The Urban Heat Island effect on temperature records is real, despite what some people wish you to believe. Peter, a sixth grader, and his dad, thought so too, and take the data from NASA GISS and show in a simple video, what we’ve been saying for years here at WUWT. Urbanization, land use, and station siting matter.
Watch Peter’s excellent video below:
They used a simple pairing of rural and urban sites to show the differences. This shows why homogenization, which smears all the data from urban and rural sites together, is a bad idea, and gives trends that don’t exist in reality.
I like the ending where he says in the rolling credits “Peter’s dad is not employed or funded by any energy or oil companies”. It’s funny that they’d feel a need to say this. No National Science Foundation funding needed either.
This video appeared in comments on WUWT, if anybody knows how to contact Peter or his dad, please advise. We are in touch now.
One wonders what the response of the well funded Hadley Centre, Met Office scientist Dr. David Parker, might be to this video.
Parker’s 2006 paper published in the Journal of Climate titled: “A Demonstration that Large scale warming is not urban” claims:
The analysis of Tmin demonstrates that neither urbanization nor other local instrumental or thermal effects
have systematically exaggerated the observed global warming trends in Tmin. The robustness of the analysis to the criterion for “calm” implies that the estimated overall trends are insensitive to boundary layer structure and small-scale advection, and to siting, instrumentation, and observing practices that increasingly influence temperatures as winds become lighter. Furthermore, even at windy sites (e.g., St. Paul, Aleutian Islands, in Fig. C1), the calmest terce and especially the calmest decile will be strongly affected by occasions with very light winds in passing ridges or blocking anticyclones, and should reveal any urban warming influence.
…the results of the present study also suggest that they have not affected the estimates of temperature trends.
Steve McIntyre gave Parker’s paper a scathing review in 2007’s article:
Excellent job, Peter and Dad. Clear thinking, common sense and good science all in action at the same time. Warmist death-shriekers please take note.
There’s another very simple and instructive experiment on UHI on the site of Ole Humlum, a Professor of Geography.
http://www.climate4you.com and click on the “Urban Heat Island” tab on the menu.
Using readily available tools (a car with a thermistor on its roof) he simply drove back and forth through Oslo at various times of the year, starting and finishing in open country, and recorded the temperature every 5 seconds.
The results are quite surprising. Sure, they’re not ideal control conditions for an experiment, but the size of the effect is so obvious that even a denialist (a warmist) couldn’t ignore it.
Icarus (13:15:52) :
Sure, the UHI effect is real. That’s why they adjust for it, isn’t it?
Right… Icarus that is part of the problem… ‘They’ may be doing it wrong. If rural stations for the most part are say 95% flat, and Urban stations still all show warming then did they adjust correctly?
Heck if even 75% of the rural stations are flat then did they adjust correctly?
They maybe doing a bang up job, on the other hand they may be doing a horrible job. Also when you have articles like Parker’s 2006 paper to back you up it really does not lend much credence to the entire ‘they are adjusted correctly’ ideology.
Look I am not saying temperatures did not increase over the last 150 years. I think they have. I feel that glacial melting offers evidence that this is the case in many regions of the world.. But how long have many of those glaciers been melting? I mean if you start a process 150 years ago and they continually get smaller each year over 150 years then sooner or later you are going to end up with… a melted glacier that does not exist any longer… This does not show ‘Global Warming’ however as being man caused in the sense that CO2 did it.
Rather it means that at some point over the last 150 years the temperature got sustainably warm enough to melt the glacier… Sort of what it did during the medieval warm period. When Greenland was much more green… Oh wait, sorry that was an inconvenient truth I threw out there I forgot that certain scientists are now admitting there was a warm period, just that it wasn’t as warm as now.. How silly of me.
By the way Peter and Dad, Very nice glad you thought to do this.
CalGrad (16:22:24) :
“I see one of the pairings was Sacramento-Colfax, and I’m not sure if it was the best pairing, as Sacramento is in the valley and Colfax up in the foothills. A better pairing might have been another valley town…but it still works, I expect.”
They may have selected Sacramento and found the closest location labeled “rural area” with longest timespan with recent coverage. That would be Colfax. Travis only goes from ’47 to ’70, Beale from ’59 to ’70, Placerville is a contender but data only goes to ’80.
With Sac and Colfax they could get overlap from 1905 to 2004.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/findstation.py?lat=38.6&lon=-121.5&datatype=gistemp&data_set=1
You don’t need a FOI request to get Peter and his dad’s data or methodology, anyone can replicate their model. Isn’t that what science is supposed to be about? It’s too bad the folks at UEA, GISS, et al can’t do what a 6th grader is capable of doing…..
Art, they don’t have any 6th graders working there.
GJG, brilliant piece, and an important lesson for your son—question everything, trust nothing.
gjg:
Thanks for providing the station list.
gjg:
I just reproduced your analysis of rural stations. I used your station list and calculated the average rural temperature every year.
I fit a linear trend to the results and found a trend of 0.8 degC/century (0.008 degC/year) among the rural sites. In your video, at about 3:25, you show a rural trend about 10x smaller than mine.
Before I go on and check the urban sites, I want to make sure I understand your analysis. Did you do a simple average of the rural temperatures from the selected stations? (That’s what I did).
Great work for a kid. Good approach.
I wouldn’t take this too seriously, however without more work. I live 30 miles SE of Portland and have visited Hood River many times. They can’t be compared.
Portland Airport, which is where I presume the data is collected from is about 12 miles west of the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge which cuts thru the Cascade Mountains. Hood River is at the east end of the Gorge. Portland is in a fairly wet climate with somewhere around 40 inches of precip a year, lots of clouds, especially from October thru April. Hood River is where the rain shadow begins and clouds disappear, with lots of sunshine in the summer, snow in the winter. A few miles east of HR, the desert begins. In addition, the wind sweeps thru the Gorge and has a strong influence on weather at either end. Portland Airport is about 10miles from downtown Portland and the Gorge wind changes everything. Portland has about 4,500 heating degree days while HR has about 5,500.
All in all, I think it would be difficult to find stations near Portland with which to make a valid comparison. At least in the west, geography makes a huge difference. And in general, big cities have big airports which can skew the data without any UHI effect.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in the UHI.
A great exercise for a kid.
gjg:
I had a little time on my hands, so I did the analysis for the urban stations too. Here are my results:
Rural trend: 0.81 degC/century
Urban trend: 0.94 degC/century
Difference: 0.13 degC/century
The difference does show a bit of an urban heat island effect, but nothing like you suggest. What’s up with that?
Anthony — I will send you my spreadsheet to check my work. Feel free to forward it to gjg. Perhaps a disclaimer in the article would be appropriate?
REPLY: Actually a better way would be to get a check would be to get gjg’s spreadsheet and have a look. I have another idea also. I’ll have more later, rather busy tonight. – Anthony
Hmmmm, relying on 6th graders for your science now?
Now that’s sound science.
REPLY: Well at least this 6th grader has the courage to put his name and face to what he says, which is more than I can say for troll cowards like yourself. – Anthony
Screw the Scholarship at UEA (that trade unionist rat’s nest); nothing less than MIT will do for this kid. Hullo, Prof. Lindzen, we got a great one for ya!
Terrific job, gentlemen. Keep it up.
Been there, done that; posted a link to a LWIR overnight satellite imagery series (a ‘picture’ every 15 min if you will) a few weeks back that showed _cooling_ all around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area *while* DFW remained degrees warmer …
.
.
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This is from my data but I only have data to 2006. Still I don’t think it should make much difference. Again this is a limited population.
rural sites
y = 0.0008x + 13.333
R² = 0.0046
Urban sites
y = 0.0111x – 7.3746
R² = 0.47149
But you can’t really say too much about the trendlines, the r2 values are very low. You don’t get any accuracy unless they are above 0.9. In my work I can’t really use them unless they are above 0.95. It is more interesting to plot the difference between the means of the rural and urban populations. You see that they are very similar around 1900 and increase in difference over the century.
Great job, Peter and Dad. For me, I grew up living in the vicinity of Lake Michigan, so when we wanted to cool down in the summer, we just went closer to the Lake. In the spring, fall, or winter, when we wanted to warm up, we went inland to the countryside. So I can’t quite relate to this. But I find it highly interesting and correct for where I live now.
A finely done study. A tribute to you and your dad. You’re lucky to have this kind of help, support and encouragement from your dad. Keep up this level of work through Middle & High School and you should be able to land a scholarship, no matter the field of study you choose.
This could be embarassing. You can’t pick a video on the internet you come across randomly and push it forward as “excellent” and assert that it shows Y and proves X, without familiarising yourself with the underlying data and methods to see if you can replicate the results. Now JohnV seems to suggest you can’t and could well be right.
Now it looks to the outside (whether the results can be validated or not) that faith has been shown in the work of Peter and Dad blindly because of the results the work portrays. You don’t even know whether raw data or manipulated data was used, come on.
In otherwords; a clear bias is evident, something which we accuse the alarmists of. This is nothing to do with science and gives cheap ammo to the alarmists.
I would place a huge disclaimer on this thread or delete it entirely until the work has been verified.
I usually rate this site very highly, so this is not a general criticism, but this thread is a low point scientificly and should not been posted with such bold assertions before the work had been checked, replicated, verified.
Re Jason (12:30:26) :
“I’ve been waiting for a larger scale comparison like this one for a while. David Archibald did one years ago with a few southeastern US sites thru 2003, and came up with similar results.”
Are there any “professional” analysts looking at this to publish in the hallowed peer reviewed literature. Or have they already done so and it has been ignored. Just wondering because it is a huge job to do it comprehensively and difficult to search for among the millions of google entries on the matter. Anyone have any leads…I would be grateful
JohnV (20:37:08) :
gjg:
I had a little time on my hands, so I did the analysis for the urban stations too. Here are my results:
Rural trend: 0.81 degC/century
Urban trend: 0.94 degC/century
Difference: 0.13 degC/century
The difference does show a bit of an urban heat island effect, but nothing like you suggest. What’s up with that?
From what I have learned recently, raw data pass a homogenization stage . Are you sure the data you use is the raw ones and not the homogenized ones? As was discussed in other threads homogenization does exactly that, reduce the differences.
Homogenization in this business means adjusting data by averaging with nearby stations.
The kid’s analysis needs raw raw , before the homogenization stage.
Peter and dad, I still have my copy of Statview SE. Loved that program. Ran on a tiny little Mac that had a handle built into the back of it. You could throw the thing across the room and it would still run. Ah, the memories.
QUOTE: Bob Highland (18:41:38) :
There’s another very simple and instructive experiment on UHI on the site of Ole Humlum, a Professor of Geography.
Using readily available tools (a car with a thermistor on its roof) he simply drove back and forth through Oslo at various times of the year, starting and finishing in open country, and recorded the temperature every 5 seconds.
The results are quite surprising. Sure, they’re not ideal control conditions for an experiment, but the size of the effect is so obvious that even a denialist (a warmist) couldn’t ignore it. END QUOTE
Back in the 70s and 80s I lived in NYC and drove a motorcycle all over town and at all times of day through most of the year. Starting from Manhattan, no matter where you headed you could feel it get cooler as you rode father away from that HUGE heat sink known as “the City”. UHI is a palpable phenomenon.
Good show Peter and Dad!
WATTS !!
What have you done to me ?? I use to have a job, a family … a life. Now all I have is a habit.
I got tired of the same old MSM stuff, ‘we’re all gunna die ! … again ! … only worse !’
I needed data, facts, hard stuff like intellectual rigour and integrity.
I got a whiff of blog, but I needed more. Simon of Sydney said he knows this guy who’s got the real gear. In some dark cyber alley you whispered, “I think you’ll like this, Try it, no charge”. So I did and boy was it gooood. McIntyre, tree rings, hockey sticks, sun spots, cosmic rays and solar winds.
So I paid my money and ohh it was just too good. I couldn’t sleep, I’d get up at 4am ‘They’re probably posting new stuff now in the US’, I’d think. I couldn’t work, reduced to painting the family home, but I couldn’t even do that right.
“You’ve missed a big patch here” my wife said. “Oh that was when I remembered that the sea ice satellite had been down and I thought it might me up again and I should check it” I recalled.
“Don’t you realise your daughter is sleeping on the kitchen table waiting for you to finish her room?” she yelled at me.
“Well of course I do, it’s very hard to balance my MacBook on her, especially when she rolls over” I explained.
“GET OUT” she screamed.
“But what about my Internet Broadband ?” I despaired.
“Ah McDonalds Free WiFi” I thought.
To prove she wasn’t totally heartless she let the kids give me their pocket money to buy coffee at Maccas. “Dad” my streetwise 12 year confided to me, “Yu gotta get a grip. Nobody believes this stuff, they’re all too busy buying stuff.”
So now I’m on the street, my wife rejects me, my friends don’t talk to me. My kids are taunted at school “Your Dad’s a skeptic ! Your Dad’s a skeptic !” But they play defence and their Dad taught them a good attack is an aggressive defence. So they throw back “Yeah well at least he knows the world is round ! You bunch of warmy wimps.”
I even tried my own blog about sailing, but my crew wouldn’t read it. “Uhm, Jack, there’s too much stuff about wind graphs, polar curves and sail trim” one confided in me. “Hey but we’re logging the data, analysing, correcting and we keep getting better results.” “Yes but stuff about the tides only going up 1.3mm per year, you know is not what the Environment Minister Garrett says – 6m sea rise, we’re all gunna die ! ” “But the data doesn’t show that !!”
So …
“Excuse me Sir, there’s been a complaint.” The pimply kid in the McDonalds Have-a-Nice-Day outfit said to me. “Is that DATA your looking at?”
“Uhm well yes it is”
“Ah that looks like RAW DATA, Sir. You’re not a professional scientist are you Sir?”
“Well it is numbers. Ahh and the Truth”
“It’s the NAKED Truth! Sir, this is a Family Restaurant, couldn’t you just watch a wholesome family video like An Inconvenient Truth?”
“But I don’t like scary movies” I muttered back.
“Oh no Al Gore’s not scary, he’s a JOKE. Million degrees huh. If you want scary you should try the EPA’s video the “air we breathe is a pollutant”. Now that’s scary. Or how about this one Sir, it’s by a 6th Grader?”
So then I saw it.
Peter (and his Dad). (ohh now I get it – we don’t see his Dad so he’s in brackets. 🙂
Data, lot’s of it, and graphs and trends, oh God, and so the first thing I thought is I’ve gotta show this to the kids’ science teacher. But they all know me, “What is it this time, CrankyJack ? Heliocentricity, plate tectonics, Medieval Warming, Maunder Minimums ?”
“No No, this is easy it shows why temperatures might be hotter !”
“Yeah well plate tectonics was pretty easy, ‘See how all the little pieces fit together?’ Can’t have that, noooo we need Dark Matter, quantum string theory that sort of big physics stuff, that if you think you understand it you obviously don’t.
So there I was hanging around the school yard, “Pissst, Kid, wanna see a cool video, and I mean coool ??”
What have you done to me, WATTS !!
Great video. One point, Portland, Oregon (Orygun not Or-Gone) and Hood River are in completely different climate zones and should not be compared. I don’t know if that affects anything except that Portland is much warmer on average. (Summers are similar but Winter are much colder in Hood River) I’ve seen numbers like 53 degrees annual for Portland and 45 for Hood River. I noticed another post in the discussion mentioning that their city pair was not well chosen. If by chance many of these cities and their rural pair are poor choices, would this affect the comparison? Seems like the stable rural temperatures would not be affected since you were looking at change not absolute.
Another thought, many cities were founded in their respective areas for a reason – near a river or other body of water for example. Would be interesting if that is relevant.
Re: Jack Jennings (Aus) (23:28:49)
—
Like it 🙂
The truth, it’s addictive! Unfortunately in the UK, that means it’ll probably get banned. Our schools ‘National Curriculum’ is very much on-message with AGW, so it’s good to see that gjg’s encouraging their son to keep an open mind.
Buddenbrook: A few of us have posted cautionary comments. I’m worried because Tom Karl (I think) of NOAA (I think) posted an analysis supposedly showing that the best-sited US station show the same warming trend as the worst. If so, then this UHI study here seems too good to be true. I’m sure there are many other WUWTers who share my concerns, but don’t want to rain on the parade.
It would be wonderful if it is true, of course, and I’m hoping.