By Steven Goddard and Anthony Watts
Fort Collins, Colorado is most famous for Balloon Boy, and Boulder, Colorado is most famous for Jon Benet and Ward Churchill.
Both are hotbeds of Climate Science, with familiar names like Roger Pielke (Jr. and Sr.) Walt Meier, William Gray, Kevin Trenberth and Mark Sereeze. Both are of similar size (Boulder 91,000 and Fort Collins 130,000) and located in very similar geographical environments along the Front Range – about 50 miles apart. The big difference is that Fort Collins has tripled in size over the last 40 years, and Boulder has grown much more slowly. Fort Collins population is shown in blue and Boulder in red below.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Collins,_Colorado
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder,_Colorado
Until the mid-1960s, NCDC temperatures in the two cities tracked each other quite closely, as you can see below. Again, Fort Collins in blue, and Boulder in red – with Fort Collins temperatures shifted upwards by two degrees to normalize the left side of the graph. Since 1965, temperatures in Fort Collins have risen much more quickly than Boulder, paralleling the relative increase in population.
Source: NCDC Boulder Temperatures NCDC Fort Collins Temperatures
The graph below shows the absolute difference between Fort Collins temperatures and Boulder temperatures since 1930. There is some sort of discontinuity around 1940, but the UHI imprint is clearly visible in the Fort Collins record. The Colorado State Climatologist, Nolan Doesken manages the Fort Collins Weather station. He has told me that it has never moved or changed instrumentation. and that he believes the increase in temperature is due to UHI effects.
Roger Pielke Sr. further commented:
“the Fort Collins site did have the introduction of the CSU Transit Center a few years ago, although this is well after the upturn in temperature differences between Boulder and Fort Collins started to increase.”
From the promotional photo on the CSU website, the Fort Collins USHCN weather station (below) seems reasonably sited.
However when you look at the Google Earth street view, you realize that it is surrounded by concrete, asphalt, nearby parking, and a building just 7.5 meters away (By the GE ruler tool). It would rate a CRN4 by the surfacestations rating. It also appears to have been modified since the promo photo was taken as there is a new fence with shrubbery and wood chips surrounding it.
Besides the pressure of CSU expansion, Fort Collins has seen an increase of about two degrees since 1970, corresponding to a population increase of 90,000. This is probably a little higher than Dr. Spencer’s estimates for UHI.
The Boulder weather station is similarly sited since the concrete path is just under 10 meters away.
It is at the campus of NOAA’s and NIST’s headquarters in Boulder. Anthony Watts visited the station in 2007 and took photos for the surfacestations project. Like Fort Collins, it gets similar expansion pressure due to nearby construction as seen in this aerial photo.
Here are the temperature records fro these two USHCN stations:
NCDC Fort Collins Temperatures
There is some UHI effect visible in the Boulder record below, but much less than Fort Collins.
Conclusion:
We have two weather stations in similarly sited urban environments. Until 1965 they tracked each other very closely. Since then, Fort Collins has seen a relative increase in temperature which tracks the relative increase in population. UHI is clearly not dead.
@ur momisugly Pascvaks (10:58:02) :
________________________
Sure seems like a big cemetery would be the best place to put a city/metro weather station:-)
But then you would be accused of burying the data.
I don’t know how Fort Collins could be any closer to the foothills, given that parts of the city are built in the foothills.
Here is the CSU football stadium
http://www.ramnation.com/images/wallpaper/hughes_expansion_large.jpg
Here is the CSU atmospheric sciences building
http://www.atmos.colostate.edu/
steven mosher (13:28:19) :
Thanks for the links. Those sites are interesting, but are up in the mountains and mostly on the other side of the Continental Divide. Boulder and Ft. Collins are very similar college/climate science towns with well maintained long-term records, which is why I chose them.
To make it clear how similar the topography is:
Fort Collins
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=fort+collins+tennis+complex&sll=40.545113,-105.108604&sspn=0.168795,0.373878&ie=UTF8&hq=tennis+complex&hnear=Fort+Collins,+CO&ll=40.56572,-105.116844&spn=0.168743,0.373878&t=p&z=12
Boulder
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Boulder+colorado&sll=40.559721,-105.095215&sspn=1.350038,2.991028&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Boulder,+Colorado&t=p&z=12
oMan: the coolness factor … nice one.
I guess that makes those of us up here in Canada WAY cool.
Your attempt at humor reminds me of a Canadian prairies inside joke:
Why is Saskatchewan so windy?
Because Manitoba sucks and Alberta blows!
It would take some detailed research to verify but I believe Boulder saw some effects from WWII activitites.
My father was sent to University of Colorado for radio school training in Sept 1942.
This implies a large influx of military trainees into the university in that time period.
The University might have enrollment numbers available to confirm that.
The new (at that time) National bureau of Standards facilities in Boulder were built sometime prior to 1954 (their first Cesium based atomic clock was moved in 1954 to their “new facilities in Boulder).
http://tf.nist.gov/cesium/atomichistory.htm
Boulder Reservior was built between May 1, 1954 – February 11, 1955
http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7417&Itemid=454
Reservoir construction is often driven by increased water needs of rapid growth. There was a major suburban building boom in the early 1950’s all over the western Metro area. Arvada, Broomfield and Boulder all saw growth during that period.
Ball Aerospace boulder was founded in 1956.
The Denver Federal Center in Lakewood Colorado was built in 1941
Likewise the Rockyflats Nuclear weapons plant began operation in 1951 and was located just south of Superior and Boulder.
The above suggest to me that there was major growth in the preceding few years, as the War effort took off. A lot of federal operations occurred here in Colorado due to our central continental location. I made a few phone calls but could not run down a local “Historian” that could answer such a question off the top of their heads.
Larry
“”” Anu (10:36:08) :
Kilroi1 (09:53:07) :
All kidding aside, I have a friend who works at NCAR and she tells me Kevin Trenberth is an arrogant jerk. No big surprise there.
Bill Gates was an arrogant jerk.
I hear all his work was a hoax, based on faked data. “””
According to legend, Mozart was an arrogant jerk.
I don’t see any point in attacking Dr Trenberth, based on a third party assessment of his personality. If we don’t like his energy budget cartoon ; which I don’t, we should address that; who knows, it might even stimulate those authors to revise it.
There is a huge difference between these two sites.
Look at them on Google Earth. Be sure to turn on the 3D terrain feature. Zoom out so that you can see a few miles surrounding each site.
You will notice that the Fort Collins site is in the middle of the city, about 5 miles east of the mountains, with the Horsetooth Reservoir between it and the mountains. The four miles between the temperature site and the reservoir is almost entirely developed land.
The Boulder site is only a mile east of the mountains, with nothing but open space between them. In fact it is only about a mile from the Flatirons (a prominent rocky feature that rises 1500 feet about the temperature site) and less than two miles from the summit of Green Mountian, which rises 2500 feet above the temperature site.
Best Regards,
Tom Moriarty
Colorado
One more point.
The Chinook winds in Boulder will nearly blow you off your feet.
These winds also blow where I live, in Arvada, near the front range, about 10 miles north of Boulder.
I don’t know if they get them in Fort Collins.
Tom Moriarty
ClimateSanity
jorgekafkazar (11:26:33) :
Seriously, I’m most curious about the cause of the 1942 divergence in the T lines. The war effort didn’t really start for the US until 1942, so the discontinuity may be war-related. It goes away about 1950, so it could have been a base or similar temporary installation in Boulder. If it was a large base, the city population may have risen, too. Or did more men get drafted from Ft. Collins?
The only large military installations were Camp Hale (10th Mountain Division, 15,000 troops) located north of Leadville and Camp Carson (71st and 104th Infantry Divisions, about 35,000 troops) located south of Colorado Springs. Both posts were built in 1942, but are too far south to have had a physical effect in the Boulder or Ft. Collins area.
However, there was a *lot* of construction involved. Contractors, laborers, and civilian admin people certainly didn’t all live in Colorado Springs, and Boulder or Ft. Collins would’ve been a tough commute with wartime rationing. Moving to where the work was would have been the sensible option. Evidently, the troops who trained in Colorado liked it there — many of the folks I used to know in the Colorado National Guard were the sons of 10th Mountain vets who moved there after the war.
I should have said Arvada is 10 miles south of Boulder. Fort Collins is, of course, north of Boulder.
Bill Tuttle (14:42:17) : “…Both posts were built in 1942, but are too far south to have had a physical effect in the Boulder or Ft. Collins area….”
Right, Bill. The only thing I could find in a 5 minute search was the Navy’s Japanese school, from 1942 to 1946. The bubble ends ~1950, so there’d have to be some reason beyond the Navy language school.
Hotrod ( Larry L ) (14:22:19) says above that his father was sent to UC Boulder for radio training in Sept 1942. There may, as he suggests, have been a large influx of military trainees into UC then, in addition to the two schools already mentioned. (Hotrod, was your dad in the Navy or the Army?)
Perhaps we need to place most of our surface stations in large graveyards because they don’t change as much year to year.
Tom Moriarty,
This winter has been very cold and there have been no Chinooks to speak of. Normally we get a number of days in January and February in the 60s and 70s, this year we hardly had any days that made it to the 50s, and there has been snow on the ground for months.
http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KBJC/2009/12/1/CustomHistory.html?dayend=11&monthend=3&yearend=2010&req_city=NA&req_state=NA&req_statename=NA
Average high temperature in Boulder has been 41F, which is about five or six degrees below normal.
I completely disagree with your conclusion that this is a population based UHI, but agree that this is a UHI issue.
First, the population divergence occurs in about 1990 but the temperature diverges about 20 years before.
Both stations have been located in about the same location for the period of record. Boulder has moved in and out of a residential neighborhood and is currently located on the border of the same neighborhood and a cemetery.
Fort Collins is located on a university campus.
Elevation of Boulder is about 5,500 ft and Ft Collins is about 5,000 ft.
The primary difference here is that Fort Collins is located at a growing University Campus and Boulder is located in more natural surroundings. So it seems to me that change in temperature more reflects the growth of the University, not the growth of the population.
As has been pointed out, the Coors Brewery is is Golden, Colorado, home also to the Colorado School of Mines and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (perhaps formerly the Solar Energy Lab?).
George E. Smith (14:33:37) :
I don’t see any point in attacking Dr Trenberth,
———–
Comparing someone to Bill Gates and Mozart is not the type of attack most people would complain about.
But to be fair, here’s his take on a famous stolen email (“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”):
Kevin Trenberth is head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. His email was referring to his recent paper.
The global mean temperature in 2008 was the lowest since about 2000. Given that there is continual heating of the planet, referred to as radiative forcing, by accelerating increases of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses due to human activities, why isn’t the temperature continuing to go up? The stock answer is that natural variability plays a key role and there was a major La Niña event early in 2008 that led to the month of January having the lowest anomaly in global temperature since 2000. While this is true, it is an incomplete explanation. In particular, what are the physical processes? From an energy standpoint, there should be an explanation that accounts for where the radiative forcing has gone. Was it compensated for temporarily by changes in clouds or aerosols, or other changes in atmospheric circulation that allowed more radiation to escape to space? Was it because a lot of heat went into melting Arctic sea ice or parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and other glaciers? Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface? Was it because the La Niña led to a change in tropical ocean currents and rearranged the configuration of ocean heat? Perhaps all of these things are going on? But surely we have an adequate system to track whether this is the case or not, don’t we?
Well, it seems that the answer is no, we do not. But we should!
——————-
It’s a good point – exactly why was 2008 the second coolest year in the hottest decade on record ?
Exactly where is the extra radiative forcing going ? Improved measurements such as the thousands of ARGO floats have helped, but the head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research argues that they could use even better measurements.
UHI is certainly not dead. They’ve yet to get us out of our modern cities and towns, and into villages of mud huts and dirt roads.
And with nice and neat studies like this one, they won’t be any time soon!
apparently ‘well sited’ is a relative term
<i.Kevin Trenberth is an arrogant jerk
No accounting for why? what a travesty!
😉
Tom Moriarity,
The Fort Collins site is almost exactly 3 miles east of the foothills.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=colorado+state+university&sll=40.533894,-105.03582&sspn=0.168823,0.373878&ie=UTF8&hq=colorado+state+university&hnear=&ll=40.585278,-105.04921&spn=0.168694,0.373878&t=p&z=12&iwloc=A
The Boulder site is about 1-1/2 miles east of the foothills. Both cities border on a hogback ridge of the same geologic formation. Both cities are about 20 miles away from the high peaks.
I hike and bike the trails west of both cities all the time including Horsetooth Reservoir, Chautauqua, Table Mesa, Mount Sanitas. Your statement that there is a “huge difference” is simply nonsense.
Steve Goddard (11:38:12)said:
Fort Collins and Boulder are both right up against the foothills, and the topography and elevation is very similar. I ride my bike around both cities fairly often. Both cities are relatively flat, sloping up slightly to the west.
Tom Moriarty (14:34:58) said:
There is a huge difference between these two sites.
= = = = = =
First, Steve, this is a great report that puts proper focus on land-use changes near climate/weather stations. Fort Collins has clearly experienced more UHI impact than the cloistered enclave of “The People’s Republic of Boulder”
But the Boulder CRS site is literally “at the foot of the Mountains” (1500-2500 ft rise) whereas Fort Collins climate station site is miles east of the foothills belt.
Boulder CRS site gets earlier afternoon shadow, more “up-slope” snowfall in the winter, and is surrounded by more artificially irrigated tree-scapes than the Fort Collins site. And Fort Collins site is downwind from several sq miles of tract-home development, whereas Boulder CRS site is flanked by mostly undisturbed grass/forest to the west and southwest.
I’ll buy you a Dale’s Pale Ale at Oskar Blue’s in Lyons, midway between!
Anu (10:36:08) :
Kilroi1 (09:53:07) :
All kidding aside, I have a friend who works at NCAR and she tells me Kevin Trenberth is an arrogant jerk. No big surprise there.
Bill Gates was an arrogant jerk.
I hear all his work was a hoax, based on faked data.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
There is no claim in the comment that because his personality is that way that it means his work is fake.
On Gates—- maybe you have something there since many claim he stole many ideas from Jobs. Also, Microsoft did lose a court case where a man claimed they stole his idea, bundled it for free with other software, and ran him out of business.
Here is a graph comparing the annual average temperature anomalies for Boulder and Ft Collins from the GHCN database:
(Plotted at http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/climgraph.aspx?pltparms=GHCNT100XJanDecI193020090900210AR42572469007x42574533002x
There are a couple of discontinuities in Boulder – the station was moved in 1990 and there were no measurements for a few months – then a big jump.
See: https://mi3.ncdc.noaa.gov/mi3qry/locationGrid.cfm?fid=4128&stnId=4128&PleaseWait=OK for NOAA’s listing of the station location.
Okay, hotrod, here’s my estimate of the number of seniors at UC Boulder for four years in that timeframe:
1941 361
1942 345
1943 331
1944 242
1945 231
Looks like the hallowed halls were emptied out by the draft. If there was any ballooning population or industry, it sure wasn’t working within UC Boulder’s academic system.
http://www.e-yearbook.com/sp/eybb