People send me stuff. My Inbox bursts daily with ideas, suggestions, papers, and photos.
Here is a climate monitoring station in Tremonton Utah. Notice anything peculiar about the placement of the temperature sensor? It is the white “bee hive” on the pole on the asphalt.
Note the conduit for the cable to the MMTS. This underscores something I’ve been saying about the MMTS installation for some time. The COOP managers that install these aren’t given the tools or time to get past obstructions like asphalt and concrete, thus the MMTS ends up closer to buildings than the “wireless” Stevenson Screen.
Randy Julander writes in:
Randy Julander here, snow survey supervisor, NRCS, USDA. Here are a few pics from the Tremonton Utah MMTS site which is right outside our NRCS field office in Tremonton. Normally there is a large truck parked right next to the sensor. As you can see, next to the building, next to the air conditioner, asphalt everywhere. Nice placement.
I’ll say, right on the pavement, 10 feet from the building. Randy mentions a truck being parked by the sensor. It shows up nicely on the Google aerial view:
A live Google maps interactive view is here
Temperature measurement issues aside, I wonder what the wind tunnel between the vehicles does for the accuracy of the rain gauge?
Here is the view looking north showing the parking lot that doubles as a climate monitoring station.
In the photo below, notice how the rain gauge and MMTS have been placed in parallel with the diagonal parking. This is not accidental.
While we have many people who are actively surveying the USHCN network, there are still hundreds of other NOAA/NWS COOP stations that are not part of the special USHCN subset of stations.
There is also the COOP-A network, which is used in climate and the is reported to NCDC, just like USHCN.
Most importantly, these stations are used by NCDC’s FILNET program, which will “fill in” missing data for a single station.
Here’s more on FILNET from NCDC:
FILNET (Fill Missing Original Data in the Network)
Estimates for missing data are provided using a procedure similar to that used in SHAP. This adjustment uses the debiased data from the SHAP and fills in missing original data when needed (i.e. calculates estimated data) based on a “network” of the best correlated nearby stations. The FILNET program also completed the data adjustment process for stations that moved too often for SHAP to estimate the adjustments needed to debias the data.
The B91 for Marysville is shown at left. Note the significant amount of missing data.
This happened because the volunteer observer was the fire station office manager, who didn’t work weekends or holidays, and had vacation throughout the year. Even though the fire station was manned 24/7, unfortunately the firefighters on-duty did not participate in keeping the records.
See a B91 form page from the Marysville USHCN record at left and note the missing data.
COOP-A stations like Tremonton Utah one are used by NCDC’s FILNET to interpolate missing data for nearby USHCN stations. Thus, it is just as important that they also be properly sited and maintained.
It appears though that they may suffer from the same sort of maintenance and siting issues that the USHCN does. After all, other than being a special subset of the COOP-A network, chosen for continuity of records over a long period and a minimum of site moves, there really is no other difference between USHCN and COOP-A stations.
They are all part of the same group and are maintained by the same people using the same tools and methods.
It seems that the sot of problems we see at Tremonton UT are widespread in the entire COOP-A network as well as USHCN. I’ll have more examples in future posts.
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Any time estimate on when you will finish your analysis of the whole network?
So dark pavement and asphalt are the cause of global warming. Joe Romm and Gavin Schmidt must read these posts. If they oppose honest science to support their superstition they call science, so be it. This web site is so enlightening. Monday algore speaks (preaches ) in australia. This bad data is why they are more afraid than ever on asking questions. It creates shame.
why not place a rain guage under a tree?
Another OT, sorry, but Peter Sissons, a long time television news broadcaster in the UKhas launched a withering attack on the BBC’s reporting of the `Climate Change’ issue, saying:
“Notice anything peculiar about the placement of the temperature sensor?”
Well, actually, no. It all seems common. Sad fact that, yes?
Humm,
Would it be a violation of your copyright Anthony to make a large poster of sites like this with the caption “This is man-made global warming at its best.” Then stand outside AGW meetings???
Just a thought – maybe even get an MSM picture.
Mike
REPLY: no issues with that – Anthony
Post Script –
I’m familiar with Tremonton (near Ogden), a hot place anyway. It’s at the northern end of the Bonneville lake bed prior to the climb to Idaho, Montana or Wyoming. The terrain means northerly and easterly winds warm as they come down the thousand or so feet from the plateau above.
Mike
I still can not figure out how anyone could claim this information has “little or no bearing” on the conclusions reached by those who utilize this data. With a slight wave of the hand it is dismissed as irrelevant. One of my pet peeves is when engaged in conversation, the other persons says “let me be perfectly honest with you”. That little phrase tells you all you need to know about what is coming next.
So, what is going on in the minds of the people that set up these stations? I set up a station this year at my place and went out of my way to find a non-corrupted site lest I lose the value of my investment by poor placement.
This looks like an example of “good enough for government work” at its poorest. Either that or the people called upon to site these units don;t have a clue as to what they are doing, or have incompetent supervision, or both. What a waste!!
If, instead of painting all our roofs and roadways white, we just painted the area around these stations, we could save paint, compared to Dr. Chu’s plan. Global temperature, as measured, would fall, and they could go back to scaring us with deja flu, or something. Mmmm, no – they’d just adjust it back up…
Best,
Frank
Still working on summer plans. Any chance that Randy will be visiting Corinne?
You know the thought just occured to me. How much heat capacitance in joules does the totall of all the cubic meters of asphalt layed on the ground hold in comparison to the ammount of anthropogenic Co2 we have put into the atmosphere. I mean, it’s night time im walking my dog on this parking lot, and it’s still hot. I should do a google search see if there is an easy way to determine the total anthropogenic cubic meters of asphalt and it’s heat capacitance.
Is there a possible way to set up a small competing network of temperature monitors in ideal surroundings. Perhaps on some farms or other adequately large properties of volunteers? One could select areas that are served by corrupted stations, number them, throw the numbers in a hat and randomly choose, say 2 dozen to “twin”. Naturally it would require some donations and I suppose they should automatically record at the right times of day and night. Or is this not practicable? We would soon get a measure of whether corrections being done for official sites are being overdone.
It is obvious what is wrong with the placement.
The sensor is too close to the doors of the building which is air conditioned. Whenever somebody steps out of the building the sensor will get a blast of cold air thus artificially lowering the temperature. Therefore the temperature readings need to be adjusted upwards.
Gary Pearse (18:24:58)
I think it would be better to use one of the temp loggers from Anthony’s toy store. You could get min/max but also a shape of the temp profile. TOBS wouldn’t matter, you have a continuous record. And they would work all by themselves without an operator. Some can even link to a PC which could record everything and send it to a data analysis location. Would take some volunteers and contributions, I agree. Sign me up.
Somebody screwed up this installation. No BBQ.
An interesting misspelling that would not have been picked up with spell check.
3rd paragraph from the end.
“It seems thought hat….
Both are correct spellings, just not when used together.
REPLY: Thanks fixed -A
I give credit to the volunteer’s cleverness in managing to install the equipment. I’m sure he wants to help, but he just simply doesn’t have a suitable location. Even if he tunneled the cable into the nearby green area, it looks like it has too much overgrowth. Hmm.. on the photo looking north, there also is a downward slope. The Google photo shows a large shadow from trees on the south side of the green area, so there is an open space but probably not as large as required. The downward slope could also mean that’s not a cleared level field. So even some tree cutting might not form a suitable location.
There is no reason in this day and age for this nonsense. We don’t need gatekeepers for this global data either.
What about a complete reboot of the surface temperature record.
It is what it is. Let us argue about the past, while we start a new baseline for ALL surface stations. A raw data set of temperatures, their stations, methods, etc. for any researcher to analyze.
A reset would dictate that the poorly sited spots become a part of the baseline for future global data with prior biases now history. A policy that any station move be documented to accepted standards is not unreasonable.
Get as many stations as we can. With current technology every station could be entered into a googleearth file, with pictures and links to raw, pure unadulterated data. We should be able to at least quadruple the station networks world wide for posterity.
Some of these stations could also choose to measure local water temps.
Our future scientists would applaud this desicion.
Data manipulation is really just lame scientists keeping their shoes dry. End the manipulation tomorrow.
If the US surface station network suffers from so many UHI and siting deficiencies that result in a false warming trend, then why does the UAH satellite data, which should be more representative, have a higher trend than GISS for the US and surrounding regions?
http://i40.tinypic.com/nget8k.png
http://i43.tinypic.com/4in94x.jpg
How many people coming out the door into the bright light have tripped over the cable conduit? Where’s OSHA? And that rain gauge looks like it’s been clipped a couple of times.
Hi folks,
I hope you’ll forgive an off topic question… I’ve wondered for some time just how solid the atmospheric CO2 measurements are? How robust and reliable is the system? I haven’t run across anything addressing this side of the whole AGW issue.
Thanks!
David Ball (18:03:47) :
I still can not figure out how anyone could claim this information has “little or no bearing” on the conclusions reached by those who utilize this data.
This station is not part of GISS Temp data (at least I could not find it) so will only change temperatures if it is used to infil.
Pretty amazing that when, decades from now, they write the books about the AGW hysteria, they’ll be shaking their heads as they acknowledge Anthony’s contribution. His pictures of poorly-sited surface stations will be featured cheek by jowl(s) with Algore.
I just want to live long enough to enjoy perusing these texts and having the satisfaction of shutting the book knowing that Al’s visage will be snuggled against a nice picture of a temperature sensor in hot asphalt.
Scratch and sniff sulfur would be a nice touch.
Love the “How not to measure temperature” series – it’s the Sunday comics section of science.
So what we have here is an example of a bad station, whose data is used to make guesses about and fill in missing data for other bad stations. You can’t make this stuff up!
How about the CO2 measurements?
To start with – WUWT 4,6 and 7 Aug. 2008
Also, Ian Plimer’s book “Heaven+Earth” which is being published in USA this month, has several pages and many references to this. An interesting graph shows CO2 measured by the Pettenkofer method 1812 to 1961, comparing it with estimates from an Antarctic ice core. Apparently the IPCC rejected the high values of the Pettenkofer figures.
Robinson (17:36:44) :
Another OT, sorry, but Peter Sissons, a long time television news broadcaster in the UKhas launched a withering attack on the BBC’s reporting of the `Climate Change’ issue…
He gave the head of the Green Party a hard time she wasn’t expecting in an interview a while ago. I’ve tried to find the footage on the net. Not a chance. I bet the BBC has ritually burned the tape.
Peter Sissions is a national treasure, and will be missed. I hope the BBC take note of his words.