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.
Does James Hansen know about this post? You’d think he’d be quick to drop out urban stations instead of all the rural and mountain ones he’s dropping so he could avoid accusations of being biased.
So whats up Jim?
Tom Moriarity,
One more thing. You said “These winds also blow where I live, in Arvada, near the front range, about 10 miles north of Boulder.”
You might want to get a new compass to your house, because Arvada is south of Boulder.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=boulder,+co&daddr=arvada,+co&hl=en&geocode=&mra=ls&sll=40.005725,-105.271511&sspn=0.042537,0.09347&ie=UTF8&t=p&z=11
A C Osborn (10:32:32) :
What you want is COOP station data.
I believe somebody had a page that has all the links to where data can be obtained.
Richard Sharpe (11:41:02) :
38,660,924 hits
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
1/4 billion by 1/1/11 would be fine!
A bit of sanity Down Under.
Climategate: ABC Chairman admits media bias
Lateline & Radio “PM” reports.
there is a commenter here who seems to think only the USA has UHI from growing cities. That would be a poorly thought out assertion.
Stephen and Anthony.
Please take a look at the paper I emailed to Anthony a few days ago.
I have examined six sites in Australia and have found that each has a very stable long term temperature gradient, (some 150 years) but that they vary from each other.
Some are rising very fast.
Others slowly or not at all.
The secret is in looking at maximums and minimums seperately.
I found that it is the maximums that are they key, which is strange, because the UHI effect is supposed to be because heat is retained at night in urban settings.
I intend to look at more sites to see if others show the same effect.
But that will have to wait for some time as I have other duties that I have neglected for far too long.
Anthony has my email address.
(Mod: Video did not embed, not sure why)
Steve Goddard (14:03:39) :
Using very long records is showing the longer cycles of warming & cooling repeating.
This is great for demonstrating how the GISS and others reliance on base period choice leads to a false impression of rising temperatures with catastrophic warming on the end.
All the warmists are showing is the candy-coated upside of a long cycle with UHI’ed low peanut temps on the end raising the average temp prize;
That’s what you get with Cracker Jacks.
Nothing more.
11 March: Physics World: Concerns raised over Institute of Physics climate submissionby Michael Banks, news editor of Physics World
The hockey-stick graph, which is widely considered as a valid result in the climate-research community, was later included into the third assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.
The “trick”, as mentioned by Jones in one of his e-mails to Mann, Bradley and Hughes, is a statistical method that is widely accepted in the climate community and is applied to proxy measurements in the years since 1960. It deals with the problem that some tree rings in certain parts of the world have stopped getting bigger since that time, when they ought to have been increasing in size if the world is warming. According to physicist Rasmus Benestad from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and a blogger for realclimate.org, Jones’ reference to “hiding the decline” could have involved removing some tree-ring proxy data from the analysis after 1960 to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming..
Arnold Wolfendale, who was president of the IOP from 1994 to 1996, says that the evidence is “not worthy” of the Institute and that the submission “further muddies the waters regarding global warming”. Oceanographer and climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf from Potsdam University, Germany, has gone further, calling on the IOP to retract the statement from parliament. “I was taken aback when I first read it,” he says. “The evidence is both misinformed and misguided.” ..
“I consider it not only inappropriate but highly irresponsible for a body like the IOP to appear to presume a judgment on what is clearly not a simple issue without having the full facts and without presumably knowing the full context,” says atmospheric physicist John Houghton, who is currently president of the educational charity The John Ray Initiative and is a former director-general of the UK Meteorological Office. Houghton has also been the lead editor of three IPCC reports. …ETC ETC
COMMENT BY BISHOP HILL AT BOTTOM OF ARTICLE
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41965
Questioning the basic temperature data is now a relevant issue:
http://voices.kansascity.com/node/8088
Ot but it seems climategate.com has been hijacked just to let them know. Will not put link here just in case
11 March: USA Today: Brian Winter: Questions about research slow climate change efforts
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The violent threats are not what bother Michael Mann the most. He’s used to them…
In a rare extended interview, Mann acknowledges “minor” errors but says he has been bewildered by the criticism — including a deluge of correspondence sent to his Pennsylvania State University office that, he says, occasionally has turned ugly.
“I’ve developed a thick skin,” Mann says. “Frankly, I’m more worried that these people are succeeding in creating doubt in the minds of the public, when there really shouldn’t be any.”…
Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, says recent events may be causing “the death of the global warming movement as we know it.”
Others don’t go quite that far, but there have been setbacks…
It has been a dramatic reversal of fortune for a movement that, just a few years ago, thought it was “invincible,” says Leighton Steward, a geologist and global warming skeptic. “We’ve all been kind of giggling as we watch this thing fall apart,” he says…
In retrospect, Mann says the movie (An Inconvenient Truth) contributed to a “premature elation” among some scientists that they had won the battle for public opinion on global warming. He also says his colleagues and policymakers were too eager to present certain scientific conclusions as “settled” — particularly with regard to possible consequences from climate change, which he says need further study……ETC
He says he has been exasperated by the way some politicians, including Inhofe, have portrayed this winter’s snowstorms on the East Coast as undermining the case for global warming, while largely ignoring a recent announcement from NASA that the previous decade was the warmest on record.
Citing climate data, Mann says “there’s a better than 50-50 chance” that 2010 will be the hottest year ever. That, more than any political statement, could refocus the debate, he says.
“If we don’t act on this, it’s not a failure of science,” Mann says. “It’s our failure as a civilization to deal with the problem.”
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-03-10-warming_N.htm
(so a ‘hottest’ 2010 would prove CAGW!)
11 March: RTE Ireland: Review of UN’s climate body welcomed
One of Ireland’s leading climate scientists, Professor Ray Bates, has warmly welcomed an independent review into the work of the UN’s climate advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Earlier this year Professor Bates, adjunct professor of meteorology at UCD, asserted the credibility of the IPCC had suffered due to allegations of data manipulation…
Professor Bates says this is a very good move because it is vital the IPCC was beyond any suspicion that it was an advocate, rather than giving unbiased, accurate scientific reports.
He said there was a need for peer-reviewed opinions to be admitted, even if they did not agree with the IPCC mainstream.
Professor Bates said the IPCC had in the past lacked transparency and a robust review, if adopted, would only add to its credibility.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0311/climate.html
jorgekafkazar said:
R. Gates (11:35:02) :”More importantly though is the the trend in arctic sea ice on a year-to-year basis remains the same…down. See:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png ”
An obvious falsehood. The recent trend is strongly upward. The ice is, in fact, currently within one standard deviation of the “average.” Saying the arctic ice is now trending down is like saying someone from LA driving west out of Denver at 60 mph is “trending towards New York.”
Sure is funny how two people can look at the exact same graph, and one see a trend and one not. The arctic sea ice anomaly is obviously downward since at least 1998…a trend the above linked graph clearly shows. To deny the obvious trend is to show that either you don’t know how to read simply graphs, or you have some agenda not to see a trend where it is quite obvious.
this is what it is all about
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/11/industries-greenhouse-gas-emission-permits
OT but can I put this in here. In British Columbia we pay a carbon tax on our gasoline and it is going up this summer. A Dr. Andrew Weaver who has been mentioned on this site before has comments on Canada’s warm winter this year leaving out Eastern Canada, most of the States Europe and Asia. Also BC had a hot summer last year which he commented on but leaving out the rest of Canada which in most part had no summer. He is a main player in our carbon tax.
Read this article http://www.calgarysun.com/news/alberta/2010/03/11/13199301.html
This is what we are up against. He does not mention El Nino or PDO
Tom Moriarty (14:34:58) :
“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”
Tom, this is ridiculous and a strawman argument. The question here is not in how they ARE different, but what is the difference in their CHANGE.
When I used to live in Denver they always referred to Boulder as 30 square miles surrounded by reality… has much changed?
So that’s it … we’re not faced with AGW, but with AMW — Anthropogenic Microclimate Warming, with temperature measurements derived from such sites as airports, wastewater treatment plants, and built-up urban areas with temperature build up due to large areas of concrete and asphalt, with further contamination due to urban creep, where built-up areas slowly encroach upon once rural weather stationn sites.
Of course the interesting question is, what do the “adjusted” temperatures look like?
Jim Cole (15:58:54) :
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the feedback and comments.
Not that it is important, but the Flatirons are about a mile and a half west of the Boulder weather station.
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=112394479801416151184.0004818f6c2f29185b17f&ll=39.995008,-105.267735&spn=0.089295,0.171318&t=p&z=13&iwloc=00048190debd6e5cc5a89
Here is the Fort Collins Weather Station
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=112394479801416151184.0004818f6c2f29185b17f&ll=40.577977,-105.13607&spn=0.088528,0.171318&t=p&z=13&iwloc=00048190e2535014f8746
There is a small hill half a mile behind the weather station. I go hiking there frequently on Table Mesa.
Here is the view of the Flatirons from NCAR in Boulder
http://www.boulderpics.com/images/NCAR_10-12-07.jpg
Here is the view of the foothills behind CSU’s Atmospheric Sciences Lab in Fort Collins.
http://www.atmos.colostate.edu/images/atmos_spring.jpg
The two cities have very similar settings are very similar settings.
It’s laughable that the hysteria crowd continues to defend their “hypothesis.” You have to put it in scare quotes because it is just so far from real science to even be considered a real hypothesis. The climate scientists like Jones, Trenberth, et. al. have given up any real premise of science. I value their degrees no more than one I might get in from a Internet college degree web site. These are people that have bought in to the Ehrlichian fad of doom and gloom.
Their movement is dying.
“”” Anu (15:48:03) :
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”): “””
Well you entirely miss my point. Describing Bill Gates or Mozart as jerks, whether true or not, is not what either of those persons is known for. Neither should Trenberth be judged by that (jerk) standard; he’s a “climate scientist”; not a candidate for sainthood.
As to Bill Gates; I’d like to see a short list of those persons, who have contributed more to the lives, of more persons on this planet (or any other planet) than Bill Gates.
I would put down two names as potential candidates; who in their day most certainly did; but that takes nothing away from Bill Gates.
Those would be Sir Winston Churchill, and former Air Marshall, Sir Hugh Dowding.
But for any of that trio; we most likely would not be having this discourse today. I’m sure there are others; and probably all of them were regaled, regardless of what they achieved for human kind.
No Dr Trenberth isn’t anywhere near on such a list; but shall we judge him on his science work, and not on what his personality may be (or not).
And I almost forgot; please do let us in, on your insider information about that famous stolen e-mail.
Has someone been indicted for that theft ?
It’s always Marcia, Marcia (16:06:01) :
“Does James Hansen know about this post? You’d think he’d be quick to drop out urban stations instead of all the rural and mountain ones he’s dropping so he could avoid accusations of being biased.”
To Quote Hansen –
“Of course, the contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the U.S. temperature does not affect the global temperature much,’ said Hansen. ”
If there any real ‘whopper’ errors, they are most likely to be in areas where the data is the poorest and the most Urbanization is taking place.