How to properly place your outdoor thermometer
04:52 PM PDT on Wednesday, July 29, 2009
By TRAVIS PITTMAN / KING5.com
excerpts:
SEATTLE – With temperatures in the Puget Sound region breaking records this week, many people are playing a watching and waiting game – waiting to see when the thermometer outside their home will reach triple digits.
…
Below is a photo of a thermometer sent to KING 5 News Tuesday afternoon by a viewer in Oso, east of Arlington. It clearly shows the temperature reading 116 degrees. You can also clearly tell the sun is reflecting off it and it’s mounted right next to a building.
source: KING 5 Viewer…
The National Weather Service says this is where you need to place your thermometer to get an accurate reading:
– It must be in a shaded, well-ventilated and open area, 5 feet above ground, give or take a foot.
– Away from sprinkler systems
– No closer than four times the height of any obstruction. For example, if a building is 10 feet tall, it needs to be no closer than 40 feet from that building.
– Located over natural ground such as grass, dirt or sod.
– At least 100 feet from road or concrete.
…
The picture they provide is what the surfacestations project is all about. Note the 100 foot distance from asphalt.
source: National Weather Service
Here is a diagram of how to properly place your thermometer to get an accurate reading.
Full article here h/t to WUWT reader “Ed”
(19:05:58) :
Competent literacy- spelling, grammar, punctuation, meanings of words that sound the same but are spelled differently, is a huge problem on every website I ever visit. Best solution: keep a dictionary handy and consult it if you have any doubt about what you’re about to write.
~~
A writer’s forum I’m on occasionally has homonym vent fests. There are entire books devoted to the subject. Spell check is not your friend. Online dictionaries are useful, and unless you want an obscure definition, fast.
Recently, I’ve seen piece and peace. Marshall and martial is getting pretty oldd. My favorite was ancestor instead of progeny.
Here in Kamloops we’ve been having some rather warm days and I’ve been having a very interesting time using the USB temperature monitors to record temperatures at various places around my yard. On my deck the peak temperature a couple of days ago was 120 F and that must have been with just the right sun angle on the thermistor. Inside my vehicle peak daytime temperatures have been 135 F and only dropping to 70 F by dawn. Going to a patch of lawn gives much lower temperatures and I don’t think my garden went above 100 F on the hottest day we’ve had thus far. A non-air conditioned basement in our house is a steady 75 F demonstrating that we did a good job insulating it a few years ago.
Before moving to Kamloops I used to live in downtown Vancouver and used to find summers intolerable. The UHI effect is quite pronounced there and, if I still lived there, I’d be spending most of my time on the beach this summer. I suspect that a lot of people confuse UHI effects with global warming. Having the USB temperature monitors has allowed me to obtain temperature vs time data for numerous locations and revealed a far greater variation in temperature in my yard than I suspected. People have known for years that on hot summer days you sit in the shade or the beach and avoid areas of pavement exposed to full sun. I don’t know what it would take to make the MSM realize that there is no single temperature reading for a city but rather a large range of temperatures depending on where one happens to be.
Spelling, grammar, punctuation?
Results of a slow day?
whop, whop, whop
Effectively we have a winter type weather track, that has set up about 2-4 months too early. Here in Omaha we are at 71 and Seattle (oddly enough where I am now and where I came from) is at 103. Now if we look at a typical winter day in say November, it would be 50 degrees in Seattle and 20 degreesin Omaha, same differential, just the temps would have been more normal, but since the pattern developed with the sun still in the northern hemisphere the temps are much higher. This is what it looks like to me anyway, but I am an electronic tech with an interest in weather not a meteorologist (though I keep thinking of going back for the degree)
Oh and Seattle, I know that it was just as hot about 6 years ago cause I was still living there at the time (I thought it was funy though that we had our families all come up to enjoy the moderate temps just the same week we were breaking records)
L (19:05:58) :
I read a lot of books. Gone are the days when you never got a spelling mistake in a book! I blame spell checkers. I can’t remember a real example but things along the line of: “I went to by a book” or “I red in a book” The problem comes when a word is misspelled but by a real word – then you don’t get a red line under it and so it gets through.
OT: Why do folks write it’s for its? Please stop!
I’m in the Puget Sound, and it’s a scorcher….so the warmers are all atwitter. After two miserable years of rotten weather, I’m flat out ecstatic. Many people I know agree this is the best summer we’ve ever seen. So we stole it from California, so what? We’ve paid our dues. It is bound to happen now and then. The start of June this year was one of the coldest on record, and it snowed about 4 times as often this last winter. This situation really offers a great example of why weather is not climate.
That is absolutely a flash bulb reflection.
MattB (20:33:31) :
Somehow I just can’t see Monty Python ever being referenced over on Real Climate…
The Pacific NW gets warm and dry typically when the PNA teleconnection spikes.
Right now it is raging positive:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/pna.shtml
Which coincides with the nasty mean almost “omega block” over the region and all the way above the Arctic Circle….where the Jet Stream is deflected like a crazy bend in a log flume ride….or an oxbow on a very old river….
http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_pac_init_00.gif
Meanwhile the upper level anticyclone which has been beating down Texas with heat this summer….shifted west to beat down the Pac NW for a while…
…Due to the strengthening trough in the East as the NAO (piggybacked on its underwater cousin, the AMO) has been negative or near negative…since May!
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/nao.shtml
And Central Park has had a record “cool” summer so far….July is almost over….so some records…
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Paddy (17:40:12) :
Yes, flat tires go whop, whop, whop. The only exception is Pierelli tires.
Hey, Paddy, you missed another italianate malaprop in you post:
Yes, flat tires da go whop, whop, whop. The only exception is Pierelli tires. [La lingua italiana non ha ancora una th suono.] Also isn’t that the sound of gelatto hitting the dish? [Nessun insulto dire agli italiani o in Italia.]
Why not question the accuracy of a cheap mass produced dial thermometer? I bought one when I moved up to the Puget Sound Area in ’92. When I got a mobile home on my property and bought a good mercury lab grade thermometer from Wind and Weather I compared the two and threw the dial away. It read 5 deg. low.
There have been several mentions of a decrescendo of CAGW hype in Sci. Am. magazine, add the Seattle NBC TV station to the list.
smokey: ” Lots of misuse can be avoided by remembering that the apostrophe indicates either a possessive “. Except for it’s, which is why it’s a special problem.
layne Blanchard (20:38:36) : “I’m in the Puget Sound, and it’s a scorcher….so the warmers are all atwitter. After two miserable years of rotten weather, I’m flat out ecstatic. Many people I know agree this is the best summer we’ve ever seen. So we stole it from California, so what? We’ve paid our dues. It is bound to happen now and then. The start of June this year was one of the coldest on record, and it snowed about 4 times as often this last winter. This situation really offers a great example of why weather is not climate.”
Prescient, reasonable observations. Agreed.
Mother Earth….ever trying to calm her noisy, impatient children towards equilibrium, ALWAYS finds a way to balance herself out (and the noisy brats that call her “Mom”, too).
If you are in one fixed point, like most of us are….the LOOOOOONG waves that propagate too slowly for us humans to perceive are ever moving across the globe.
One moment its a cold spell…the trough…and then six months later…the crest arrives.
People in this part of the world (the Pac NW and SW Canada) are smart enough to get it….and suffer through this cycle.
The Pacific winds will return….as they have over there on the coast.
Hello to my little brother and his family in Bend!. Love ya.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
That is NOT the camera flash, nor is it a direct reflection of the sun.
The sun would have to be just rising or setting to be at that position. A camera flash would be much closer to the center of the clear cover, and we would see a sharp shadow against the wall off to the left. The low contrast indicates the thermometer is in the shade, evenly illuminated by ambient light. The bright light could be a secondary reflection of the sun, angled off something too distant to make a shadow, perhaps a sloping car windshield.
Another thing about the thermometer, it’s (a contraction of it is) full of water vapor. You can see the condensation dripping on the inside of the plastic.
ABC was in full tree hugging mode on the Seattle story. Proof positive!
They spent five minutes on the heat ending with coverage of a bit of highway median grass fire (about three car lengths worth). End of the world tone throughout.
How could they have missed the over 3000 cold temperature records set in July all over the country in favor of reporting a hot day in Seattle?
I reside in Washington, on the west side of the Cascade Mountains.
.
Not a few times, since around 1983 or so, did I experience rather warm weather in the mountainous areas.
.
In fact, at least twice that I’ve personally witnessed, the air temperature got warmer with the altitude — to a point.
.
Where I reside currently —at an altitude of 621 ft.— it often gets cooler than the surrounding lower elevations, and consonantly gets warmer then those same lower elevations.
.
There are a number of reasons for that, and anyone cogitating at length will surmise those reasons, it having much to do with the atmospheric pressure itself.
.
Now, helicopters make a ‘whop’ sound with their main blades, and a ‘guinea’ with their tail (stabilizer) blades.
.
Of course, there’s a rather dated joke about the American helicopter which had been shot down over Rome (of all places) because the large blade was going ‘whop-whop-whop’ and the small blades were going ‘guinea-guinea-guinea’!
.
:o)
.
Why would the flash go off in broad daylight? Must be a very cheap camera if this is the case. Then again, if it did go off, it would not be so intense compared to ambient light.
Here in “Golden” Chilliwack (where they actually film the series “Eureka”, we had a nice 38 C (i.e. 100.4 F) yesterday and about the same today. But the killer is not really the temperature but the humidity level. We had about 76% relative humidity. The humidex must have been about 45 C or more.
It looks to me like it is night time due to the very dark area to the right that would not be that way in the middle of the day, it would also make the flash completely unnecessary. The thermometer is clearly broken.
An interesting article…but I’d say the light reflecting of the plastic cover of the thermometer is a flash, not the sun.
This is an unfortunately below-standard topic today, not the level I am used to on this site.
For a comparable regional heat wave in the Pacifc Northwest, I got 1942:
Portland WB City
1942-06-30,102.0,68.0,
1942-07-01,104.0,72.0,
1942-07-02,107.0,71.0,
Vancouver4 NNE
1961-07-11,104.0,67.0,
1961-07-12,103.0,63.0,
1961-07-13,100.0,65.0,
1942-06-30,105.0,63.0,
1942-07-01,100.0,68.0,
1942-07-02,102.0,68.0,
1907-07-30,105.0,59.0,
Battle Ground, Or
1942-06-30 100.0 55.0
1942-07-01 103.0 72.0
1942-07-02 101.0 57.0
Salem AP
1942-06-30 102.0 63.0
1942-07-01 101.0 64.0
1942-07-02 104.0 64.0
Corvallis Un., Or.
1905-07-08,109.0,57.0,
1942-06-30,100.0,63.0,
1942-07-01,101.0,66.0,
1942-07-02,104.0,66.0,
Medford AP, Or.
1942-06-29 100.0 55.0
1942-06-30 105.0 58.0
1942-07-01 108.0 63.0
1942-07-02 106.0 64.0
Redding, CA FS
1942-06-29 103.0 71.0
1942-06-30 109.0 74.0
1942-07-01 110.0 79.0
1942-07-02 107.0 78.0
1942-07-03 105.0 75.0
Olympia, WA Priest Pk.
1942-06-30 100.0 55.0
1942-07-01 103.0 62.0
1942-07-02 101.0 62.0
Nothing else was that widepread, but a lot of stations are missing data, Portland is supposed to go back to 1856. I find this a lot.
What’s the big secret?
The other thing I find are some older rural stations with this hot period missing.
Check it out for yourselves.
Looks sort of fishy to me.
OT:
Environment Canada should get their story right for a change:
In the Vancouver — The Canadian Press Last updated on Thursday, Jul. 30, 2009 12:49PM EDT ” “A very strong ridge of high pressure is currently dominating all of B.C.,” said Gary Dickinson, a meteorologist with Environment Canada. “The ridge of high pressure also brought up from the south very warm air, which was responsible for the record-breaking temperatures.”
And now in the Jane Armstrong Vancouver — From Friday’s Globe and Mail Last updated on Friday, Jul. 31, 2009 01:04AM EDT “As forecasters we care about two things: Is the wind blowing onshore or offshore? And if you answer that question, you can tell a lot about the weather. If the wind blows offshore for a prolonged period of time, a heat wave sets in.”
So dear Environment Canada… did the wind that caused the 2009 heatwave blow from the South -ocean- or from the East -land-? ROTFLOL!!!!!!!
““As forecasters we care about two things: Is the wind blowing onshore or offshore?” says Mr. Jones, meteorologist for Environment Canada.
And at least we know where the Hot Air is coming from…
fyi, based on the shadow, the reflection is clearly the flash from the camera. Just helpin out!
Smokey: ” Lots of misuse can be avoided by remembering that the apostrophe indicates either a possessive “. Except for it’s, which is why it’s a special problem.
possessive pronouns don’t get the apostrophe:ours, yours, its, his, hers, and theirs. Should be easy to remember now. class dismissed again 🙂