The Hillsboro, Ohio USHCN climate station of record, measuring rainfall and the “surface” temperature. Note the MMTS temperature sensor laying flat on the ground.
To be fair, apparently the station is in the process of being moved. The new addition to the home (seen below) required it to be moved around to the side.
Surfacestations.org volunteer Ed Fix writes in the station survey:
Private residence, second longest continuously used Coop. site in Ohio. It has been at the present position since 1959, and in use in the area since 1893.
The previous owners of the house Marie and Thomas Knott, now deceased, collected the data from 1959 until Marie’s death in 2007. Current resident is continuing the observation duties.
MMTS temp, manual rain gauge. Rain gauge has been in use since at least 1959. The instrumentation is in the process of being moved. The previous location is on the south end of a deck (removed 3 weeks ago), approximately 14′ from the metal-sided south wall of the house, 40′ west of the new location. It was approx 42′ from an air conditioner at the SW corner of the house. The station is to be set back up in the very near future.
The proposed new location is SE of the SE corner of the house, approx 21′. This is 32′ from the corner of the house next door, with an air conditioner condenser.
While one would think that maintaining a continuity of records for such a station would be of prime importance, it lays idle as the photography shows.
The first point here is that backyards are dynamic places, prone to land use changes and biases that result from the changing/evolving lifestyle of the owner of the home, which makes them less than desirable for gathering scientific data. The second point is that the gap in the record could easily be avoided if the local NWS COOP manager had worked to help the homeowner get the equipment operational again.
The USHCN is far from a homogeneous measurement system.
Addendum:
I should add that the many problems we have seen in the USHCN are not the fault of the volunteer observers. These people give their valuable time and dedicate their lives to doing a mostly thankless job. They do it mostly for their own satisfaction and interest in providing something useful that can be part of the permanent record of our country.
We should never forget that. They are to be congratulated for their service.
The responsibility for the errors in siting is with NOAA, as they are in charge of doing these installations and ensuring a modicum of quality control based on their own 100 foot rule.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/standard.htm
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But dont you realise that all this doesn’t matter. The graph in this article shows how accurate even the badly positioned stations are.
To be fair, the sensor has not been lying whilst it has been lying. As a sensitive sensor, I am sure it will be moved to correct the impression that it has misled anyone.
With apologies to Forrest Gump, “sensors is as sensors does”.
No biggie. Just whip out FILNET and fill in the missing temp data so we can know what the temp data should be. Heck, why stop there? Just keep beefing up the algorithm till all those expensive stations can be closed and a super-FILNET on steroids can take the temp data from a single station and fill in temp data for the entire country! Ain’t computers wonderful?!
I see the real problem here… it’s too close to the building!
I would really like to see the correction formula that Hansen applies to this one. LMAO
This is my survey, and I also say “unfair”.
Poor siting is one thing, it’s fair game, and it’s the job of the coop manager to negotiate the best site he can get, given the constraints of the location. But it’s unfair to judge a site by the fact that it’s in transition.
Let’s do a thought experiment. If I had visited this house one week after the station was set back up, would it have made the “how not to measure temperature” list? Even if I mentioned there was a month gap as it was being moved? I doubt it.
It’s not just back yards that are dynamic places. The whole world is dynamic. Buildings get built and torn down, stuff gets moved, construction schedules may or may not match, accidents happen, continents drift. Nothing is ever perfect. There’s a reason it’s hard to find any monitoring station that has been continuously operating in the same location for a decades at a time.
Marie handled the reporting duty by herself from the time her husband died in 1988 until her own death in 2007. The lady that lives there now called Marie her “adopted mother”, and was extremely nice and cooperative. She had to leave while I was there, but had no problem with me staying later and finishing up. She is very proud to be continuing the weather reporting duty from this station, and rightly so. She doesn’t deserve to be slammed for not taking measurements during the move. Many of these people volunteer their own time and their own property to do this reporting (it can’t be easy mowing around this thing without disturbing it). They deserve our thanks, and they certainly deserve the benefit of the doubt when things aren’t perfect.
Maybe I should have waited and come back after the site was set back up, but it was my first survey. I wanted to at least get a survey of where the monitor used to be, and where it will probably be after it’s set up again (that’s still not set in concrete–I don’t believe the Coop manager has seen the “new site” yet.) I’ll be more careful next time. In any event, I do intend to do a re-survey after it’s set up, whenever I get back to Hillsboro.
Ric Werme (12:36:06) :
“Kudos to the photographer – the apparent connection between the roof gutter and the rain gauge is brilliant! Was it intentional?”
Thanks. I’ll take any congratulations I can get, but in this case, I don’t deserve it. The gutter actually is connected to the rain gauge. I’m sure they have the proper correction factor.
Oh, wait. No, it’s not. Never mind.
ROFLMAO
Ed Fix (17:16:03) :
This is my survey, and I also say “unfair”.
Don’t get Anthony wrong Ed. I see the criticism being of NWS & the COOP manager not providing help to minimise disruption, no more than that as I think Anthony also mentioned earlier.
DaveE.
Ed Fix
“Many of these people volunteer their own time and their own property to do this reporting (it can’t be easy mowing around this thing without disturbing it). They deserve our thanks, and they certainly deserve the benefit of the doubt when things aren’t perfect.”
You’ve touched on something that has been worrying me a bit. I have now visited about 6 station sites. All the local people I have talked to have been cordial, open, and even supportive of what we are doing. I would like to use WUWT site as a reference for them, but I’m afraid they might feel they are being ridiculed.
A bit of cognitive dissonance for me, because I enjjoy reading these examples. I’m sure that the top NOAA and EPA controllers would love to encourage an adversarial relationship between us and their volunteers.
Like you, I have been impressed by the willingness of these volunteers to accept responsibility for what most of us would probably consider a world-class nuisance.
The station equipment displacement is bad enough, but it is very likely (judging solely from the histories of many other stations) that the meta-data will record little or anything about the disruption and movement of the instrumentation, making it impossible to evaluate the temperature record quality. Perhaps the site is so bad that this doesn’t make any difference here, but this sort of thing is a habit with the USHCN and thus the data from good sites also is jeopardized.
We need to all chip in and send them an Official WUWT grill. Looks like the regulation grill is missing from the photo.
I used to go to summer camp right outside of Hillsboro. It’s in the hills of southern Ohio. I used to do some rock climbing there when I was older. Great place and a nice town.
And… reporting on the temperature of my grill for my first annual WUWT cookout (drumroll)… 265C! Unprecedented!
Happy 4th to all!
The real travesty here is the stairway on the new addition. It goes straight to a pile of what looks like mulch. Flagstones people!! Only slightly more of a nuisance, but nice when you want to avoid sloshing through wet muck on your way out the back door. Helps keep the floors cleaner, too. 😉
Mr. Ed (sorry, I could not resist and I am sure you just rolled your eyes like every Ed I know when I break out that gem) I am sure that your revisit will have this station looking much better, and I encourage you to do the revisit if you have reason to be in Hillsboro.
Let’s face it. This system wasn’t set up to measure “climate change.” I guess the thought is that if it lays on the ground, it will absorb the heat from the ground.
Then, as the system grows, it becomes self aware, becomes frustrated with humanity, takes over the weather, and drives mankind back into caves as the planet heats uncontrollably! Deniers are really just time traveling robotic agents sent to destroy the savior…Al Gore.
more trash from CT spot the error
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.13.html
Climate-skeptic finishes up a bad legislation example with a dig at the poor supervision of surface stations, and a link to surfacestations.org…
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2009/07/bad-legislation.html
We don’t blame the curators. We appreciate them.
I’ve talked with dozens and met a few face to face. They are good people, conscientious volunteers. About the only thanks they get is to have their lawns trenched up and holes drilled in their houses.
(And not a few of them are skeptics, by the way, but their belief either way is not relevant to their unselfish service.)
The blame for poor siting does not fall on the curators.
Three cheers for the volunteers!
Ed Fix,
You made a good call. I do not think that the people who collect the data are being ridiculed. The places many of these stations are sited certainly is and the siting of the one you photographed must also be called into question. Hilarity aside (which is also not aimed at the people collecting the data but at the current state of the equipment) a number of the comments are aimed at how the non-existent data will be entered into the record. They are aimed at the ones who manipulate questionable siting figures to help produce “proof” of AGW. You know, the ones who march to the beat of the Al-Gore-Rhythmistas. 😀
Ed Fix (17:16:03) :
This is my survey, and I also say “unfair”.
juan (17:52:15) :
I have now visited about 6 station sites. All the local people I have talked to have been cordial, open, and even supportive of what we are doing. I would like to use WUWT site as a reference for them, but I’m afraid they might feel they are being ridiculed.
evanmjones (20:52:00) :
The blame for poor siting does not fall on the curators.
Afraid I have to agree with “unfair”. Poor siting indeed does not fall on the curators, but a measure of ridicule/censure does when they see their site picked for the “How not to measure temperature” series after years of faithful tedium recording and submitting data.
I just finished an Iowa site, and the curator couldn’t have been nicer. He took over the station from his son. The present location isn’t ideal, being near the house with a stand of trees surrounding three sides. The house sits atop a hill, however, and the trees are an essential windbreak. Farther away from the house would be fatal to the sensor, for the hill is a lightning magnet and the house has a full complement of lightning rods. Trees beyond the sensor show lightning scars, and a strike destroyed the inside readout once.
The site moved around in town several times, and finally out to the farm where it is now. Had he not taken it, we might have lost a long (1890’s) record to Filnet.
If we’re going to continue the “How not to” thread, perhaps we might leave out the station identification in the story. Anyone wanting to know could easily find out (the photo link title), but we might otherwise spare some curators some undeserved hard feelings.
Yep… Fisheries “management”(conservationalists) do the same… They take catch records and call it carefully collected and collated data. The assumption being all fisherman and operations are the same…. and of course all fisherman are scrupulous with the truth (yeah right)…… both assumptions are wrong… But the “scientists” (environmental activists) manipulate the shoddy data to show anything they desire… Inevitably to the detriment of the fishing industry.
So as an ex fisherman, it comes as no surprise to see the Eco Fascists engaging the same sort of tactics in the gathering of data for climate “studies” (Propaganda)
It’s been a highly successful tactic for them for a long time, making up science out of Bureaucratic record keeping.
Hate to sound like a naif, but couldn’t these things be excluded from urban and suburban neighborhoods and located in places where human activity doesn’t change the parameters. Places like National Parks and National Forests, (let the Rangers- more on the way- do the readings) or Private Golf Courses (let the pro take the readings) or even in extensive back yards.
Like Edyfix, I appreciate the efforts of the citizens who monitor these things, but think that the subject is a little more important than to be left to folks who have day jobs, take vacations, and so on. Can we re-analyze the data set from only the stations that are not compromised by the (very) local environment? For example, living on an acre+, more than half of the property is home only to the wild things still living in the Sonoran Desert. Put one of those thingys by my back fence and it won’t know anything other than what the temperature is doing, ’cause no human being other than the monitor will ever see it.
Can Anthony’s survey identify “pristine sites” and reduce the data set to only those sites which are not cmpromised by local development(s)? New sites dedicated to The Question” would probably be a good idea, but at the expense of starting from scratch. With all the compu-power out there, is there not a way to separate wheat from chaff without reinventing grain?
Question – are readings taken at the same local time every day at each station? If so, one need only look at the world time zones (which are subject to political boundaries, and such things as daylight savings time ) to understand at least one of the problems with this. Here’s a time zone overlay for Google Earth – http://www.barnabu.co.uk/files/kmz/timezone_clock.kmz .
Mike McMillan (00:36:37) :
“just finished an Iowa site, and the curator couldn’t have been nicer. ”
Which just goes to illustrate what I’ve always known–that rural Iowans are the nicest people on earth (this from a former Iowa farm boy).
L (01:40:03) :
“…couldn’t these things be excluded from urban and suburban neighborhoods and located in places where human activity doesn’t change the parameters…”
As far as “urban” settings, this one is about as good as it gets. It’s at the far south end of a small (pop ~6500) town, well away from the heat from the business district.
I was once at a conference where, after a researcher presented his work, an audience member made a rather thoughtless off-the-cuff comment about the quality of the underlying data.
The researcher’s answer was priceless, “Yes, it would be nice to have an infinite amount of noiseless data. The real world is seldom so accomodating.”
The Coop manager does know what kind of data he needs, but in the end, you always have to work with what you can get, not with what you wish you had. And he’s monitoring weather, not climate.
As I understand it, the deck where the sensor was mounted was deteriorating and had to be removed for safety. I’m sure the Coop manager didn’t have a hole built into his schedule just in case a station had to be moved that week. They also have a big job, involving more than just monitoring these volunteers.
I just hope the owner of the house doesn’t see this post, because if she does, I’ll never be able to get a re-survey when the monitor is operational again.
another “bubkes” deletet on “realclimate” by gavin and censored friends:
I think, they do not like reality:
why are “bubkes” so funny?
what do you “experts” say to the lower atmosphäre t trend:
1978/2004:
RATPAC (radiosonde) 0.02±0.07ºC per decade
HadAT2 (radiosonde) 0.03±0.08ºC per decade
UAH (satellite) 0.04±0.08ºC per decade
RSS (satellite) 0.13±0.08ºC per decade
UMd (satellite) 0.20±0.07ºC per decade
NCEP50 (reanalysis) -0.04±0.10ºC per decade
ERA40 (reanalysis) 0.07±0.10ºC per decade.
yea, realy bubkes, but real data for people who likes messuring urban heat islands.
what has realclimate.org to do with REAL CLIMATE if you permanant ignore or delete this “bubkes”???