Guest post by John Goetz
As noted in the previous post, GISS has released their monthly global temperature summary for June, 2009. This month’s whopping anomaly of 0.63C is once again much higher than that of RSS, UAH, and even NOAA, which is the source of the GISS temperature data. Not only is the anomaly higher than the other metrics, but it is trending in the opposite direction.
Temperature data from 1079 stations worldwide contributed to the analysis, 134 of them being located in the 50 US states. Data from essentially the same few stations have been used for the past twenty-four months. Many, many hundreds of stations that have historically been included in the record and still collect data today continue to be ignored by GISS in global temperature calculations.
Once again, the bulk of temperatures comprising the present-day worldwide GISS average come from airports – in this case 554 airports, according to the NOAA metadata from the V2 station inventory. In the US, the ratio of airports to total stations continues to run very high, with 121 out of the 134 reporting stations being located at airports.
Why worry about airports? Aside from recent posts on this site documenting problems with airport ASOS equipment in the US, WUWT has also documented a number of equipment siting problems, notably the typical close proximity of the equipment to a tarmac heat sink. Airports can introduce a mini-UHI effect where one would otherwise not be found.
The NOAA metadata is not entirely accurate, and several stations located at airports are not noted as such. Some examples include Londrina and Brasilia in Brazil, Ely / Yelland in Nevada, and Broome in Austrailia. Those stations were easy to find because they had “airport” (or some variant) in the station name. A check of coordinates using Google Earth confirmed the airport locations.
Let’s examine the metadata a little further, shall we?
NOAA says that 345 of the stations it passes on to GISS are rural and presumably free of UHI influence. Fifteen of those stations are located in the US. However, only 201 of those rural stations are not located at an airport, and therefore presumably free of UHI effects (including tarmac heat sinks). In the US, only one of the fifteen stations is listed as both rural, and not located at an airport: Ely / Yelland in Nevada.
Doh!!! As noted above, that station is located at an airport – confirmed not just by Google Earth, but also by NOAA’s NCDC website as well! This means that all of the US temperatures – including those for Alaska and Hawaii – were collected from either an airport (the bulk of the data) or an urban location.
As for the rest of the world, some of the stations listed as being rural and not at an airport have metadata indicating they are located in an area of “dim” or “bright” lights. Filtering those out, we find a total of 128 stations that are rural, not at an airport, and “dark”.
Why are “dark” stations important? Recall that GISS uses dark stations to adjust for UHI in the urban stations. With only 128 dark stations available, none being in the US, it would seem this is an impossible task.
Fortunately, GISS adjustment rules allow old data to be used in adjusting new data. The older “non-reporting” rural weather stations continue to adjust reporting urban stations, even though the most recent two years of overlap is missing.
Thankfully, the algorithms are robust enough to calculate adjustments to the 100th of a degree even when data is missing.
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Where can one find the station list? It would be interesting to look it over. There are probably more crypto-airports. For example in Sweden many seemingly “rural” sites are actually at military airfields.
Reply: It is not posted anywhere, but was not that hard to determine. I filtered the v2.mean file for all entries that had valid June, 2009 temperatures. I further filtered that with the list of stations actually used produced by GISS.
Its funny how IPCC believes “UHI has no impact at all!!”
– and yet GISS just “happens” to choose only stations with good possibility for UHI.
I hope the whole world will wake up soon. I miss real science from the good old days.
This is like receiving an economic report from the USSR tabling the great economic results, while ignoring the people lined up for their bread ration.
Must keep doctor Hansen happy, science and accuracy has nothing to do with it.
This GISS is unfortunately symbolic of “civilisation” run amok. We’re back to Stalinism: cut, paste, fabricate, make up and manipulate data until it supports the agenda of a few nutjobs in high places. Rewrite history if you have to! It doesn’t get more perverse than that. Yes, that’s how I feel about GISS and NOAA – they’re bunch of science perverts. Makes you want to vomit, doesn’t it.
[snip]
Latest developments:
Heated runways to keep them ice free.
Bigger aircraft, bigger engines, bigger ground support vehicles, bigger buildings, more asphalt, more heat, all at the same location of the weather station.
It’s called progress and we would like to keep it this way.
So it’s time to kick the morons and scare mongers out of office and get to work again.
We have real problems to solve and our climate is not one of them.
Simple solution.
Want to avoid global warming?
Don’t live at an airport.
“WUWT has also documented a number of equipment siting problems, notably the typical close proximity of the equipment to a tarmac heat sink.”
I wonder?
Seems somehow appropriate, today. Showed up in my email queue from poethunter.com:
“Weather”
Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be–
Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,
With a record of unreason seldome paralleled on earth.
While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incandescent youth,
From the coals that he’d preferred to the advantages of truth.
He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote
On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote–
For I read it in the rose-light of the everlasting glow:
“Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow.”
Ambrose Bierce
OT:
BBC blog refelcting on frontpage, Spectator, “Global warming is a myth”:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/07/anyone_seen_the_front_page.html
Havent read it yet..
I think the current GISS anomaly has more to do with ocean data bias than airport temperature bias. This will be Hansen’s fallback cover if he gets audited.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2003.5/to:2009.5/plot/gistemp/from:2003.5/to:2009.5/offset:-0.2/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2007.5/to:2009.5/scale:1.7/offset:-0.25
If the Honolulu airport data influences a large part of the Pacific, that might explain the discrepancy this month.
I mean his fallback cover story will be that he shifted GISS to use more ocean data in mid 2008 because of ‘problems’ with land data, including UHI around airports.
I think he had a panic attack in Jan last year, stacked a 0.5C rise on the data, realised it wouldn’t fly, and fudged it for a couple of months. Then realised he’d be found out by numerical fingerprinting and started using a heavier bias of ocean data to prop up the anomalies.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2003.5/to:2009.5/plot/gistemp/from:2003.5/to:2009.5/offset:-0.2/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2007.5/to:2009.5/scale:1.7/offset:-0.25
Anthony.
” Thankfully, the algorithms are robust enough to calculate adjustments to the 100th of a degree even when data is missing”.
Is your tongue firmly in your cheek?
REPLY: Note the post is by my friend John Goetz – A
Could we start a campaign to educate Bill O’reilly on Fox News. He believes GISS and Jim Hansen. Glenn Beck has tried to explain what is going on, but Bill is six cookies short of a dozen. He repeated the GISS nonsense again, yesterday, July 14. His email is oreilly@foxnews.com.
Jeff
On the local news last night in Oklahoma, I noticed the temperature difference in Tulsa vs. the surrounding areas. The Tulsa news station I watch gets their temperature info from the Tulsa International airport. Temp last night was 12 degrees higher in Tulsa than it was where I live, which is about 45 miles east. In fact, Tulsa was at least 6 degrees hotter than any surrounding communities in ANY direction!!! That is the definition of a heat island. Those are not typo’s. That was a full twelve degrees difference!
Regarding the BBC blog Frank mentioned: I had a quick look and discovered that it’s an article about an article in Spectator about Ian Pilmer’s book. Intentionally sarcastic, it was reviewed in the Spectator by Delingpole because Pilmer is one of a ‘dying breed who concedes nothing in climate change.’ The only point in the BBC article as far as I can see is to add that Moonbat has compiled a list of basic errors and finds it laughable.
Thanks John for this article. I have noticed that the local record high temperatures of the day usually comes from airports here in Europe and I was wondering what is the percentage of surface stations located at airports.
I know that surfacestations.org aims mainly at the US stations but I was wondering what is the status in the rest of the world.
Frankly, it doesn’t seem scientifically plausible to compare today’s world temperatures with the ones recorded 80 years before when nowadays a large percentage of surface stations are located at airports. It is not that we have covered 50% of Earth’s surface with airports.
Anyway, as Flanagan says, the bulk of the discrepancy can be explained by the warming of the south pole, where the bulk of the world’s airports are, I guess.
“the science is in” Lets go for the numbers that support the presuppositions
Same goes for models. Lets chose those that fit our expectations.
Now if Hansen uses these, He can just get all huffy and claim, “How dare you question my numbers or conclusions” He is THE scientist of course.
I have an aunt that has translated the bible in the jungle for several languages. The point she makes is this is how the local witch doctors operate. Bringing in just a few antibiotics or sutures causes them to go into threats and hysteria. A well supplied first aid kit threatens them to the core.
Some middle school science students with a few instruments may be intimidating. Just a thought. Of course the sun cranks out so much heat and the runnways according to an engineering friend who is also my yacht club neighbor they are incredibly thick. In our local airport, we have somewhat regular deliveries of huge airplane parts by the Russian freightors. A modified 124 record load of 253.82 tonnes of cargo landing with several dozen tires sending all kinds of smoke from friction when it lands. Even with a lighter cargo, the heat is massive. A couple of points. The runway is incredibly thick to carry this impact. It retains heat because of it’s mass.
Or this from Hansen.
Page 673– even Hansen says there is unexplained warming in the ’40’s Arctic
“The model’s fit with peak warmth near 1940 depends in
part on unforced fluctuations, e.g., the runs of Hansen et al.
(2005b), with nearly identical forcings to those in this
paper, appear to agree better with observations. As expected,
the runs in which the solar forcing includes only the
Schwabe 11-year solar cycle (Fig. 4), available on the
GISS web-site and included in Table 2 as AltSol, do not
produce peak warmth near 1940. AltSol also differs from
the standard ‘‘all forcing’’ scenario in having the sulfate
forcing reduced by 50%, thus yielding an 1880–2003 global
warming of 0.64C.
It may be fruitless to search for an external forcing to
produce peak warmth around 1940. It is shown below that
the observed maximum is due almost entirely to temporary
warmth in the Arctic. Such Arctic warmth could be a
natural oscillation (Johannessen et al. 2004), possibly unforced.”
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_3.pdf
Fudge are us.
Anybody that doubts the Heat Island Effect of airports (especially major urban ones with hundreds of acres of tarmac or concrete heat sinks) needs only be around one for a couple of years.
I worked in the environs of IAH (Houston’s “big” airport) for 17 years, directly under the southerly flight path (I forget the runway number but it was around 180). Every afternoon at about 3:15 a KLM “heavy” (a 747 combi) loaded with frreight would pass directly over our headquarters building and I swear that you could count the rivets on the landing gear doors. Visions of that little KLM incident on Tenerife.
The massive amount of surface area in concrete and tarmac created a thermal “mountain” in the heat of the day, especially in the summer, and you could watch the thunderheads build around this little thermal mountain range every afternon starting around about 2 pm.
[On a related note, there was one of those Wacky Mega Projects proposed in the 1970’s to PAVE (actually, spray a thin layer of bitumen) in a wide strip across North Africa, say 50 -100 miles form the coast, to create a thermal mountain range to suck wet air off of the Med. France, Italy and Greece weren’t too happy, since if it worked, their Med coastal rains would likely have disappeared. In any case, “Maghreb” and “major civil works” have not appeared in the same sentence since Carthage, so it never happened.
In my view, there’s nothing particularly wrong with having weather stations proximate to these Heat Islands, UNLESS of course you plan to use the “data” as the basis of GLOBAL CLIMATE STUDIES.
Porto Alegre…Brasil
Station Information from GHCNv2 Inventory
country: 303
wmo_identifier: 83967
mod: 000
name: Porto Alegre
latitude: -30.00
longitude: -51.18
elevation: 3
elev_interpolated: 30
population_type: Urban (population > 50,000)
*****population_in_thousands: 1109……………….MORE…4000
topography_type: Flat
vegetation_type: No information
location_type: Within 30 km from the coast
distance_to_coast: 5
*****is_at_airport: Not at an airport……………….AIRPORT
dist_to_airport: -9…???????
grid_vegetation: Warm Grass/Shrub
Frank Lansner (06:10:04) :
OT:
BBC blog refelcting on frontpage, Spectator, “Global warming is a myth”:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/07/anyone_seen_the_front_page.html
Havent read it yet..
Thanks for the posting Frank.
It’s a scandalous frontal attack to Plimer’s reputation, us skeptics and deniers, Spectator and science.
We are used to this kind of BS from from the BBC but I really hope Plimer will take them into court.
It has become clear that GB now has become a Satellite State of the new Russia.
Well here’s a helpful explanation from a RealClimate poster
I think it’s James Hansen or Al Gore as some guy named Wayne?
He predicts “Global temperatures may be highest in history soon.”
I’ll take the lead on this and establish something new.
Instead of History we need a GISStory category.
Yes, soon global temperatures may be highest in GISStory.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/
153. wayne davidson says:
14 July 2009 at 8:44 PM
Warming Interrupted? Seas responsible?? Well , June just past was 2nd warmest in history, with the southern Hemisphere being 2nd warmest as well… A contradiction?
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/SH.Ts.txt
So I await some convincing conviction statement on this temperature pause. Seems that current El-Nino is poised to surpass 1998 one, if this trend holds, Global temperatures may be highest in history soon.