.
According to the following records site, for the month of June so far, there have been 277 highest daytime max temp records (142 records, 135 tied), and a whopping 870 lowest daytime max temp records (638 records, 232 tied). Regardless of corrupt data, even bad stations are saying it is damned cold outside during the day! By the way, could it be cloud cover that is resulting in more nighttime highest low temp records versus lowest low temp records at the same time?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/index.php?ts=daily&elem=lomx&month=6&day=0&year=2009&submitted=Get+Records#recs
Sam bailey (06:19:44) said :
To MR Watts,
I am a steadfast watthead since I first discovered this site. Being the professional pain in the ass that I am, it has been a perfect resource to provide accurate data time and again for my efforts to drive every algorite I meet into a frenzy.
EXCELLENT NEW COINAGE: “watthead”. I like it, and if I wasn’t one before, I am now. Quick, somebody design a bumper sticker!
This is some of the most fantastic (in all sense of the word) research I have ever seen. In one fell swoop, ALL of the foibles of our current climate “system” (which is to say bureaucracy) are laid to waste.
This puppy is getting printed out, multiple copies, and stored in my briefcase for later use as metaphorical 2x4s for the crania of the AGW population.
[Unfortunately, that may not be enough: Reynolds Rule says that in order to get some people’s attention, you have to wup them upside the head with a 2×4, but that for other people the 2×4 required would be so large that if you used it, you would kill them, so you have to let them go about their dim-witted business.]
I consider this iron-clad proof of that Reaganism “the best people don’t work for government; if they did, the private sector would steal them.”
Congratulations in advance for “Best Science Blog 2009”
Here in Western Washington the local temp and rainfall information is gathered from instrumentation at local schools, which they call Schoolnet.
I went onto one of the local news web sites (king5.com) and used their feedback form to ask what types of equipment were used at these schools, and whether there were siting standards to insure we weren’t measuring the temperature of school buildings instead of actual ambient air temperature.
Never got a reply.
As a former employee of FedEx, I can attest to the warmth of jet exhaust. While we not allowed to approach within a certain distance while the engines were active, it was always nice, on cold mornings, to be able to follow a plane taxiing to their gate. The jet exhaust was usually several degrees warmer than the ambient temperature, even if it did smell of Jet A fuel. FedEx provide great cold weather gear, but you still had to expose areas of your face to the cold, and that little bit of extra warm air a great bonus.
In this thread http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/25/feeling-the-heat-is-it-real-or-is-it-asos/#comments I posted this comment:
Håkan B (10:05:53) :
Hm is it really a good idea to use those airport based weather stations for science? I suppose the airports own meteorologist wants to have a word on the placing, and he is not there to do science, he’s there to help run the traffic as safe as possible. To do that I suppose he would be interested to get temperature, wind and moisture as close to the runway as possible. For other weather data he probably relies on radar and reports from a national weather center. I took a look in Google Earth at our 2 airports here in Stockholm Sweden and it looks about the same.
Nice to see the folks running those stations are catching up!
This is really good stuff. Records are made to be broken, but not with inaccurate equipment. The retract the records would mean a mistake was made. Do they have the guts to admit it?
It’s still not too late to do the right thing, NWS!
Elementary Watts!
You’re the Sherlock Holmes of climate science.
Just like in Iran, technology (internet/Twitter etc..) is going to keep the B honest no matter what (unless they start to “hide” ALL data from now on because of sites like these.. this is a warning to the Hadcrut and GISS data keepers that they will be held to account now and in the future. More inclined to trust the Scandinavian met offices.. It seem they are no longer prepared to on with the AGW charade and have seen the light. Thank you Anthony.
I think much of the problem arises from the widespread use of confusing acronyms. They could improve things by using acronyms that are more easily identified with the product. It would be much easier to identify the agency with its product if, for example, the acronym “NOAA” were to be changed to “GM” for Government Meteorology. Ownership of the trademark should no longer be an issue.
Milwaukee Bob (07:22:26) :
Fabulous work again, Doc Watts. I’m “green” with envy.
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort ‘em as you please”. Mark Twain
And the real shame here, wattsupers, is that nary a one of us is a MSM journalist/editor. Doc, et al have created, in summary over the past few months here, through investigation/contribution/analysis and summarization a “scoop” worthy of a Pulitzer. This last report is an exclamation point on a lot of that work.
The point is the discovery that FACTS such as those uncovered here by Anthony have a new found home. It is not in broadcast television, or radio or print media – it is in the uncensored, uninhibited “blogosphere.” And anyone with a brain can check the FACTS for themselves and then form an opinion. WUWT will continue to publish the true data and FACTS. An ever-growing body of the public will come here to view them, and go away wondering why their TVs and radios and newspapers refuse to do the same.
When I look at NASA and most science, I see a meticulous regard for fine precision and accuracy. It was disgusting before I found this site to learn how slopp they were on data gathering and instrumentation and then were extremely demanding we accept the models and forcasts.
In June i find every single day, our local daytime high is running between 5 and 19 degrees lower than forcast. The night time lows have not been as far off. In fact I recall sever nights the night time low was the same number as the forecast. In vector review, what if NASA wanted to go to the planet mars and was off by 1.2 degrees?
Stephen Skinner (09:24:09) :
“Hi Glenn
Funny, I was showing this clip to a friend only yesterday. Yes, I am well aware but this is blast not temperature, but I think you just be sharing this with me.”
This blast (from each engine) is likely to be around 500 C or more. Honolulu is one of the busiest ports in the US, and many hundreds of these “portable kerosene forced-air heaters” are running around that weather station day in day out.
This story raises several interesting questions:
1) If asphalt and cement affect nighttime temperatures more than daytime ones, would it be possible to detect a reduction in the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures when something like a runway or sidewalk got built close to a sensor or when a sensor got moved close to cement or asphalt?
2) Are there a lot more ‘lost’ sensors out there waiting to be rediscovered? If so, maybe that could be the focus for another volunteer effort like the one to document siting for the temperature sensors.
3) Are records kept of when sensor errors like the one at the airport are discovered and corrected? If so, it would be interesting to see if more “running cold” sensor errors were fixed than “running hot” ones over the last two or three decades. Since people are expecting hotter temperatures because of global warming they would probably be less likely to question anamolously hot temperatures than anamolously cold ones, and would be less likely to discover sensors that are running hot than ones that are running cold. So you would end up with expectations of hotter temperatures biasing the data in the direction of showing hotter temperatures.
Just some thoughts for future research.
Not all government workers labor all day aiding gravity in keeping their chair from levitating. I know, I’m one. This latest scathing expose however, has me…um,…uhh…well…hiding in the fileroom.
Keep it up anyway Anthony, I’ll just change my name and use my laptop to keep in touch.
Anthony,
After that post, I couldn’t help but donate the money jar.
Excellent job!
Why not file a complaint against NASA/NOAA under the Data Quality Act? It seems like this would be a perfect use of the act for “ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information (including statistical information) disseminated by Federal agencies”
Where’s Flanagan telling us again about great the ground temperature record? He must have skipped over this article.
Anthony needs an outlet for these types of reports. Maybe Fox News. These are great stories that cast doubt on the entire AGW hypothesis. Reminds of the old stories about $20,000 hammers, etc. that I used to see on the news.
I think it’s better to show the failures of the “consensus scientists” than to claim alternate hypothesis.
Stephen Skinner (09:24:09) :
“JoeS
“Jet Engine Exhaust Gas Temperatures (EGT) can range from 400 F to well over 1000 F.”
“Hi Joe
Yes, this is the temperature at the point of exit from the engine as measured by the sensor in the engine. To measure these temperatures externally to the engine you would have to be very close, although it is likely the sensor would be destroyed by the blast. The tempeature disipates quickly otherwise the YouTube of those people in St Maarten should show burning clothes at least.”
No, EGT is higher than 400 F, by about 500F for a rough number – 500C. Of course this temperature will be dissipated in the air, but just claiming “quickly” doesn’t provide any weight to your argument. And the people in your video wouldn’t have to have burning clothes, just feel a degree or so warmer. And likely they felt a blast of very warm or hot air. Have you been around airports and jets??
OT-Sorry, would like to see the crew tear this apart.
CO2 Levels are Highest in 2.1 Million Years
Bärbel Hönisch, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and her colleagues have assembled the most detailed look at atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels over the last 2.1 million years by analyzing shells of single-celled plankton buried under the Atlantic Ocean. Ice core CO2 data only goes back 800,000 years ago.
According to the results from the study, peak CO2 levels over the last 2.1 million years averaged only 280 parts per million (ppm), but today, that number is now up to 385 ppm. These results also tell scientists that they will have to look farther back (beyond 2.1 million years ago) to find an analog to modern day CO2 induced climate change.
This is also the latest report to rule out a drop in CO2 as the cause for earth’s ice ages growing longer and more intense some 850,000 years ago since CO2 levels were relatively flat during that period. But it also confirms many researchers’ suspicion that higher carbon dioxide levels coincided with warmer intervals during the study period, according to the EurekAlert article.
This study is posted in the journal Science.
Anthony;
In the small hours of this morning I posted a comment to this thread in which I neglected to add my thanks and congratulations, although it seems to me your main point was that no heroic efforts or special ingenuity was required to accomplish the task. In fact, to me, what was most glaringly illuminated by this post was that, if any of the minions who are charged with collecting and maintaining this data had any real dedication to the quality and integrity of the data set, they could have done exactly what you did between showing up in the morning and their first coffee break on any day in the last decade or three. That none of them ever has should tell us all we need to know about the level of respect we should award this data and how completely insane it is that the political class should be using it as a basis for formulating any kind of public policies, let alone ones as immediately and egregiously deleterious to freedom and prosperity as what they are intent on inflicting on us now.
Regarding the suggestion that you be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, as perhaps the only one here who can even semi-legitimately claim to share with Algore the now dubious “honor” of being a recipient that award ( in the late Seventies an organization of which I was then a fairly active member was awarded the Prize) I would like to offer my thoughts. In the years immediately after I felt a certain pride in my admittedly slim connection to the award and would occasionally find an excuse to insert it in conversations. For a time I even included it at the bottom of my resume, mostly as a check of whether interviewers had actually read the thing. But , with the reprehensible nature of so many of the recent awardees I have long since ceased having any pride in my association with the prize and now find even thinking about it will fill me with an uneasy sense of embarrassment, a feeling that is growing even as I write this. My overly long winded point is that you deserve something much more meritorious than a Nobel and though it is far beyond my power to grant that, I will offer this. I have spent my entire life with an almost ironclad rule not to embrace belief in anything based on what someone says, but when you state that you are not in this for awards but to seek the truth, that is something I believe with a firmness that is exceeded by few things in my life. The train of events of recent years has often left me struggling like Sisyphus to keep from sliding into despair and though I have other resources to support me, I am amazed, in thinking back, how often a visit to this site has provided the glimmer of light I needed to keep the darkness from engulfing me. For that, no words of thanks could hope to express the depth of my gratitude, but I hope that this comment will help you understand, if only in a small way, how deep that gratitude really is.
REPLY: Thank you for the kind words, really it is no big deal. Truth is the simplest of rewards, but often the most gratifying. – Anthony
This demonstrates the level of ‘global warming’ that the city heat island effect can generate. If a simple tarmac strip can generate four or six degrees of temperature increase, then many of the met stations that have been swallowed up by urban sprawl will be giving completely erroneous readings.
I think a trial is in order – several identical sensors in different environments within the same locality (next to water, tarmac, grass, air-con units) to see the variability in temperature.
>>>If the ground is warmed by an idling jet engine, what
>>>would an engine at takeoff power do to the air around a runway?
I can tell you it is hot! Even a considerable distance behind the runway (i’m not a spotter honest) you can feel a ten degree or so increase in temperature. The increase is transient, of course, but the thermometer would no doubt register this rise.
In addition, the tarmac around the runway threshold dries out very quickly, unlike the rest of the runway and the runway edges, indicating a retention of heat by the runway which could be reradiated later.
Simple to test, I would have thought. If you have a local (busy) airport with a met station near the runways, you could place an identical sensor in a nearby field and note the difference. Ideally, the sensors would also need to be adjacent to each other for a few days, to make sure they are reading identically.