Last week we had quite a row about temperature and temperature adjustments in Wellington New Zealand. One of the stations cited was the Kelburn district of Wellington, NZ.
NIWA issued a response statement regarding the charges leveled by The NZ Climate Science Coalition here:
http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise
They say:
Warming over New Zealand through the past century is unequivocal.
NIWA’s analysis of measured temperatures uses internationally accepted techniques, including making adjustments for changes such as movement of measurement sites. For example, in Wellington, early temperature measurements were made near sea level, but in 1928 the measurement site was moved from Thorndon (3 metres above sea level) to Kelburn (125 m above sea level). The Kelburn site is on average 0.8°C cooler than Thorndon, because of the extra height above sea level.
The NZ Climate Science Coalition responded with a series of graphs that showed how the temperature record of stations in Wellington looks:
And they write:
What’s interesting is that if you leave Kelburn out of the equation, Thorndon in 1910 is not far below Airport 2010. Perhaps that gave NIWA some confidence that the two locations were equivalent, but I’m betting Thorndon a hundred years ago was very different from an international airport now.
Of course we all know that airports tend to run hotter than surrounding areas due to the huge expanses of runway, tarmac, terminal buildings, and car parks they have become as aviation has grown in the last 100 years, so it is no surprise to see the airport hotter than Kelburn, which is higher in elevation and with a bit more greenery, owing to the nearby Botanical Gardens.
I had an interest in tracking down the Kelburn station, just to see how good it is. I was able to find it on Google Earth as an aerial view which you can see below. I was unsuccessful in my first attempts at finding a photograph to document the measurement environment of the Kelburn station. I picked up the hunt again a few days later, and found it hiding in plain site. Thank goodness for tourists.
You can see the Stevenson screen is surrounded by astronomical science, such as the historic Dominion Observatory and the Carter Observatory to the west (off screen). But from a climate science perspective, it is also surrounded by asphalt, with a car park to the east. According to the Google Earth measurement tool, vehicles are parked within 6 meters of the Stevenson Screen.
But I really really wanted to get a ground level view to absolute ascertain the placement of the Stevenson Screen. Lots of web searches turn up nothing. I found pictures of the observatories, pictures of the Krupp gun, pictures of the skyline, but no pictures of the nearby weather station. After all, other than myself and surfacestations.org volunteers, who takes pictures of weather stations while on vacation? Still I figured, this is a major tourist spot, within walking distance of the top of the famous Wellington cable car, surely somebody had snapped a photo?
Then I discovered something in Google Earth called “Panoramio”, which had a whole collection of tourist submitted shots around the observatories.
Bingo!
Here’s the full image from Panoramio, the Stevenson Screen is clearly visible. Thank you J. Baines, wherever you are.
The car park asphalt at 6 meters away puts the station rating at CRN4, based on NOAA’s site quality rating system used for their Climate Reference Network. I’ve found that the vast majority of historical stations in the USA have been affected this way:
One wonders how this area has changed over time, and how long the car park has been there, and how much it, and the tourist vehicles that park next to the fence have contributed to the Kelburn climate record. Someone familiar with the history of the observatory might be able to shed some light on this. Was the screen always in this location? When did the car park go in? How many tree have been cleared around the site over the years? How many new buildings (Like the Carter Observatory) have but put up nearby? These are all issues which affect the temperature record. Disentangling those influences is difficult without an historical context.
I don’t blame the scientists at the observatory for letting the climate measurement environment at Kelburn deteriorate, after all they are charged with looking upwards, not at the grounds around them.
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rbateman (19:38:44)
“This is an exercise (experiment if you will) that anyone can perform. Go find an official station, and take the temp nearby using a handheld (calibrate first).
You will be in for a surprise more often than you would think.”
Actually this is a good idea. I listen to automatic weather reports broadcast from the Australian airports. In Canberra it is called ‘Canberra Terminal Information’ and is broadcast on 127.45MHz, it gives wind speed,direction, QNH (air pressure) and temperature. The recording changes when one of the parameters change. I don’t suggest you break airport security by going too close to these sensors but downwind may be a proxy.
This could be done at any airport that transmits this data, the frequency could be found by web or manual searching and you would need a communication receiver that picks up VHF. VLF (very low frequencies) also transmit this information but I find it is hard to receive and VHF or higher is better for audibility.
NIWA – No Intelligence Weather Assumptions
Richard (13:30:07) : “Maybe the world looks flat to (Gordon Brown) through his one eye, and this is some form of reverse (perverse?) psychology?”
Wooo! Richard, have you been hanging out at RealClimate too much?
At an airport, you want a temperature recording device at or near the runways. This is because things like air temperature, wind direction, and altitude of the airport influences things like proper landing speed and takeoff rotation speed. You don’t want to stall the thing just off the ground.
Landing is a little different at 100F at Denver than it is at 0F and so you want to know what the temperature is at the airport and not what the temperature is in some nearby park.
And you don’t want a UHI “adjusted” temperature either, you want to know the REAL temperature.
I remember more than once seeing people have problems at Big Bear airport in the mountains East of Los Angeles in the summer. In fact, the airport even has an article that describes the problem. There have been pilots that have taken off with not enough fuel to reach their destination in trying to be light enough to take off when the weather is hot.
Point is, the purpose of the weather station at the airport is to give pilots guidance on how to fly, not to give politicians guidance on how to spend.
What Success in Copenhagen means to me.
NO ACTION!
here some history on welington airpot.
Rongotai Airport started with a grass runway in November 1929.[3] The airport opened in 1935,[4] but was closed down due to safety reasons on 27 September 1947 (grass surface often became unusable during winter months).[5] During the closure, Paraparaumu Airport, 35 miles north of Wellington, became Wellington’s airport, and became the country’s busiest airport in 1949.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington_International_Airport
RE: REPLY: Wind chill is only a human condition, it does not affect thermometers. Sure some additional photos would be welcome. – Anthony
Anthony, I’m not a meteorologist, but I would think that wind would make a thermometer respond to changing air temperature more quickly than it would in still air.
REPLY: It will affect the rate of change in the thermometer reading, if the air temperature changes quickly, but not the absolute reading. To a thermometer, 32F is always going to be 32F wind or not – Anthony
I flew into paraparaumu airport in 1958 before it closed in 59. It was then called Paraparam.
Here are some excerpts from the NZ Science coalition:
“With the current scandal over the disclosure of the CRU emails and code and the involvement of some of NIWA’s staff in those emails, it is naive to pretend that New Zealand might remain somehow untouched. So we believe it is now especially important to ensure that ordinary citizens and taxpayers can be confident of open, honest handling of public data and are free to question official wisdom.
What we have shown to date is that the warming claimed by NIWA comes from adjustments, which they do not dispute. So the quality and validity of these adjustments are now paramount but we cannot judge them until they are placed by NIWA in the public domain. We do not understand why they have not done this already. If the adjustments are valid, we must accept the results, whether they mean warming or cooling.
..
In the past, the Coalition has enquired of NIWA regarding the graph posted on their website. A response was received that indicated the stations used were:
1. Mangere
2. East Taratahi
3. Wellington, Kelburn
4. Hokitika Aero
5. Appleby
6. Lincoln, Broadfield
7. Dunedin, Musselburgh
In that communication, NIWA stated that the data for these sites could be downloaded for free from the National Climate Database (http://cliflo.niwa.co.nz), but warned that the raw data had been corrected for “site changes, etc.” before they went into the national average calculation.
..
No reply was received from Dr Salinger and subsequent requests for the corrections produced no reply. A similar query was sent in the past six weeks to Dr James Renwick, Principal Scientist at the National Climate Centre, but no response has been received.
This is not the first time our queries have been ignored. Warwick Hughes has also attempted to get the corrections from Dr Jim Salinger, and although he received some of the adjusted data three years ago, he was not informed of the adjustments themselves.
Reproducing a station history
… the CliFlo database reveals that Hokitika seems to be made up of Hokitika South from 1866 to 1965, followed by Hokitika Aero until the present. There was a decent 14- month overlap during the closing of South and the opening of Aero.
..
The interesting thing to note is that South is 0.3ºC cooler than Aero. Yet South is at the lower altitude of 4 m and Aero is higher, at 39 m. According to NIWA’s Wellington Thorndon explanation, the higher station should be cooler, based on the expected environmental lapse rate.
..
Had there not been an overlap period to show us differently, NIWA would presumably have dropped all values prior to 1965 by 0.2ºC instead of raising them by 0.3ºC. A data adjustment based on that faulty assumption would have caused a substantial 0.5ºC error in Hokitika.
The key is to find out the details of the old Thorndon station. Exactly where it was, and how it was operated. It wouldn’t surprise me if just the daily high was recorded, as that was typical of the day. To convert such a thing into usable data, you’d need to project it to a daily mean, which opens the door to a systematic error big as you like. OK, I’m guessing, but it’s not a bad guess that only the 3PM temperature was taken — that’s how it was done here in NZ.
temperature ‘lapse rate’ depends entirely upon the humidity, when humidity is less than 100% the air cools at 1degree per 100m altitude. when you hit 100% humidity it cools at a much slower rate (as condensing water releases energy) of about 0.5degrees per 100m.
If you want to accurately assess the temperature difference for different station heights you really need the humidity (or some record of when it is foggy/raining). You can’t just pluck a 0.8degree figure for the Kelburn site out of the air. (pun intended), as the lapse rate it is different for different days.
Hokitika Aero
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=507936150000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
” Brnn8r (16:23:55) :
So, I’m wondering, is it good practice to take into account a wind-chill factor if you change measurement sites? ”
Do you mean to say: A cold wind out of the south, that blows away the warm air?
(And: I observed that they have not fired that gun for quite some time.)
Hope I am not boring you all, but “wind chill” is like blowing on your soup. An object hotter than the air will be cooled faster if the air blows, and an object colder than the air will be heated faster. It’s just the rate of heat transfer by which the object equalizes to the background (air) temperature. Objects the same temperature as the air, like trees, are not subject to wind chill.
Well these “improper” WEATHER station designs are really only a problem when they are used to try and keep tabs on CLIMATE changes; essentially the same as the UHI problem. There is nothing inherently wrong with recording the temperature at a UHI or an errant weather staion; presumably the thermometer still acurately records its own temperature, even with cars parked there or jet exhausts bathing the area.
The fatal mistake is in the unwarranted assumption that the temperature read in such locations can be reliably used as a measure of the temperature at some other location; and according to some peer reviewed papers those other places might be as much as 1200 km away from the thermometer.
Even a cursory glance at a daily “weather” map of the San Francisco Bay area, will quickly reveal that a given temperature reading in this area cannot be reliably used even 12 km away; let alone 1200 km away. We have temperature differences over just a few km distances, that dwarf the claimed global temperature rise over the last 150 years; even applying “Mike’s trick” to “hide the decline”.
As I have said before; the fact that a simple move of a single measurement station is sufficient to screw up the data is “unequivocal evidence” that the whole sampling regimen is hopelessly inadequate.
A properly sampled continuous function can be accurately reconstructed from a proper set of samples, even if any individual sample is tossed out or changed by some small error.
In the case of NIWA’s “climate measurements” to obtain unequivocal evidence of NZ climate change; they really splurge and takea whole seven samples from different places in New Zealand.
I hate to break the news to those chaps; but they have bigger problems than the 123 meters height difference in the present location of one of their seven climate data measurment sites.
And we still have peopel who post here at WUWT, who believe this is real science ? Totally amazing.
“”” janama (21:53:11) :
I flew into paraparaumu airport in 1958 before it closed in 59. It was then called Paraparam “””
Well I bet it is still called paraparam; or even worse, depending on who is doing the calling. I bet they still call my old high school Otahoo College; although it was just Otahuhu Technical High School, when I fisrt went there.
Those are simply Pakeha bastardized pronunciations by lazy people. There are no Maori words that end with a consonant like ‘m’.
Copenhagen prostitutes?
Unbelievable and unacceptable.
What are you doing and why?
He’s showing that there are some people in Copenhagen who will *admit* that money is their motivation.
this may be interesting.
Files
If these files are of interest you are welcome to download and make use of them.
NZ’s carbon and nitrogen cycles
A two-page graphic recently developed by NZ’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (June, 2009). It shows the numbers and the reasoning behind much of NZ’s GHG emissions reporting policy.
NIWA’s NZ temperature data, 1853 – 2005
The adjusted temperature data produced by Dr Jim Salinger and kindly sent to us by Mr Warwick Hughes. It’s in an Excel spreadsheet, it does not include the adjustments made to the raw data and when plotted it produces the graph on NIWA’s web site showing strong warming during the 20th century
i wish we could see the unadjusted data.
sorry heres the link.
http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2009/12/01/salingers-adjusted-data-now-online/
IMO the media and UEA’s Andrew Watson leading of the discussion onto the surface record is a red herring. Fully 10% of all the emails consist of long discussions on how to hide the Medieval Warm Period from policy makers. It is this which is fatal to the AGW hype-othesis and demonstrates that the hockey jockeys had stopped being scientists in favour of becoming purveyors of advocacy and spin.
Fully half of the authors of the main document at the Copenhagen Summit, the Copenhagen Diagnosis are implicated in these emails.
The Domain copenhagendiagnosis.org is owned by Stephen Gray of New South Wales university in Australia.
His degree is in social science.
http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/staff/support.html
Hoping to add something usefull here but there is a youtube clip of WLG airpot in the 50’s here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3iMw7Q7H68 and a more recent one of airplanes being blown all over the shop here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_LaAkAyoz0. This proves absolutly nothing but worth a watch over lunchtime. Compare the two clips and note the effects of infill housing. Discuss if this has effected the local micro climate.
Anthony,
I worked at both Met Offices in Kelburn ( 1963 -1965) and Wellington Airport (1967) as a Meteorological Technician, and can confirm that this was not the site in use during the 1960’s, and certainly not surronded by tarseal, concrete, fuming diesel buses and parked cars.
That site was located , from memory some 100 yards further north above the pathway and somewhat south of the current new met office building…
…why the move, and to present the data for Wellington ( Kelburn) as being from the same site, when in reality, we are dealing with two different stations raises serious questions!
…there are such things as climate stations, rainfall stations etc and most climatological stations are not located on airfields, although in NIWA’s case it appears that three of the seven were located on airfields.
…a trip to Wellington might be in order,with my camera and a thermometer… but alas, Copenhagen is tomorrow!
George E. Smith (00:40:23) :
New Zealand changed all the Maori pronunciations in the early 60s to their original Maori so I’d imagine they all call Paraparaumu exactly that.
Daryl M (21:30:21) :
RE: REPLY: Wind chill is only a human condition, it does not affect thermometers. Sure some additional photos would be welcome. – Anthony
Anthony, I’m not a meteorologist, but I would think that wind would make a thermometer respond to changing air temperature more quickly than it would in still air.
REPLY: It will affect the rate of change in the thermometer reading, if the air temperature changes quickly, but not the absolute reading. To a thermometer, 32F is always going to be 32F wind or not – Anthony
REPLY:
For what it is worth a simple way of measuring humidity is by using a pair of calibrated thermometers. both have the bulb and stem covered with a “sock”. The thermometers are then “twirled” and the temperatures read. Textiles especially wool and cotton are effected by humidity so this method was used as an independent check of the humidity in our humidity/temperature controlled textile lab once a day back in the late seventies.