Measure UHI in your town with this easy to use temperature datalogger kit

Now imagine of just a one percent of cars had this system installed in several countries around the world. We would have the best method of measuring real temperature at the surface. The job of collating, processing, filtering, analyzing and reporting would be an issue but it would be far more accurate than the stationary temperature stations that are next to air-conditioners, parks, etc.

Very impressive.
Is this a recognised method of measuring UHI or is there an element of innovation?
How does the results with the inexpensive kit compare to those with the expensive kit?
Can you yet say whether there’s a discrepancy between the official correction for UHI for your home town and the correction your instrumentation would indicate is appropriate?
One thing about an improvement in instrumentation and access to it is that it doesn’t favour one side of the argument over the other.

Nice idea except for one thing: BIASES introduced by the surroundings.
I’m surprised that you’d —on the one hand— criticize the feds over their selection of specific weather stations, while on the other not consider the biases which will be introduced by so many uncontrollable factors such as the temperatures of:
— the pavement
— the vehicle
— the driver (who might be breathing heavily)
— the passengers (who might also be breathing heavily)
— passing vehicle exhausts
— wind currents which might cause the air temperature to remain static
— the surrounding topology of buildings, etc.
I like your idea, but in order for it to garner ~any~ degree of the scientific, one would have to have a fleet of identical vehicles AND a cameras facing all degrees of the compass such as to capture the lay of the land, and traverse the same route for several hours each day so as to acquire a replicative set of measurements.

Of course, if the Governements of the world were really keen on working out U.H.I , they would put these on Public service cars. But i suppose the problem is that they are idle most of the time, not doing any work, so the result would be debatable. Haha.
It would be great to get a National Taxi Service behind this, maybe we can get a grant from the Greenhouse Office(Australia) or Obama’s Green Mafia mob.
Also another suggestion would be a National Trucking line. surely someone knows someone that could help this happen. A lot of these guys are G.P.S monitered, so it would collate???

Off topic – but this is just the last in a succession of scandalous behaviour by our Scottish politicians.
MSPs fly out on £30,000 business-class ‘jolly’ – to talk about climate change

At a time when Scotland faces spending cuts of up to £3 billion in its budget, the parliament will today send four MSPs and two officials on a trip to New York, Boston and Washington DC.
The business-class transatlantic flights are costing in excess of £10,000, while accommodation has been booked in some of the best hotels.
The trip – described last night as an unnecessary, taxpayer-funded “jolly” – has been arranged as part of Tartan Week, even though the Scottish Government is already sending three ministers to take part in the celebrations in New York.

http://www.scotsman.com/politics/MSPs-fly-out-on-30000.6200049.jp

899
— the driver (who might be breathing heavily)
— the passengers (who might also be breathing heavily)
Before picking fault, look at the photographs – the windows are up.
DO’OH!
REPLY: More than that, even if the windows were down, at 60mph explain how a small breath is going to reach up to the sensor instead of getting sucked into the slipstream and instantly pushed downwind fast. – A

I think I would like to do several of Burlington, VT and Plattsburgh, NY. Two cites about fifteen miles from each other, one of which has experienced high economic growth and “global warming,” and the other of which lost a large air force base, has experience modest growth at best, and does not seem to show much “global warming.”

Good start on creating a global real-time dataset. No doubt the alarmists will mount the temperature sensors on the car’s exhaust pipe to achieve the results they expect.

Hell, I ain’t going to whip up any datasets or such, but I’m going to buy one just for the absolute neatness of the concept. I’ve used the temperature only unit for a couple of months, it’s kinda addicting. Now I need humidity measurement! Jeez that a recording barometer could be so inexpensive…

Have you allowed for possible cooling effects on the sensor of varying ground-speeds (and effective “airspeeds”) of the vehicle? Or is the fact that your UHI effect was measured at 1.5C both ways considered sufficient proof that this changes nothing?
REPLY: AT 60 mph it becomes a turbocharged aspirated thermometer. If you’ve ever ridden a motorcycle at night you’ll understand this experiment better. – Anthony

Chris Wright (04:26:54) :
A really great idea. As TJA says, it would be really useful to monitor UHI for the stations documented by SurfaceStations.
As far as I understand it, the IPCC effectively discounts UHI, possibly on the basis of a paper by Parker that used wind monitoring. To use such an indirect method seems bizarre when it’s so easy to measure UHI directly.
Anthony measured a UHI of 1.5 degrees. The presenter of the BBC Climate Wars series measured a UHI of several degrees at Las Vegas.
These UHI measurements are consistently much larger than the total claimed global warming of 0.7 degrees. Houston, we have a problem….
We know that the UHI effect exists. Most of us have experienced it at sometime in our lives, particularly during very hot or very cold weather. During hot wearther, night-time temperatures in urban areas are often several degrees higher than rural areas. This, however, is not the issue.
The real question is whether the UH effect has contaminated the readings at the same location over the last 50 to 100 years and whether this has had a significant influence on the global surface temperature trend. The evidence suggests not.
1. The oceans (i.e. ~70% of the earths surface), which are not subject to UHI effects, have warmed.
2. The satellite (LT) temperature trends broadly agree with the surface temperature trends.
It’s unlikely that a UH effect can account for any more than a couple of hundredths of a degree in the global trend. Just after the climategate episode, I warned that sceptics were tending to focus far too much on the validity of the surface records and that this might result in a lost opportunity. The recent UK enquiry suggests I was right. The world has warmed over the past several decades. Arguing against this fact is futile.

Great idea. The temp reading build in my car varies as much as 8-9 degrees. It really drops when leaving a paved road.

Off subject…but possibly applicable regarding light winds observed at airports.
For Mr. Watt’s consideration… Wind data from ASOS observation sites…taken by the new ultrasonic Ice Free Wind Sensors…are being messed up by birds and possibly bats. I have to edit the data frequently during light wind conditions, when a Hawk, or other Raptor perches on the top of the sensor head, then dives down to catch its prey. So a lot of gusts of 40 to 70 mph when prevailing winds (2 minute) are running 3 to 7 mph are due to the birds, rather the true wind flow. We don’t have time to correct each site’s data in our area…so try to do so with our primary climate sites only. It is time consuming…and we aren’t always able to do so…(eyeball adjustments???)
Just thought you would like to know. The FAA and NWS are looking into trying to fix the problem…but so far nothing has worked. They are aware of what has been going on…but still haven’t come up with an answer. Also, this has been going on without letting the public know what is going on… Oh, for the old days, when you just had to determine whether the winds were light or calm…or the cups had become frozen… Back in the days of the F420 wind set… Just a heads up…
From an HMT somewhere along the east edge of the Rockies.

Set them up with connections to sensors in swimming pools and watch the temp. in the pool water world wide, the pools will show up via google maps.
The locations will be able to be known by all.
The small weather station can be away from the pool area.
It is a great idea to sell weather stations to raise money for this blog.
Be sure the govt./govt’s are not messing with the supply of insturments.
I for one would not put it past them to rig the thermometers and or other
insturments to “hide their decline”.
Out in the “outback” , “ranch land” , and or no pool areas use stock tanks, tanks by water wells that serve livestock.
Never allow goverments to do those things you can do for yourself and you will remin free.
They can not fight say, 500,000 independent data sources that can be proved up as true and correct.
IMHO

May I assume that this experiment would be invalid if conducted in direct sunlight? I would think that the absolute values would be off. I am not sure what the theory would say about relative values.
REPLY: At 60 mph highway speed or even at street speeds of 30 mph biasing effects of sunlight on the sensor housing would be negligible as any localized heating is carried off in the airstream. If your vehicle stops at a stoplight, then yes you’d have an issue but it will disappear once moving again. -A

Neat, I love ‘kiss’
lots of people will have time/distance datalogger they use when running/cycling. These tend to have a standard time/position dump that can be read by google maps/earth.
There’s an app for that too on iPhone etc (free & paid) …
So it is comparatively easy to get route/speed/velocity data & then just mash them all together.
And all you hams – this looks an ideal APRS project : strip the datalogs via APRS mesage……
Next step is obviusly to merge the temp/humidiy (what chance pressure ? ) with gps.
Anyone think of doing runs that take in (multiple) weather reporting stations ?
BTW here in the UK we are not allowed to drive any distance without having to stop; our traffic planners seem to think the best way to control traffic is to make it stop, especially on empty roads late at night

Anthony you say : And yes, I do ship internationally.
But your indicative international postal charges are very scary.
It does say that there will be an e-mail approval but it is only that I trust you, after so long on this board, that I will send in an “179.95$ finalize sale” for a 79.95 item.
I often get stuff from Amazon.com and the postal rates are given on the spot while ordering, and are nowhere near 100$. For example for 3 books they are around 12euros.
If you want international customers you should get something like that.
REPLY: Yes sometimes the shipping calculator gets whacked. We’ll correct it. – Anthony

If a few thousand people got these and someone set up a database where the information could be collected, it could be a tremendous source of valuable data.
Chico UHI numbers are very similar to what I typically see in Fort Collins.
When people start using these, it is important to take transects in a way that does not introduce systematic bias. Like in to downtown in the morning and out in evening, which would both tend to make downtown look warmer due to morning heating and evening cooling. The best approach is to transect the entire city like Anthony did.
I do my transects on a bicycle, which has the advantage of very low thermal mass, and I ride on devoted bike trails where I almost never have to stop.

igloowhite (06:15:27) :
All merchent ships could be also rigged up with water temp. insturments and gather data from the ocean areas.
*************************************
If (a big if) “they” wanted to instrument a merchant ship for both sea temperature and air temperature, it would be relatively simple. (or navy ships for that matter.)
Both steam and diesel powered ships use prodigous amounts of sea water for cooling. It would be necessary to prove that the quantity of water flow through the cooling system while at sea was enough to prevent a measurable thermal contamination, but should that prove to be the case, installing a termal probe would be simple. I would mount it in the intake piping between the main sea suction valve and the sea water circulating pump. Alternately, you could mount it on a manhole cover on the inlet of the largest cooler availavble, although you should prove first that there is little or no thermal contamination that far into the ship.
The air probe could be mounted on the radar/radio mast and it would be perhaps 100 feet above ocean surface.
An interesting project.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack

Anthony,
Slightly OT:
Given, as you say, the world’s surface data is measured to the nearest degree, how can they measure global anomalies of fractions of a degree?

My RHT-10 from Extech looks a whole lot like the one from Anthony’s store (got it before I started lurking here) but the software reads out in 0.1 degrees C. Cost the same, so perhaps 0.5C is only a software limit? The sample rate is programmable and the unit can hold 16,000 readings, all with nice time stamps. My USB gps unit coupled to a netbook can do the same, so no distractions while driving. Set it and go. Post process on a spreadsheet, the GPS data should allow removal or at least take note of any stops. Set the logger’s time from the PC (Windows now sync’s up with NIST, so the clock should be good), the GPS will have exact time, all should tally.
My only complaint is I didn’t think of doing this. 🙁
A new task for Anthony’s Army: let’s verify just what the hockey stick is going on. We’re pretty sure UHI is real, now we can get hard data.

I just ordered mine. Anthony, what an awesome idea; can’t wait until my arrives.

Hu McCulloch (05:18:02)
————————————-
I would trust ducttape over velcro for an $85 instrument
————————————-
How ’bout this: Ducttape a female USB to to the mount … _and_ use velco for the instrument ?
..if it will work OK without the protecting cover that is..
I want one, but think I will make my own mount to save on the postage

Anthony, you took care to make sure that your temperatures during the transect didn’t get artificially inflated by being too close to a truck, or to too many cars. But did you find that traffic was generally heavier near the middle of town, on either your Reno or Chico transects?
Heat from vehicles would be part of the UHI effect, but perhaps the effect of heat from vehicles, averaged over an entire city or town, might be overstated if taken from the highway, where the heat signature from vehicles would be maximized — even if you took care to be far from trucks and not too far from gaggles of cars.
Did you try other transects, on streets with less of a traffic buildup in town, to cross check your previous transects? Or was there not a visible increase in traffic near the town centers?
REPLY: Avoiding such issues is why I suggest going later in the evening. I didn’t notice of any traffic in Reno, and on Hwy 99 at 8:45 pm traffic was also light. I was not caught up in pods of traffic either direction. There’s quite of bit of turbulent mixing and entrainment due to the highway speed involved. I believe at rush hour you’d be able to see a bias, but not in light traffic. I should note that I’ve driven this route hundreds of times prior to this experiment (when I was returning home from the 11 o’clock TV news) and my car thermometer showed this effect many many times, but until last night I had never logged the data. – Anthony

Ole Humlum has done a similar experiment in Norway and Scotland and published the results on his website – http://www.climate4you.com/

Instead of GPS there are …cell towers. Plug the thermometer into your cell phone and it will automatically call Anthony every 5 minutes stating it’s location and temperature.

Anthony, thank you for your feedback. I agree that driving in late evening should do a lot to reduce any artificial increase in UHI beyond what is legitimate UHI. But wouldn’t a good way to validate your quite likely assumption would be to drive a different transect, chosen specifically for very little traffic, and see if there is any change in the results?
It seems to me that if you do so, you will buttress yourself against claims by others that you chose only one road, don’t have statistics on the number of cars, didn’t avail yourself of a simple cross check, etc. Wouldn’t it be better to do added transects and thereby demonstrate, before hand, that such critiques don’t hold water?

Great idea/project. I would like to pick at least one of those up in the near future (after tax day).
It would be interesting to get a small group together from the same town and do a coordinated simultaneous star burst transsect with everyone starting at the same starting point (center of town). This would also provide a QC point as all should read the same temp at the beginning of the run. Then go out of town on radials, then reverse and all return to the starting point.
4-6 drivers would give you a good 3D view of the heat island dome topography in a community.
Larry

Valter Ström (02:27:38) :
Wonderful. Absolutely.
Wonderful combination of imagination, creativity and ability.
This and similar activity, if widely spread, should remove much of the nimbus in AGW.
I have a suggestion for improvement though, concerning the temperature measurement. Many of you may know that Analog Devices sell an absolute temperature controlled current generator AD590. It is an IC for, say, ca$10 (?).
Once I selected the series resistor for optimum current measurement for the voltmeter I had at hand with 1 microvolt resolution. The result showed 1 mK resolution. I am not joking, it immediately became clear I could follow temperature variations with 0.001 K resolution.
It is not that hard to make a thermometer with 1mK resolution. It is very hard to make a thermometer with 1mK accuracy and precision. The calibration alone would be very expensive and complicated. Wouldn’t matter much for this particular case though, as we are only interested in short-term temperature delta…
Carbon film resistors will get you 300-500 ppm/degC easy, but they are not consistent (anywhere from positive to negative coeff) and accurate calibration is a bitch.
On another note, the vortex effect will pretty much kill your precision – vortexes will heat and cool your sensor by much more then 1mk. Given unpredictability of airflow when you driving you can forget getting anywhere with 1mK.
50mK resolution is much more practical.
Still, making your own calibrated temperature logger is not worth it unless you can sell it and ther is a demand, IMHO

As we’re all, according the the warmists, on the payrolls of big oil, coal and other energy corporations, shouldn’t we all be getting the $1200 systems from them as a bribe to keep posting anti-agw on the net? I think Exxon-Mobil should send me one as I’m a staunch disbeliever and use their gas in my Honda Reflex scooter. It’s only fair.
Great system and article. I’m a retired metrologist from the US Navy, but don’t have access to the temperature/humidity test chambers any more to do a proper calibration for you and award your logger a proper USN calibration sticker. Sorry.
Keep up the excellent work and the pressure.

Very well done Anthony.

Anthony replied to my wonderings about complicating the simple:
> any of those will work, but the LCD version (not LED)
> really doesn’t gain you anything, and comes with a risk.
Roger; for this specific purpose U are clearly correct.
I was also thinking of other apps, but won’t bore y’all with those thoughts.
And my bad on letting LED slip in vice LCD; LCD, of course.
> I went for simple, robust, and inexpensive.
Which in most cases is the best policy.
Thanks for answer; I’ll buy one of the data loggers from your Weather Shop.
:-]

899
“— the driver (who might be breathing heavily)
— the passengers (who might also be breathing heavily)”
– gasping at straws

Will a police officer believe anything that you say after they pull you over for illegal survellience (such as driving past court houses, bridges, etc.)?

A few thoughts.
The action of air molecules (which carry the temperature energy) are not as simple as one likes to think. I used to spray metal cases with cellulose paint in a cellar with a powerful extraction fan to the outside running, and the access door closed. Despite these precautions my wife could come home from work some time later when the fan was still running and her asthma would be set off by traces of the gases that had managed to reach the ground/first floor.
I am the first to admit that the fan wasn’t driving the air at even 30mph, but the suction round the door crevices was noticeable though the door was a poor fit.
It would seem obvious that there is a considerable energy spread in the air (and cellulose) molecules giving some of them sufficient energy to more than overcome the airflow. Nevertheless if the vehicle speed is reasonably even the effect is probably the same throughout the exercise.
It might be an idea to turn off air-conditioning systems and perhaps use a car with manual transmission so there is less heat emitted. When I get out of my car after a journey I am met by a blast of hot air from the front.

Well, after reading those responses I’m given to wonder at the lack of humor some readers might be suffering. My ‘heavy breathing’ comments were meant in jest. But at low vehicle speeds, they ~could~ become biases. In the field of science, virtually NOTHING should be discarded without sufficient prior testing.
If you people are inclined to treat others with the same level of derision as you experience from the AGW idiots, then its no wonder that you don’t have all the support you’d like. Are you people always that trigger happy?
Now, it seems to me that a far better scheme of measurement might be to get a city to volunteer to place those data loggers at discrete intervals (light poles, anyone?) throughout that location and get the county to participate so that the suburban and rural measurements might be obtained as well.
If the devices are all placed at a specified height away from the easy reach of the curious, and the positioning is such the sun strikes them only in the early morning and late evening, OR if they are sufficiently shielded inside their own little enclosure, then a decent record of daily temperatures might be obtained.
In fact, such a scheme could well be used by cities to determine weather driven hot spots and help them to mitigate those.
In fact, Anthony, you might consider asking your readers to donate sufficient funds to get such a project started, with the added bonus that after the experiment is completed, the ones who donate to the project at the level of the price of the instruments, will be given one of the data loggers, with all others being prorated.
Heck, you could even start with a small town to get the feel for things.
The benefit here: There are fewer variables for which to have to control.

This is a good idea. It’ll take a while to build up the database, but it should give a much better basis than anything we’ve seen before.
My educated wild guess on the results: Properly handling UHI will reduce the temperature increase up to 1998 or so by a few tenths of a degree, but won’t eliminate it. That will still be significant because it will make some of the higher prediction for where the temperature will end up in forty or fifty years less viable.
One interesting idea: If there is an airport within easy transit distance, it might be worth it to drive past it. You might not be able to get close enough to detect any airport generated “UHI” and you might need to be discrete. I don’t know if airport security would get antsy about repeated transits, but it’s a possibility.
Another possibility: If air temperatures are different between city and country, would that be reflected in ground temperatures? Is there a consistent relationship between average air temperature and soil temperature at various depth? That might be complicated. Soil composition, moisture, how compacted the local soil is, and how healthy the local earthworm and soil bacteria populations are might all have an impact.
That brings up another point–which is admitted drifting OT: One of the biggest weaknesses in the CO2 –> Global Warming position is causality. Even if there is global warming and even if it is caused by human activities, that doesn’t mean that it is caused to a significant degree by CO2. Has anyone quantified the impact of human activities on the ability of soil to retain heat? On the diffusion of surface heat downward? On the diffusion of heat from the ground to the atmosphere during the winter?
Heat stored in the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of the amount stored in the ground and in the oceans, and it’s a very transient fraction. If changing farming practices somehow increased the amount of heat stored in the ground, or allowed more of the stored heat to be released, then that could be an alternate explanation for measured global warming (if there is any after UHI and measuring weirdness is accounted for).
Farming practices have definitely changed over the years. No till. More irrigation. More use of petro-based fertilizers. It would be interesting to measure the impact of that sort of thing on temperature storage capacity of the ground.
Tying this back to the topic, it would be interesting to see if transits using Anthony’s instruments could distinguish between types of rural land use. Is a no-till field cooler or warmer on average than a traditionally cultivated one? Is an irrigated field warmer of cooler than a non-irrigated one? For that matter, is there a detectable difference between crops–corn versus soybeans versus wheat? Between croplands and lands used for grazing or kept in forest? Old growth versus second-growth forest?
Lots of potential in this beyond just the urban versus rural divide.

As for clamps, how about an earthing clamp? you can get them in various sizes.
DaveE.

Must remember that both enthalpy & temp are anomolies.
DaveE.

Looks like fun.
Just a few questions.
1) Any elevation changes across your transect?
2) You mention that stopping the car may lead to temperature increases. It’s normal that there are more stop signals in the centre of a town than on the outskirts. How do you know you haven’t just measured the concentration of stops across the transect?

Please note that the ram air temperature rise while travelling at 65 mph is about 0.5 Deg C. So one would have to subtract that from readings while travelling that fast

John Finn (05:42:45) :
“The recent UK enquiry suggests I was right. The world has warmed over the past several decades. Arguing against this fact is futile.”
I’m a little confused. Who exactly is arguing that there has been no global warming at all in the past several decades? I certainly am not.
I’m sure you would agree that it is extremely important to know the amount of global warming that has actually occurred. The argument here is not about the reality of global warming. It’s about the actual amount.
The sceptical arguments about UHI seem to me to be very powerful. The way UHI has been handled – or ignored – by climate scientists and the IPCC is so bad that I hardly know where to begin. Recent research by McKitrick & Michaels showed a very strong correlation between local land use and population condition, and the local temperature record. Obviously, if the temperature record had been properly adjusted for UHI effects there should be no such correlation. If I remember correctly, they calculated that if the UHI had been properly accounted for, the average warming would only be half, at least for the last few decades.
I would also be curious to know why you thought the UK enquiry proves anything, except that most MP’s know little about climate science and can easily be misled by scientists who might be – shall we say – economical with the truth.
I seem to recall that the satellite measurements originally showed far less warming than the surface record. It was only after they had been ‘adjusted’ that they agreed, assuming that they actually do agree.
Those in charge of the satellite record vehemently deny that they calibrated the measurements against the surface record and that therefore the two records are completely independent. But I have to admit I’m a little – shall we say – sceptical about this. In climate science the word ‘independent’ has a rather different meaning, compared to what you would find in your dictionary.
At least until recently, the surface record was regarded as a gold standard, as it depended on direct temperature measurements. Of course, the satellites do have a local reference/calibration source but it’s still a huge jump to assume they can measure the surface temperature directly without some form of calibration from the surface record. One could almost argue that if they didn’t use the surface record for calibration they weren’t doing their job properly.
It would be sad if the one method of providing a reliable temperature record had been corrupted by calibration against another record that was completely unreliable.
As I said, nobody here seriously denies that global warming has occurred. Indeed, that modest warming has almost certainly been of overall benefit to mankind, just as it was in the Medieval and Roman periods, though sadly it may be coming to an end.
The warming has been noticeable in England. It was nice while it lasted, but now the winters are getting steadily colder and more unpleasent. It’s instructive to look at the CET record. It shows that the warming is completely unexceptional – there were warming trends very similar in previous centuries, and actual temperatures were also higher. CET is one of the best and longest temperature records and it shows nothing ‘unprecedented’. Of course, it raises one question: why didn’t the Met Office ‘adjust’ it to get the right answer?
Maybe they haven’t got around to adjusting it yet. But maybe they never will, given the current ‘climate’.
Chris

I wonder if someone will write an “app” for that… All the smartphones with USB ports could make the control a snap. You carry your phone with you anyway…., just keep the datalogger in the glove compartment, and you are ready to go.

I was thinking about IR bias from the heat source you bring with you. I’m not sure of the absorptivity of the datalogger itself, but you could shield with a small disk of material below, with a small amount of gold coated tape on the bottom. Gold has a great reflectivity of IR. Gold tape is expensive, but in this small an amount, it shouldn’t add terribly to the cost.
Just a thought.

Asking the city or any government agency to do this (on public vehicles, for example) turns the project back to the folks who brought you GISSTEMP and CRU. Much better for us amateurs to do it. Sure, it will have some errors, but with enough data from enough places, we’ll get a good picture. Driving around airports multiple times may get TSA a bit upset, but freeways through cities should be easy.
Any thoughts on how and where to send or collect results? Formats? I’m OK with spreadsheets, but Windows code is not my strong point. (If you need code for an embedded 8 bit micropower processor, give me a call.)

Pity the software is Windows. I run Debian/GNU-Linux on more than half a dozen desk top machines and three laptops. How about porting the software to the GNU-Linux operating system?