I’ve mentioned problems with airports as climate stations in the past, mostly that they are pockets of UHI that have grown with the 20th century aviation boom. A good example is Chicago O’Hare airport. I’ll bet that many of you don’t know that the ICAO ID for O’Hare, is KORD, and FAA uses ORD which is what you see on airline luggage destination tags. “ORD” has nothing to do with the name O’Hare, which came after the airport was established. It has everything to do with the name “Orchard Field” which is what the airport started out as, which at the time was far more rural than it was now. You can read about its early history here.
Here’s that same view today from Google Earth:
Look at O’Hare today, a sprawling megaplex of concrete and terminals surrounded by urbanization:
The weather station location above is designated by the orange pushpin. Here’s a closeup view:
Note that there’s two electronics equipment buildings nearby with industrial sized a/c exhaust vents. While not USHCN, NCDC metadata lists O’Hare as a Class “A” station, which means it does in fact record climate. Data from O’Hare can be used to adjust other stations with missing nearby data.
The point I’m making with all the photos is that airports are far from static, especially since airline deregulation in the 1980’s. The are just as dynamic as the cities they serve. We measure climate at a great many airports worldwide. E.M. Smith reports that the majority of the GHCN record is from airports.
Even NOAA meteorologists admit that airports aren’t necessarily the best place to measure climate. In a series of stories I did…
How not to measure temperature, part 88 – Honolulu’s Official Temperature ±2
..about the failure of the aviation weather station at Honolulu causing unparalleled record highs, the NOAA Meteorologist there had this to say:
“ASOS…placed for aviation purposes…not necessarily for climate purposes.”
The key issue here is “aviation purpose, not climate purposes”. The primary mission is to serve the airport. Climate is a secondary or even tertiary consideration. And that’s exactly what happened in the story from the Baltimore Sun below. The observer used FAA guidelines rather than NOAA guidelines to measure snow for the climate record. NOAA doesn’t like the record because he didn’t follow their procedures, so they toss it out.
However, when a new high temp record is set in Honolulu due to faulty equipment, NOAA thinks THAT’s alright to keep in the records:
NOAA: FUBAR high temp/climate records from faulty sensor to remain in place at Honolulu
A nearby station shows the error:
This is your Honolulu Temperature. This is your Honolulu Temperature on ASOS. Any questions?
Sat 20 Feb 2010
…
A contractor working for the Federal Aviation Administration at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport, paid to measure the snow for the aviation industry’s needs, did not follow a separate protocol required by the National Weather Service and the National Climatic Data Center for valid climate data.
So while the contractor measured 28.8 inches of snow during that storm, the National Weather Service has thrown out the reading. Instead, climatologists will rank the storm as “only” 24.8 inches – a number that almost surely understates the “true” total.
Worse, for climatologists, it now appears the weather service’s rules for snow data had been ignored for years at BWI, throwing a cloud over the validity of snow totals as far back as 1998, when the FAA took the job over from the weather service.
Only BWI’s data are known to be affected, but the problem could be more widespread. That possibility has caught the attention of top officials at the FAA.
“We plan to meet with the National Weather Service next week to begin a discussion on making sure that we’re all on the same page in terms of measuring snow accumulations at our airports,” FAA spokesman Jim Peters said. “There will be a national discussion.”
In the meantime, the weather service’s Baltimore- Washington Forecast Office in Sterling, Va., is preparing to convene a committee of climatologists and other experts to review Baltimore’s snowfall records from the 2010 and 2003 storms, and perhaps back to 1998.
“I feel very strongly about historical records and getting the climate data correct,” said James E. Lee, the meteorologist-in-charge at Sterling. “Obviously, with the increased media attention and political attention to climate, it is really up to NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the National Weather Service is an agency] to make sure … the climate record is a genuine one, and consistent to the best of our ability.”
The problem at BWI came to light Feb. 6, as snow accumulations reported at the airport passed 26 inches. They seemed poised to break the record set in February 2003 – the storm listed on Sterling’s Web site as Baltimore’s biggest.
But when reporters called asking about a new record, Lee said that because of measurement errors by an FAA contractor at BWI, the two-day storm total would be pegged at “only” 24.8 inches. He had discarded a 28.8-inch measurement from BWI because it was the sum of hourly measurements throughout the storm – a method invalid for climatological data.
Even at 24.8 inches, Lee said, the storm total beat the previous two-day record of 24.4 inches, set at BWI during two days of the four-day 2003 event. “I’m convinced that was the most amount of snow Baltimore has seen [from a two-day storm] in recorded history.”
But Lee had to use the most conservative reading from the airport – a “snow depth” measurement of the total on the ground when the storm ended, after hours of compaction.
The FAA requires its observers to take hourly snow measurements and wipe the boards clean after each hour, adding the totals as they go. That provides pilots with better real-time information about changing conditions. But it virtually eliminates compaction and so inflates accumulation. Climatologists require measurements every six hours, striking a balance between the hourly and snow depth readings. Some airports maintain separate snow boards for the different protocols. But not BWI.
Richard Carlson, vice president of Pacific Weather Inc., said his company has experienced weather observers at 20 U.S. airports, including eight at BWI. Pacific has held the contract there since 2008.
“We follow the FAA manual … and that is the guide book on how these meteorological observations are to be taken,” Carlson said. “We had heard about the six-hour measuring thing, but … if you have high winds at all, this really is not going to work.”
…
Read the full article at the Baltimore Sun
Read Frank Roylance’s blog on MarylandWeather.com
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WOT Canada rules the ice, Excellent US team second in hockey.
Sucessful winter olympics in an el nino year in Vancouver, contrary to the warmest hysterics wishes.
Closing celebration at 6:00 PM (18:00 hrs) should be spectacular.
David Segesta – Your comment made me remember back in the early to mid 70’s that the local weatherman stated on TV that the temperature sensor at Washington National Airport was off by 2 degrees to the cold side. So if the temperature read 32 degrees it was actually 34 degrees. If I remember correctly this had went on for appox. 2 yrs. before the problem was found and the sensor fixed. I would be interested to know if the temperatures recorded during the faulty sensor time were corrected.
kadaka (13:17:50) :
Really you could have fooled me. They take temperature measurements and then statistically aggregate them to determine climate. Weather is real, climate is statistics.
Dallas Fort Worth [DFW] airport was just a cow-pasture in 1977, since then an airport and a small 30 to 40 K city has grown up.
Even with perfect placement of the ground station the UHI is far from negligible. After 1977 you see a rise in temperature because of the growth of the city.
Fifteen miles away a small naval air station doesn’t show any warming. It was semi urban in 1977 and there was no substantial construction.
The readings of DFW seem to be about 4 o F higher than in my suburban Dallas back yard. I do not live in the country!
Just for the fun of it I took temperatures from downtown Dallas to a city park and then out to the country as fast as I could legally drive. The difference was 7 o F and the city park was 2 o F below the high. UHI is alive and well in Dallas.
R.S.Brown (13:16:27) : “MAX” consecutive days of snow
This number ‘MAX’ must be an accumulated count across years. That is: because January has 31 days, if three Januarys in a row have snow on every day except on the very last day of the 3rd year then the accumulated count would be 92 days [ (31 x 3) – 1 ].
I did not find a definition but I did check a few other stations and for those where snow is common in January the number is often >31.
RE: Typo’s
IMO, it’s about putting out a professional product.
We are all here reviewing it, so let’s get it right.
Anthony, (IMHO) is WAY overworked, let’s help him out.
Post a typo fix comment, then tell the mods NOT TO POST IT.
Here is a plea I made about Canberra airport Australia. Can someone help me with the physics units – too long since I was confused by power, work, energy, BTUs, joules etc. Original scenario follows, can be applied to O’Hare of course.
“Can someone please do the calculations? At Canberra there are 250,000 people a year lifted (say) 100 m above ground before the aircraft leaves the perimeter. A Jumbo carrying 350 people weighs about 350 tonnes, so give each person a weight of a tonne. Give the airport a generous area of 16 sq km.
Calculate how much energy is needed to do the lift, then multiply it by 2 for landings and taxi.
Convert into heat measurement like watt per sq m , or better still, temp in deg c. Then spread it over the main hours of use of the airport, say 7 am to 9 pm to see if the temp change is enough to create a measurable effect.”
There have been many mentions in blogs of aircraft fuel combustion adding onto temperature records, but I’ve not seen a semi-quantitative estimate to confirm or deny that we are in the right ball park.
Here is a bit of trivia for airport identifiers. All U.S. airports that have ICAO identifiers have weather reporting equipment, and all of these airports have three letter FAA designators that omit the leading “K” from the ICAO identifier(except for in Alaska and Hawaii where the first ICAO letter is a “P”). Airports that don’t have weather reporting contain at last one numeral (example S67).
Either kadaka has the driest sense of humor, or he’s the twin of that guy that said the polar bears are melting, or whateverthehellhesaidwasmelting. Loved the comment on the other thread referring to whateverthehellhesaidwasmelting saying that the Antarctic was melting at an accelerated pace and that it was worse than we thought, and I might add, just compared to 3 months ago!
Reminds me of the time I was in food research and monitoring the plant production quality of a new hot extruded dry product which went into a 5 lb bag.
If the product wasn’t cooled to 140 F before it went into the bag, excessive moisture would be given off and condense onto the cooler inner bag surface. This could lead to mold.
One plant technician was proudly showing me the data he took over many hours and the temperature never went over 140F.
I watched his method.
He took a 5 lb pound bag from the production line and inserted a metal dial thermometer in the product. I watched as the dial temperature rapidly neared 140 F. Quickly, he pulled the dial out of the bag and recorded 138 F.
“You should leave the thermometer in the bag until it stabilizes”, I said.
He shook his head in dismay at my ignorance.
“No, no, I can’t do that! If I do, the temperature will go over 140 F and we’ll have to reject the packaged product.”
He was very pleased and diligent about his “methodical” testing method.
I think he could have had a great career at CRU in East Anglia or at Hansen’s NOAA.
Many years ago I worked casually for a Sydney City Council department that insisted on complete public attendance figures for all its branches.
Because “attendance” was never defined – and really meant nothing at all – it was possible to vary the numbers massively. One simply wrote down what one thought was desired, though one was never told to do this.
It was a bit like a fearless and impartial newspaper editor who never takes direction from the owner…He never needs to!
It’s such a naughty world.
If alarmists *really* want to be taken seriously, the least that could happen is a lot of the money being poured into research could be directed towards better quality control.
One would think that’s a wise move, considering the whole-of-life-on-earth altering decisions being made over analysis of the data being collected.
Well, I do remember there was Greater Southwest International Airport ((IATA: GSW, ICAO: KGSW) in the area just to the south of where DFW airport is now (accounts say from 1953 until 1972).
Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport (or DFW) opened in 1974 on property adjacent to the north side of the airport; I think I still have an old sectional from those days sans DFW.
History of GSW
.
.
Geoff Sherrington (16:34:50) :
That seems like a lot of work for little gain. There will be many other sources of energy input in your 16 sq. km. area. Even then that will be only part of the problem. Then to make use of the concept you would have to apply yet another adjustment to the temperatures measured there. Why?
The measurements at airports serve their purpose, namely, contributing to the safe operation of aircraft. If climate science needs precise temperature measurement, and I’m not convinced it does, then it needs to disconnect from such a proxy as it currently is linked to.
Interesting about Chicago O’Hare being Orchard-Douglas, but did you know BWI was originally called Friendship when it was built in the 50’s?
As far as snow depth goes it can be very variable over even relatively small areas. Washington National is down in a river valley (the Potomac) on an area of land that was originally called Gravelly Point. Comparing measurements made to the surrounding areas is certainly problematic.
I just found a couple of very small errors in the posts about poor grammar and typos.
I won’t bother pointing them out, if the nitpickers will stop their nitpicking.
Since you mentioned Honolulu Airport in your article and I work only about 5 or 6 miles from there I will tell you that it is located in a heavily populated area of Hawaii. On Oahu, there is only so much land with which to build our cities. I live on the Windward side of Oahu about 2 miles from Kaneohe Marine Corps Base, the other airport.
As you can see here the airport is located in a heavily urban section of the city. Not only that but it also contains Hickam Air Force Base and routinely flies C5 transport planes as well as 747’s from Japan, China and Australia as well as several inter-island jets daily.
Turns out that the NWS weather station is right in the middle of the runways here. Wow! So all of you are thinking right now that Hawaii is warm and we have beach weather since you saw all the nice pictures from yesterdays Tsunami. Bah! It is freakin cold today and I am wearing shorts and a long sleeve shirt and slippers and I am freezing my a$$ off! Well, freezing in Hawaii is 65 degrees…
You all are probably better off using the Pacific Tsunami Center’s weather station than that of the Honolulu Airport.
Aloha!
Dang! Couldn’t get the links to appear correctly. Can anyone send me a vowel? Or at least a direction on how to post the links?
[Reply: the easiest way is to cut ‘n’ paste the link from the address bar to its own separate line in the post, like this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com
With no characters connected on either end. It will appear as a link. ~dbs, mod.]
I remember a story about twenty years ago about a change in snowfall measurement methods from a human observer to a mechanical device. It was recognized at that time that the two methods were not equivalent, and my memory is that the sum of hourly accumulations by the human observer was perceived to be the main reason. I also recall that the concern about the change was great enough that they budgeted for several years to run both methods side-by-side. Perhaps someone who was in the profession at the time can be found to provide details. It seems to me that there’s more than simply the two protocols for human observers that has to be taken into account. Perhaps a case of apples, oranges, and bananas?
“vigilantfish (14:07:47)
Usually, the snow amount or the depth of accumulated snow is measured using a snow ruler.”
got to be quick to use one of those before it melts in your hand!
D.R. Williams (18:27:31) : a change in snowfall measurement methods from a human observer to a mechanical device.
Sometime last year snow sensors entered the conversation on WUWT. At the moment I don’t find my comment. It had to do with the Washington stations:
http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/Washington/washington.html
and the general topic. As I recall, early equipment was less reliable than the current models. Here is a link to a commercial site:
http://www.rickly.com/MI/SnowCover.htm#Ultrasonic%20Snow%20Depth%20Sensor
Re: John F. Hultquist (16:14:47) :
John,
I guess you and I created so much traffic we crashed the server
for the NCDC/NOAA snowcorver database.
At this writing, no matter what state you select from:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ussc/USSCAppController?action=map
You get the red letter diagnotic “Error Occurred Connecting
to the Database”.
I was going to show you the maximum consecutive
days of snow cover numbers from the Ravenna_2 station about
20 miles south of Hiram… they didn’t have strange monthly
totals.
Let’s be paranoid and assume “they” read WUWT !
lws (16:09:33) :
Would that same measurement hold for all 12 months?
i.e.- is the UHI a constant, or does it reach a max in summer and a min in winter?
Repeat the experiment.
Surely weather stations were never installed to give measurements to a tenth of a degree. No one knew when they were installed this idea that they could be used to determine the global average temperature. So all that is indicated is an approximate temperature at each point in the temperature field and that was the intention. Trying to correlate them with each other over a hundred years is surely a delusion of the highest order. Here Canberra there are three that are used across a small city. They regularly show a difference of a couple of degrees so all you can do is say the temperature was x within a degree or two. Normally no one will care.
Anthony Watts (13:58:34) :
“Thanks to everyone who pointed out the typos. Family duty called this Sunday and I had to finish the article w/o doing a second proofreading pass.”
Better excuse than my “drunken typing” one A 😉
On Topic…Makes me wonder, would any of the RAF stations data have been used during the 1970s?
I ask because I remember, at a V Bomber base in the UK, the method used to clear snow from the perimeter and main runway was very efficient and utilized a refuelling tanker truck, which pushed a “trolley” on which were mounted two old jet engines. The exhaust was funnelled down to a couple of inches above the tarmac. An operators cabin was mounted between the two engine!
The truck would push the trolley up and down the runway and simply blast the snow away. The heated tarmac also slowed down anymore snow still falling. These units would run for hours on end but the swine would never let me have a go at running one! One hell of a way to generate a UHI!
and if you do not believe me ….http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v170/KMCLEAN/RAFMRD2.jpg lol, happy days of long ago