Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
“I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii
Following on from my look at the USHCN temperature dataset, I have gone north (if not north-north-west) and looked at the NORDKLIM dataset. This dataset covers Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland. Of the seventy-five stations in the dataset, fifty of them have records covering the period from 1900 to 1999. Figure 1 shows the average of those selected temperatures for that period.
Figure 1. Average of the 50 long-term stations in the NORDKLIM dataset. The warmest year in the data is 1934. Photo is of Tromso, Norway, 70° North Latitude.
As before, I wanted to look at the changes in different months, to see when during the year the warming occurred. Figure 2 shows the decadal changes in the temperature for each month.
Figure 2. Decade-by-decade changes in the temperature of the Nordic countries. Photo is of Tromsoe, Norway, 70° North Latitude
As you can see, the changes are similar to those in the US. The summer temperatures have not changed. Winter temperatures (January to March) have warmed. One difference is that the winter warming is larger in the NORDKLIM temperatures.
The more I look at these datasets, the more I think that we are looking at the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This is the change in the recorded temperature due to increasing development around the recording station. Increasing houses, buildings, industry, parking lots, and roads all increase the recorded temperature at nearby stations. The NORDKLIM notes say:
Especially one should notice that stations represent local conditions, which may have been effected e.g. by urbanisation
This effect is known to be greater in winter than in summer. In a study done in Barrow, Alaska, for example, there is a 4.5°C difference in the UHI effect between January and July. The winter to summer difference in the UHI in Fairbanks, Alaska is estimated to be 1.2°C.
In addition to the physical development (buildings, roads, etc.), another reason for this UHI can be seen in the photos used to illustrate the graphs. This is the direct usage of energy in the cities. For example, estimates of the energy usage for the New York City area are on the order of 5 * 10^18 joules annually. This gives a local forcing of ~ 20 W/m2.
How large an effect is this? Well, to get this amount of forcing from increasing CO2, instead of merely doubling, it would have to increase by more than forty times …
The colder the city is on average, the more effect that this will have. A building kept at 70°F (20°C) will have little effect on temperature if the local temperature is only slightly below that. If the temperature is below freezing, on the other hand, this will be a much larger effect.
In addition, the colder the weather, the more energy is put into heating the buildings. This also increases the winter UHI. As a result, we would expect the effect we have seen, that the recorded change in winter temperatures is greater in the NORDKLIM dataset than in the USHCN dataset.
My conclusion? At least part of the warming in the US and the NORDKLIM datasets is the result of UHI distortion of the records. An unknown but likely significant amount of this UHI heating is due to direct energy consumption in the cities.
And knowing how much of the temperature change is from UHI is harder than telling a hawk from a handsaw.
my basic thought is you take average in a day and average to a month then average it to a year and average it with stations similarly done locally (if 1000 kms can be considered local by anyone other than AGW advocates) then regionally then globally and are left with a big nothing because all the information in the data is averaged out.
Alan S. Blue (19:48:28)
Agreement in the continental US is pretty good … up north, not so much.
The albedo of bare roads and buildings is much higher than snow. On a still winter night, downtown Denver is often 10-15 degrees warmer than outlying regions at the same elevation.
davidmhoffer (16:16:12) :
A cold climate features shorter days, but also a sun that hangs lower on average to the horizon. So the vertical face of a building presents an almost perpendicular surface to incoming radiance and in most cases a darker color than snow. As a consequence, the amount of energy a building absorbs from the sun (and re-emitts as longwave) is higher in winter than in summer, and higher still than the amount of shortwave that would have been absorbed had it hit snow at a sharp angle and mostly just bounced off.
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Not sure if I understand what you are saying. A building will absorb more energy from a low-angled sun than the surrounding snow, but I’m not sure why a building would absorb more solar energy in the winter than in the summer. Sure, more energy enters the windows if the sun is at a low angle, which can help heat the interior (on sunny, windless winter days in Toronto there is a noticeable heating effect) but in the summer the roof absorbs tremendous amounts of energy, plus the length time buildings are being irradiated by the sun is much greater as the days are longer. The difference in albedo of plowed and salted roads, driveways and parking lots, shovelled flat tarred roofs, and dark brick buildings are probably greater contributors to the UHI than the sun hitting building walls as opposed to roofs.
I’m wondering how the introduction of effective insulation has affected the history of UHI. Insulation was uncommon prior to the post-Second World War period, and was not a major concern while energy was cheap, preceding the OPEC oil crisis of 1973. Fiberglass was invented during the Great Depression, but not used until after the war. Effective double-paned windows and efficient insulation really did not come about until the late 1970s (? just guessing but I know that the houses of the 1960 had doubled-up pairs of those awful glass pane sliders.) The increasing use of insulation would dampen some of the increased UHI that otherwise would show up due to increasing populations and population density.
For those who were wondering what sort of “hawks” I was referring to, click here.
(FWIW, that’s what I found when I Googled for something other than the Wikipedia entry.)
Willis & Anthony
I am doing a similar study for Australia – unfortunately I am very slow and keep getting distracted by other non AGW aspects of my life.
My results are exactly the same as yours.
Amongst other locations, I have done a very indepth study of Sydney, my home town, where there is 150 years of data, as well as 100 years of “value added” data from the BOM, who are warmists as you probably are aware.
It is all VERY interesting.
Knowing the location of the Sydney Observatory intimately and also having read the history of the site, i have been able to put sudden changes in human activity against sudden changes in temperature. Most instructive.
The BOM “value adding” process is also quite entrancing but there I am waiting for some answers to my questions before getting too excited.
More later, but what I see leads me towards the theory that all or almost all of Australian warming is due to UHI.
And is Australia like Camelot? Or does it reflect what is happening in other parts of the world?
(Camelot you may recall is said to be a mythical place where everyoby and everything only wake up each 100 years).
Enough – more later.
I hope to make a posting in a few weeks.
Anthony has my email if you want to get in touch.
Note that the data set includes some homogenised/reconstructed data, i.e. some well thought out but poorly documented guesses, like for 99840 Svalbard airport, which has been in service only since 1975 but is reconstructed back to 1911 using data from tens of km away (even hundreds) for much of the period. So the station is not too useful for climate studies.
You should try to find data for 2000-2009 as well. That decade has been quite warm, very warm in the arctic.
Willis, thanks for the interesting post, which confirms what I already suspected: There’s nothing special with the current warm period compared to the 1930s/40s warm period.
Your by-month graph is a bit difficult to read because of the similar colors of the important 30-39 period and the 80-89 period, but isn’t that the 30-39 period that has winters comparably warm to the 90-99 period?
Arctic warming is all about the AMO. And still we have to endure propaganda like this: http://blog.norway.com/2009/09/02/ban-sees-first-hand-view-of-climate-change’s-impact/ … sigh. When that story ran on Norwegian TV, I had a look at the ice maps, and the ice border was not far from average in the area northwest of Spitsbergen (which I think the UN secretary general visited).
A most interesting aspect of the jigsaw.
What happens in very equitable climates?
Is the ‘Winter UHI effect” less or absent?
Willis, I took a picture of the Stephenson screen at AES airport in north west Norway in march. This airport has grown a lot since 1950. The picture showed something interresting: around the screen there was no snow. The brown grassy spot around the screen looked like a nice spot to sit in the quite warm march sun. The fields around this spot were covered with 50cm of snow. There were a few bushes around the screen that had caused the melting around this screen. My bet is that these small changes in time will affect more a snowy location compared to a snow-free.
It is hard for Southerners to envision how very short the winter days are, up near the arctic circle. In December the sun has barely poked above the horizon, and already it is setting.
Even when insulation is very good, buildings still have plumes of steam from their exhaust. On bitterly cold and calm nights, with a strong inversion, this moist exhaust has nowhere to go. Even in very dry air, without a cloud in sight, I have seen a dust of fine “snow” on sidewalks, or suspended in the beams of a midwinter sunrise, simply because the moist exhaust from buildings can’t remain in the very cold air, and precipitates out. As it condenses from vapor to ice crystals, I imagine a fair amount of latent heat is released.
For what it’s worth, the quotation about hawks and handsaws wasn’t in the first printed edition of Hamlet in 1603. In the quartos of 1604 and 1605, it occurred as , “I knowe a hauke from a hand saw,” with hand saw as two words. In the 1623 first folio, Handsaw is one word and capitalized.
That the earlies use was as two words casts some doubt on the theory that it was a misprint of hernshaw.
I have looked a lot at individual monthly CET trends on Excel. The linear trend for June over the whole series is completely flat. The greatest rises over the whole series, or the last one hundred years are seen at the months around the Equinoxes, March, April, September and October. It is at these times that the solar wind makes the best connection with the Earth system, and the strongest solar storms and aurora occur.
NASA has observed the twisted magnetic ropes in the solar wind, migrate towards the North Pole in the Northern Hemisphere winter. I would suggest that intermittent connections here, are responsible for sporadic warming events during the winter months.
The linear trends for the last 1 hundred years show no particular rise for February or May, but really strong warming around the Vernal Equinox, (March/April). A slight warming through summer months, strong warming around the Autumn Equinox, a moderate rise in November, then fairly strong in December/January.
Here is a study I found of the last ten years; http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/01/central-england-temperatures-runaway-warming-during-the-last-decade.html
kadaka: “For those who were wondering what sort of “hawks” I was referring to, click here.”
I had visions of you sharpening a platerer’s tool!
Still, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that my interpretation is likely to be correct. And it is related to the following phrase
to draw the saw (of contention or controversy): to keep up a fruitless dispute. to be under the saw of contention: (of a question) to be the subject of profitless dispute. to hand the saw: to take turns, change parts, with another in some work or function.
Hamlet is contrasting the “man of action” who was his father and also the similar man of action who is teh King of Norway (both in action like hawks) to the “dithering to-and-fro of the handsaw politician” who is his step-dad/uncle/(illegitimate)king.
Also the Hawk would have had a high social status being the sport of kings. Whilst a handsaw (those who are at each end of a handsaw pulling it first one way then the next see:-http://www.thewanderingnomad.com/51.jpg) is a lowly profession a dirty profession in which you get covered in sawdust.
It would seem that the contrast might also refer to the kingly king (hamlet’s father) and the person not fit to be king (his uncle who murdered his father).
Interestingly saws after often used to explain the phrase: “top dog” which is assumed to mean the top person on the handsaw: (see:http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/top-dog.html for good picture) When wooden planks were sawn by hand, two men did the job using a two-handed saw. The senior man took the top handle, standing on the wood, and the junior took the bottom, in the saw-pit below. Add to this the fact that the irons that were used to hold the wood were called dogs and that the bottom position was much the more uncomfortable, and we can jump from this scene to the origin of ‘top dog’ and ‘underdog’. … although there’s no contemporary evidence to support the use of the phrase.
Caleb (00:24:39) : edit
Interesting thought, Caleb. I had never considered all of the H2O in exhaust and the warmth released when it condensed/froze. I just ran the numbers, and if we assume that the water is freezing (rather than condensing) it adds about 15% to the direct thermal energy from the burning of gasoline … I figure it like this, check my numbers. Gasoline is a mixture of hydrocarbons. For every gram of gasoline burned, we get about 1.2 grams of water.
A gram of gasoline contains about 21,750 joules of energy. 1.2 grams of water releases about 3,370 joules of energy when it freezes.
Always more to learn …
harrywr2 (14:20:35) :
“I’ll toss out another simpler theory for northern latitudes.
The side walk effect.
Anybody who has ever shoveled a sidewalk or driveway knows the snow melts faster near the sidewalk/driveway….”
I was think something similar. Back when I was a kid, the roads disappeared during the winter and everyone used studded snow tires or chains. Now the roads are salted as well as plowed and all that black top is visible instead of covered with snow and ice.
The saga continues (Anglo-Saxon pun!)
Just to check, my interpretation of “hawks and handsaws” I tried to check the rest of Shakespeare for “saw” but obviously because cutting saw and seeing saw were spelt the same this is problematic. However, this is interesting as it is a hangover from the Anglo-Saxon usage of saw to mean saying or “saga”, and this is how it is used in Hamlet earlier:-
ACT I SCENE V
Enter GHOST(Hamlet’s dad & rightful king) and HAMLET.
… Ay, thou poor ghost, … I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there;
We also have in As You Like It “Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon.”
Again the modern phrase would be “wise sayings” or even “wisdom”, and it was because “saw” meant saying, that Shakespeare had to write “hand-saw” and not just “saw”.
So what did Shakespeare mean by “handsaw”? In King Henry IV, Part I we have FALSTAFF saying: “I am a rogue, if I were not at half-sword with a dozen of them two hours together. I have ‘scaped by miracle. I am eight times thrust through the doublet, four through the hose; my buckler cut through and through; my sword hacked like a hand-saw–ecce signum! [meaning behold the sign!] … … so clearly something with a saw blade!
But going back to cutting saws (in last post), in the THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR Shakespeare specifically mentions a saw pit:-
wee’l dresse Like Vrchins, Ouphes, and Fairies, greene and white, With rounds of waxen Tapers on their heads, And rattles in their hands; vpon a sodaine, As Falstaffe, she, and I, are newly met, Let them from forth a saw-pit rush at once With some diffused song: [diffused meaning confused or even delirious] Vpon their sight We two, in great amazednesse will flye: Then let them all encircle him about, And Fairy-like to pinch the vncleane Knight;
The connection with “confusion” even madness is interesting as Hamlet is feigning madness when he uses the phrase “hawks and handsaws”, and from the way there is no other reason to mention saw-pits except to enhance the idea of “fairy-behaviour” I think saw pits may have been associated with madness – perhaps sawing decayed wood with fungal growth led to frequent madness by those in the saw pit who accidentally ingested fungal growth?
But overall in Shakespeare time the action of sawing as is in the phrase: “see-saw” used at the time of Shakespeare 1640 Let me not see you act now, In your Scholasticke way, you brought to towne wi’ yee, With see saw sacke a downe, like a Sawyer.
And in Shakespeare Lucrece In rage sent out, recald in rage being past, Euen so his sighes, his sorrowes make a saw, To push griefe on, and back the same grief draw.
Could this to-fro be intended to contrast in some way with the characteristic behaviour of a hawk?
We read also in ‘Romeo and Juliet,“Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks.” But to any one not conversant with the terms used in Falconry, this line would be perfectly unintelligible. An “unmanned” hawk was one not sufficiently reclaimed from the wild to be familiar with her keeper; and such birds generally “bated,” that is fluttered or beat their wings violently in their efforts to escape.
So, perhaps the comparison is between “handsaw” behaviour of one who is really mad (like the fairies from psychedelic toxic fungal infections in the wood) rocking too and fro and the hawk who flutters in an apparently similar way but is in reality perfectly sane.
James Sexton (15:34:07) :
Willis, I guess, because I haven’t seen a response, you either missed the question,(happens) or I wasn’t clear or emphatic enough.(probably both). I’ll try again.
Willis, there is something wrong with your graphs or the numbers used. Sure, I buy the UHI effect. What I don’t buy is how much greater the UHI is in Januarys as opposed to Decembers. In Decembers’ one sees a slight divergence in your spaghetti straps. Move to the Januarys, then one sees a great divergence. It is as if something magical happens every January. Willis, you know it doesn’t work like that. You know the graph is representative of half of a circular shape. The difference between 12 and 1 is disjointed. Of course, it could be the numbers you’re using and that someone else has done something “magical” with the numbers before you got them. But, its as if time starts anew every January. I don’t mean to be vague, I wish I could show you, and I don’t mean to be hyper critical, but better to find the problem here than someone else finding it elsewhere. If you have further questions about what I’m seeing, or I could help in anyway, feel free ask.
Kindest regards,
James Sexton
harrywr2 has it right – it’s not only energy use, pavement plays a role too… and then there’s the combination 1-2 punch of roads with cars running on top of them.
An additional conspiracy theory… UHI has a pronounced effect on Tmin, which appears to be exagerrated by the temp reconstructions. If you recall Dr. Spencer’s reconstructions, that took 4 daily temps and averaged them instead of Tmax/Tmin – the more I think about it, the more logical it seems that it might be in large part responsible for the discrepency between his reconstruction and the mainstream ones.
I hate to keep beating a dead horse here but pavement, pavement, pavement… In the US we have paved the equivalent of Wisconsin. Power consumption cannot explain the observed severe change in temp trends at relatively low population densities – it is the structures, paving and other LULC effects that are the strongest. Power consumption explains why, a NYC for example, continuesto see strengthening UHI once pavement, structures, an other LULC changes have been effectively satuated for a given area.
Willis,
I’m not really disagreeing with you here, but the sidewalk effect – as Harry calls it – is important to consider too!
vigilantfish;
Not sure if I understand what you are saying. A building will absorb more energy from a low-angled sun than the surrounding snow, but I’m not sure why a building would absorb more solar energy in the winter than in the summer>>
Let’s take an extreme example for illustrative purposes. Let’s suppose in summer at high noon the sun is at an 80 degree angle to the earth and shining away at 500 watts per square meter. In winter, let’s say the sun is at a 10 degree angle to the earth, exposing it to only 50 watts per square meter.
Now let us erect a building 1 meter by 1 meter by 100 meters tall. In summer, the top of the building, which covers 1 square meter of earth, is getting hit with 500 watts per square meter. Same as the earth it covers would have. But the south facing wall represents a 100 square meter surface at a 10 degree angle to the sun that didn’t exist before, absorbing 50 watts per square meter ( x 100). So in the summer time we went from 1 square meter of earth absorbing 500 watts to 1 square meter of building absorbing 5,500 watts (when the south facing walls is included)
Now let’s do the numbers for high noon in winter. The top of the building is at a 10 degree angle to the sun and so is only getting 50 watts per square meter, just like the earth it covered would have. The south facing wall however, is now at an 80 degree angle to the sun, and so getting hit with 500 watts per square meter over its 100 square meter surface for a total radiance between the roof and the south facing wall of 50,050 watts.
Of course I built a very thin tall building just to exagerate. But you can see that even with a very short day in winter, the building absorbs much more energy from the sun than it does in summer. I’ve never been able to get anyone to due this, but I also suspect that if you measured UHI in winter moving from city centre to the south, you would get a different value than if you measured UHI from city centre going north.
vigalintfish;
my apologies, I forgot one part of the equation. Remember the 50 watts per square meter in winter? Well most of it reflects off the snow. Angle of incidence = angle of reflection. So the sun is shining at a 10 degree angle downward onto the snow, and then reflecting back up at a 10 degree angle upward going in the same direction…. and running straight into the south facing wall of the building instead of proceeding into space.
James Sexton;
Willis, there is something wrong with your graphs or the numbers used. Sure, I buy the UHI effect. What I don’t buy is how much greater the UHI is in Januarys as opposed to Decembers>>
If you take a look at my explanation above re how much energy a building absorbs from the sun in winter versus summer, it might be part of the answer. I am guessing that someone less lazy than I, and with accurate math skills rather than guestimates for illustrative purposes, could show that the maximum absorption of energy from the sun would be a combination of sun’s inclination and length of day with maximum arriving somewehere after the winter solstice…. like January or February…
Heat Islands In The Stream, FYI –
http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/centgrtlakes_lite.php
Hurry, they won’t last long;-)
Living in a suburb of Stockholm I notice the UHI winter effect every time I drive my car from my home in a residential area approx 10 km outside Stockholm to Stockholm City. My car thermometer normally shows a difference of 2-3 degrees C. I.e. it is 2-3 degrees warmer in the City.
davidmhoffer (06:34:48) and (06:46:39) :
Thanks for the clarification. I’m a suburbanite, and was thinking in terms of ordinary houses. Obviously when considering tall buildings, there would be more sun exposure to the south- to some extent east- and west-facing walls in the winter. I suppose this factor would be more important than the shadows cast by other nearby tall buildings as the overall effect would be cumulative.