Today I’m starting what may be a two or three part series having a detailed look inside the Eureka Weather Station and the data it produces. Thanks to the manager of the station Rai LeCotey, we have a lot of new information that had not previously been available on the web. Mr. LeCotey has been most gracious and forthcoming and I commend his openness, which as we have seen in Climate Science, is a rare quality. Here’s an aerial view of the station.
click for a larger image
Ecotretas and I looked at a number of what we identified as errors in data from Eureka, Nunavut, Canada weather station. Some errors are real, such as the January 1st 2007 METAR error (caused by transcription error).
We identified what we thought were errors on July 13th and 14th. The Station Manager Mr. LeCotey says that the July 14th new record high temperature “error” was real (meaning meteorological data, not a transcription error), and a function of wind direction bringing air from the North that has been warmed by terrain. He also says he’s working to get the error on Jan 1 2007 corrected in the record. He’s sent along some photo documentation of the July 14th 2009, event. We’ll get to that in a subsequent post, but first some background on the station itself.
Here’s what the Meteorological Instrument Complex looks like:
Looking Southwest at Eureka Met Instrument Compound -7/24/2004 - click to enlarge
The truck is interesting. Note the blowers on top of the Stevenson Screens for continuous aspiration.
Mr. LeCotey provided this official visitors guide to Eureka, which I have posted as a PDF, link below
He also graciously answered a number of questions. His answers are in blue.
1) The sensors in the Stevenson Screens are electronic it appears. Am I correct in assuming they are cabled to the met office? Of what type are they? Thermistors, RTD? Thermocouple?
We use a remote temperature and dew point measuring system type 2. The dry bulb temperature is measured with a thermistor and the dew point is measured with a dew cell.
2) I notice fan aspirators on the screens. Are these run continuously for the electronic sensors, or are they a holdover of earlier times when wet bulb DP/humidty readings required aspiration?
The sensors are housed in a ventilated Stevenson screen that runs continuously. Psychrometer comparisons between the remote system and our mercury thermometers (in a second Stevenson Screen right next to the remote screen) are done once a week with an thorough calibration done once a year.
3) How far away, in meters, is the Met Instrument compound from the nearest structure, such as the bright blue HQ building?
The Stevenson screens are approx. 40 meters
4) Why are there no readings in the first two hours of the day (00 and 01)?
We only do a surface weather program for 22 hours a day. We have a contract with Nav Canada that only wants aviation weather between 06Z to 03Z inclusive.
Surface weather observations are done on the side (with NavCan funding). Our primary function is that we send up 2 weather balloons a day as our commitment to the WMO. We stay on EST all year (there is no point to go to daylight savings time as an extra hour of daylight does mean anything to us when we have 24 hours of daylight in the summer anyway). Therefore, our last observation is at 22:00 EST (local) and we start observing again at 01:00 EST (local). The 23:00 & 00:00 observations are missing as NavCan does not pay us for those two observations.
5) Do the electronic displays have max/min memories?
Yes, our AES remote temperature and dew point (1987) system (RTD-87) measure the max and min temperatures and stores them in memory until cleared by the observer every six hours on the syno. The RTD measures the temperature & dew point every minute.
6) How often are the meteorological instruments calibrated and how is this done?
Psychrometer comparisons between the remote system and our mercury thermometers (in a second Stevenson Screen right next to the remote screen) are done once a week with an thorough calibration done once a year.
7) How are the hourly METAR reports made. Are they transcribed from the paper form to teletype or Internet data, or some other method?
The METARS are transcribe from the 2322 form into a WinIDE quality assurance software system (WinIDE version 3.0, is used as the principle data input system for human METAR observations within EC) that automatically checks for errors/discrepancies and gives a warning to the observer to make a correction before the observation data will be sent out. The WinIDE system is very good and follows the observing criteria of MANOBS very well. It will not allow an observation to be sent out over the met circuit with any errors or unnatural trends as in the case of the temperature being entered in as +23.0°C when it was supposed to be -23.0°C.
There will be subsequent posts on Eureka coming in the next day or two.
Visitor’s Guide to Eureka
1) The sensors in the Stevenson Screens are electronic it appears. Am I correct in assuming they are cabled to the met office? Of what type are they? Thermistors, PTD? Thermocouple?
We use a remote temperature and dew point measuring system type 2. The dry bulb temperature is measured with a thermistor and the dew point is measured with a dew cell.
2) I notice fan aspirators on the screens. Are these run continuously for the electronic sensors, or are they a holdover of earlier times when wet bulb DP/humidty readings required aspiration?
The sensors are housed in a ventilated Stevenson screen that runs continuously. Psychrometer comparisons between the remote system and our mercury thermometers (in a second Stevenson Screen right next to the remote screen) are done once a week with an thorough calibration done once a year.
3) How far away, in meters, is the Met Instrument compound from the nearest structure, such as the bright blue HQ building?
The Stevenson screens are approx. 40 meters
4) Why are there no readings in the first two hours of the day (00 and 01)?
We only do a surface weather program for 22 hours a day. We have a contract with Nav Canada that only wants aviation weather between 06Z to 03Z inclusive.
Surface weather observations are done on the side (with NavCan funding). Our primary function is that we send up 2 weather balloons a day as our commitment to the WMO. We stay on EST all year (there is no point to go to daylight savings time as an extra hour of daylight does mean anything to us when we have 24 hours of daylight in the summer anyway). Therefore, our last observation is at 22:00 EST (local) and we start observing again at 01:00 EST (local). The 23:00 & 00:00 observations are missing as NavCan does not pay us for those two observations.
5) Do the electronic displays have max/min memories?
Yes, our AES remote temperature and dew point (1987) system (RTD-87) measure the max and min temperatures and stores them in memory until cleared by the observer every six hours on the syno. The RTD measures the temperature & dew point every minute.
6) How often are the meteorological instruments calibrated and how is this done?
Psychrometer comparisons between the remote system and our mercury thermometers (in a second Stevenson Screen right next to the remote screen) are done once a week with an thorough calibration done once a year.
7) How are the hourly METAR reports made. Are they transcribed from the paper form to teletype or Internet data, or some other method?
The METARS are transcribe from the 2322 form into a WinIDE quality assurance software system (WinIDE version 3.0, is used as the principle data input system for human METAR observations within EC) that automatically checks for errors/discrepancies and gives a warning to the observer to make a correction before the observation data will be sent out. The WinIDE system is very good and follows the observing criteria of MANOBS very well. It will not allow an observation to be sent out over the met circuit with any errors or unnatural trends as in the case of the temperature being entered in as +23.0°C when it was supposed to be -23.0°C.
Interesting indeed. Good to see that they are using RTDs.
Paul Vaughan
April 24, 2010 12:38 pm
My experience dealing with EC has been that they openly admit any errors without hesitation.
Doug Badgero
April 24, 2010 12:39 pm
“The Station Manager Mr. LeCotey says that the July 14th new record high temperature error was real, and a function of wind direction bringing air from the North that has been warmed by terrain.”
We really need to start talking about total system energy and stop talking about temperature when discussing global warming. This is obvious when you consider some thermodynamic properties of water and air:
Specific heat:
Water – 4.2 KJ/KG-K
Air – 1.0 KJ/KG-K
Latent heat of vaporization for water:
~2200 KJ/KG
Now consider the volume of 1KG of water (1 Liter) and the volume of 1KG of air (~800 Liters at 1 atmosphere). You quickly realize that ignoring the transfer of heat from oceans to atmosphere and vice versa is idiotic.
Ed Caryl
April 24, 2010 12:54 pm
Those Stevenson screens were moved to their present position, probably when the blue building was built. They are not there in the earlier picture. Is there a step in the temperature record? REPLY: I’m trying to determine the date of the blue building addition to check. Seems like it may be 2004 as I see construction machinery as well as some temporary sealant tarp on the building- A
DirkH
April 24, 2010 1:01 pm
Anthony, i’m confused:
“Some errors are real, such as the January 1st 2007 METAR error.
”
I think here you mean “it’s really an error”.
Later:
“The Station Manager Mr. LeCotey says that the July 14th new record high temperature “error” was real, and a function of wind direction bringing air from the North that has been warmed by terrain. ”
Here you mean “it wasn’t an error but real”. So you use “error is real” in two ambiguous ways… REPLY: Yes I agree my wording choice is confusing. Look for the uncertainty to be resolved in the next post. The bottom line is that the Jan1 2007 error is real, confirmed, and a transcription error. The July 14th 2009 “error” appears to be a real temperature reading, not a transcription error. -A
MaxL
April 24, 2010 1:15 pm
I worked as an operational forecast meteorologist with EC for many many years and still do some contract work for them. One of our forecast areas was the arctic, including Eureka. I do not know of any deliberate attempts to falsify or questionably adjust data. Certainly there are instances when some bad data gets into the system. This is especially true now with all the auto stations. In older times, humans would actually take and input the observations. Errors were caught much more readily. There are many known systematic errors from auto stations which get into the database Anyone using the climate database needs to be aware and cross check the observations that may seem out of sorts. Downloaded data contains flags for each parameter which may indicate that errors are possible.
Andrew P.
April 24, 2010 1:19 pm
I followed yesterday’s thread and the discourse over the July 14th 2009 20.9C reading with great interest. For the temperature to peak at 20.9C so late in the day does seem quite unbelievable. But I am happy to take Mr. LeCotey’s word that the reading was correct and that it was caused by an entirely natural sudden warming event due to north winds from presuambly sun-warmed terrain.
That said, this must have been an extraordinarly event and as such very rare.
Which leads me to suggest that Chefio’s argument (that the effective extrapolation of the Eureka data such that it can be used to potentially ‘colour’ an area of up to 3600km in diameter) is still very much a valid concern. Using Eureka’s data but excluding other settlements in the high Arctic is fundamentally bad/junk science. Irrespective of whether the 20.9C reading was caused by a nearby deisel engine left running, or a natural warm north wind, this was evidently an extremely rare and localised event, which lasted less than an hour, and cannot (with any credibility) be used as an example or consequence of AGW; as it clearly had nothing do to with CO2 emissions, local or global. If you will it is more akin to UHI, but with sun-warmed bare rocks au naturel, rather than ashpalt/concrete.
Rhoda R
April 24, 2010 1:21 pm
It is nice to see such a clear and upfront response from Mr. LeCotey. Did you contact him, or is he a reader? REPLY: He is a reader, and contacted WUWT via comments first. – A
MikeC
April 24, 2010 1:32 pm
Give that man a ceee-gah! Nice to see an honest chap, a real scientist, in the bunch!
MikeC
April 24, 2010 1:34 pm
…oh… and how do we send good guys like this some support… I have a very old bottle of scotch that may be useful as back-up generator fuel 😉
I understand that real errors such as transcription screw-ups, when discovered are corrected in the main Environment Canada data base by some established process. It would be nice to know what that process is and how well it works, i.e. how long it takes, stuff like that.
I wonder then what happens to the corrections. That is does EveCan issue an exception or correction report? Do users or collectors of the data then update their data holdings? Things like that.
Spector
April 24, 2010 1:36 pm
RE: Mangled Data.
Perhaps a standard should be set that any software used for collecting this type of information should be required to include ‘bogus abnormal data’ (BAD) detection routines to flag or exclude single point anomalies.
Ed Caryl
April 24, 2010 1:36 pm
“July 14th so late in the day” has little meaning so far north in the “land of the midnight sun”. I remember playing baseball in shirtsleeves at 2AM at Thule on July 4th. During July the temperature doesn’t change much around the clock if the wind is steady. I also experienced rapid temperature shifts depending on whether the wind was blowing from the land or the sea.
BBk
April 24, 2010 1:38 pm
The WinIDE system is very good and follows the observing criteria of MANOBS very well. It will not allow an observation to be sent out over the met circuit with any errors or unnatural trends as in the case of the temperature being entered in as +23.0°C when it was supposed to be -23.0°C. ”
Ummm… so how did the real error occur then? He seems to be claiming that the error doesn’t exist, even though you say he’s trying to get it corrected. It’s obviously possible to somehow not get corrected…
RichardS
April 24, 2010 1:40 pm
“The 23:00 & 00:00 observations are missing as NavCan does not pay us for those two observations. ”
I’m a physician not a climatologist but this caught my eye.
Is this standard paractice?
Would this not bias the average daily temperature higher by eliminating night-time observations?
jaypan
April 24, 2010 1:45 pm
It’s important to clean up what’s going on in the Arctic.
Holdren’s keynote shows a Hansen et al. globe from 2006, with the big deep-red Arctic, suggests a disruptive(!) climate change now.
Strong words. Weak facts. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/22/ostp-director-holdren-keynotes-engineering-academy-summit
Very impressive, well, sort of … if you are not a WUWT reader.
Haven’t we seen some graphs lately, showing temperatures, ice cover, sea level over time with not a bit of disruption anywhere?
Michael Bentley
April 24, 2010 2:12 pm
Hummm,
From this exchange, it seems our Mr LeCotey is a scientist – weather watcher, and intellegent to boot. I look forward to more from him, no matter what he “thinks”. We need more, many more of this type to sort out what’s happening to our world, and how best to use it.
Mike
Clive
April 24, 2010 2:14 pm
Thanks as always Anthony.
I am rather surprised that the printout is in F° vs C°. Temps are recorded in C and only converted on request … at least at the lay level.
Clive REPLY: that is from Weather Underground, F done for American consumption -A
MaxL
April 24, 2010 2:18 pm
RichardS (13:40:10) :
“The 23:00 & 00:00 observations are missing as NavCan does not pay us for those two observations. ”
“Would this not bias the average daily temperature higher by eliminating night-time observations?”
Many stations in the arctic only take observations for a limited time during the day…some for only 12 hrs or less. Forecasters very often have to wait for the first morning observation to find out what is actually happening. It is all a matter of funding and it is not going to get better.
Clive
April 24, 2010 2:18 pm
Anthony,
One more item if I may. Can the “Eureka story” be put in a single PDF when completed for submission to various authorities.
Of course the significance of possible errors at Eureka are monumental when it is such a pivotal site.
Thanks for your efforts. They will be rewarded one day.
Clive
Carbon Dioxide
April 24, 2010 2:33 pm
It may be of passing interest to readers to hear the origin of the name “Nanavut”
When Nanavut was granted autonomy by the Crown and the Canadian government, the representatives of the residents were asked what wished their newly semi-independant region to be known as- they said “nanavut”
(“Nanavut” in the local native language translates as “government idiot”) REPLY: Rubbish. -“Nunavut” means “our land” in the Inuit language of Inuktitut. http://www.gov.nu.ca/English/ – Anthony
Is Eureka the station that is being used by some to measure the temperature for the 1,200km diameter area mentioned in an earlier article? Is that right?
Interesting comment by Mr. LeCotey, about the wind from the north. On the previous WUWT article I was going to mention the fact that the only way the temperature could spike up like that would be a north wind. Having heading many times towards Black Top Ridge for a hike (north of Eureka), there was a noticable difference in temperatures away from the Fjord. Also, they are linked up now with the south, gotta like it. Back when I worked there as an Upper Air Tech. and surface obs. we had: no live TV, limited water during winter, no telephone, … i could go on… glad to see that its a much more habitable place now!! Good on him to be so forth right on information. thanks Mr. LeCotey.
Lance – Eureka – 1979-80. (PS. I arrived just after they set the N. American record for coldest month ever recorded -47.9C in Feb 79, I think its still holds.)
u.k.(us)
April 24, 2010 3:16 pm
Nice to see professionals having a civil interaction.
Good stuff.
Mike D in Alberta
April 24, 2010 3:18 pm
MaxL (14:18:08) :
RichardS (13:40:10) :
Further to Max’ note, Eureka is far enough north that the normal “night” and “day” variations apply a lot less. Thinking of summer as “day” and winter as “night” makes more sense to me than the 24 hour clock that means so much to the densely populated areas. Yes, there will be some variations because of the angle of the sun in the sky (or on the other side of the planet) but I doubt that they’d be significant for aviation or the purposes of tracking maxima/minima.
View from the Solent
April 24, 2010 3:20 pm
If I wore a hat I would lift it to Mr. LeCotey. He both accepts that some data were erroneously logged, and provides an explanation for an (apparently outrageous) anomaly. In a polite and factual manner. I would listen to what he has to say.
You state that there will be more on Eureka. Will there be anything from Mr LeCotey on what is involved in the day-to day running of a weather station like this? I’d be interested.
WTF
April 24, 2010 3:29 pm
I am glad to hear that Mr. LeCotey was open and honest with you. I am sure he is a man of good character.
As an after thought though he has nothing to lose by telling the truth. What is EC going to do to him? Send him to Toronto 😉
On second thought….Toronto….Eureka…Toronto…..Eureka. Hmmm tough one.
Waiting for this thread to develop and just signing on for follow-ups.
nick
April 24, 2010 4:10 pm
“The Station Manager Mr. LeCotey says that the July 14th new record high temperature error was real, and a function of wind direction bringing air from the North that has been warmed by terrain.”
In all likelyhood a Foehn. An example of ‘warming’ produced as a microclimate effect, and not evidence of global warming at all. If this is representative of a large area, its another area that needs to be looked at.
Is it possible to identify? ie. The heat for the warming comes from water vapour.
A combination of humidity, wind directions, and temperature measurements. Does it show the effect?
Nick
Foehn – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind
IAmDigitap
April 24, 2010 4:17 pm
I was so surprised to hear someone speaking about climate, and it actually sounding like technologically and instrument management/data analysis coherent speech, i thought i was on the wrong article or one from before Hansen, Schmidt, Jones, Stevens and Mann came along and made lying as a government employee steering policy, the legal norm in western countries.
Just telling the truth and it all making sense; as opposed to ” I haz new magic heat u can’t kno cuz i copyrighted my government funded work but world ending tee-hee-hee!”
Well, there’s one station that we can see plainly the people who massage data to instill terror, that lends some capacity for them to claim they didn’t do anything to it.
Unfortunate thing is when someone’s in the climatic forecasting business they’re supposed to have done something at that point: average it in.
Whenever I hear climate employees in government talk about management of data it makes me want to puke.
Phil Jones, the one caught SAYING he knew it wasn’t heating in 2005 (the scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if i said the world had cooled since 1998. Ok it has but it’s only seven years’ data and it isn’t statistically significant.”)
Phil Jones running the world’s ORGANIZATION and DATABASE ANALYSIS MANAGEMENT REPOSITORY for the G.L.O.B.E. kept a shop SO SHODDY that the author in the HarryReadMe file, in leaving his usage notes for one of the math models (now having their statistics rejected by the Royal Statistical Society as not even being real math, in actual fact: although it hasn’t been formally declared that way, just remarked by the Society’s head, that the statistics are simply not properly done), the author of HarryReadMe made long, and very clear discussion on how simply unNAVIGABLE the records there ARE: even detailing how, as he was constructing his own model parameters, the people there had taught him what their methodology was, and he showed how by every pass through the databases people were making up or REmaking up data out of the clear blue sky: and LEAVING it.
Why was that? Because the data was so spottily kept there in the FIRST place.
Incredible that political parties catching onto this “steer policy through spreading terror” scam are able to do these things and law enforcement being told sit down and shut up, can pretend this kind of policy steering isn’t EXACTLY what transparency laws are made for, and what TERROR laws are made for.
And don’t be so naive as to be fooled, these guys worked in an arm of business and drew a few cranks, Al Gore made an enormous deal out of it because he felt humiliated losing an election.
It caught on and Al Gore led the world in creating a fifth column of government called “Global Warming is Destroying the World, Change Policies to Ours Now or You’ll Die.”
And between government employees threatening everyone in sight who disagreed, using their tenure as such employees to make themselves literally unfireable.
–
Can any of you imagine if in your particular field even as a researcher, you’d have tried to do what these people do? Are doing, while claiming they don’t know they are doing it?
Well… anyhow it’s just nice to hear someone connected to climate speaking and it not sound like a politician found in bed with a live girl AND a dead boy.
geo
April 24, 2010 4:23 pm
All props to Rai LeCotey. It’s nice to get a sense of “we’re all on the same team just trying to figure the planet out”.
May we assume that the current WinIDE system was installed after January 1, 2007? If not, what happened there to allow that failure of QA?
The Sun at Nunavut between 21:00 and 22:00 was only about 18/19 deg. above the horizon. Skies were clear. Is there any chance the sunlight can reflect off the white louvres into the box at these angles?
Billy Liar
April 24, 2010 6:03 pm
I agree with:
nick (16:10:19)
If there was open water behind the ridge in this picture: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/2448345
and wind from the appropriate direction there could have been fohn conditions at Eureka.
Gerald Machnee
April 24, 2010 6:03 pm
RE:
nick (16:10:19) :
“The Station Manager Mr. LeCotey says that the July 14th new record high temperature error was real, and a function of wind direction bringing air from the North that has been warmed by terrain.”
In all likelyhood a Foehn. An example of ‘warming’ produced as a microclimate effect, and not evidence of global warming at all. If this is representative of a large area, its another area that needs to be looked at.
Is it possible to identify? ie. The heat for the warming comes from water vapour.
A combination of humidity, wind directions, and temperature measurements. Does it show the effect?
———–
Long time since I was up there. It has been called the Garden Spot of the Arctic because it has more vegetation than other Arctic areas.
Re the Foehn – The warming comes from compression as the air descends to lower pressures. There would not be a significant contribution from water vapour as water would evaporate and use energy instead of contributing it. A thousand feet of descent would add about 3 deg Celcius. At that time of day (evening) I am not sure if there would be any heating from the ground as the sun would be in the north and the north slope that the air would have come from would be in the shade.
Jeff Alberts
April 24, 2010 6:15 pm
From this exchange, it seems our Mr LeCotey is a scientist – weather watcher, and intellegent to boot.
Anthony, Just in from Mark E. Gillar and his radio program.
Chris Horner Drops Bomb: Predicts first major ethics scandal of
the Obama Administration to be revealed on Monday.
April 24, 2010
This morning on Global Cooling Radio, Chris Horner, author of the recently released book, Power Grab: How
Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom And Bankrupt America, revealed that a major ethics scandal
involving someone in the Obama administration will be unveiled on Monday. Here is the complete quote that
comes at the 29:01 mark of the interview:
“You’re going to see the first ethics scandal in the Obama administration. We’ve got our hands on some internal
documents revealing a serious conflict of interest at a very high level on these green jobs and stimulus and the
policies that Carol Browner was talking about. It isn’t Ms. Browner, but it is someone tied to Al Gore.”
– Chris Horner
Note: The statement comes at the 29:11 mark in the interview.
pat (16:54:13) :
. . . BBC lectures us incessantly on climate change. So why did their bosses make 68,000 domestic flights in two years?
Flying is safer.
Keith Minto
April 24, 2010 8:09 pm
Ulric Lyons (18:23:36)
Good link, especially for me and the southern hemisphere.
Note the male ‘BT’ figure over Australia. 🙂 An Aussie version of Aeolus ? http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_sohem_00.gif
I applaud Rai LeCotey’s openness and honesty.
The observed temperature excursion to +20.7 degrees C should be a lesson to all who (ab)use the data. It makes a mockery of using the average of extremes as a basis for making decisions.
A time averaged heat content of the air would be more sensible (excuse thermodynamic pun). The necessary measurements seem to be available. The extra computing power required is (nowadays) trivial. All the data are “up-linked” anyway.
But even such doesn’t produce representative data if stations are so dispersed that local effects such as the one due to a change of wind described, are inherently extrapolated over a distance of 1500 km in order to “fill the gaps” on the computer models. The only fix is more stations if a meaningful surface climate model is to be supported.
ISTM that the failure to adapt to the capacity to measure and calculate is driven by certain “climatologists” already “knowing the answer” to what they want to find. The extreme case of this has already been demonstrated, where the “known outcome” was produced no matter what the input data. That’s willful ignorance.
Frederick Michael
April 24, 2010 8:35 pm
It’s refreshing to see the Eureka staff are highly professional — not surprising though, given what they volunteered for.
The explanation for the brief, but legitimate warm spell argues against using just the low and high for the day to compute the average. Might this explain some of the difference between the surface data and the satellite data (amongst all the other explanations)?
AnonyMoose
April 24, 2010 8:48 pm
1. Item 7 says that negative/positive errors are reduced through the checking by WinIDE. So how did the January 1 2007 error get in the record?
2. No word yet on whether there’s been a change in wind patterns from the North. It’s unlikely that someone has studied one station’s wind patterns, except there are people being paid to manage climate data quality.
3. When did the water lagoon and sewage facilities get built? Large bodies of water absorb more sunlight than do most land types.
4. There seem to be conflicting opinions on the Stevenson screen locations. I don’t know which is Caryl’s “earlier picture”, but if it is the 1997 Wikipedia photo, the Stevenson screens are there. On the right side are drums, to the left construction equipment and a red trailer. The screens are left of the trailer. Two screens lined up with the camera, and the bluish box peeking out from behind them. Look at “Arial 1” at the top of this page and note the pipeline and hydrogen shed at far left of the Wikipedia photo; those show the camera was a long walk at a 30-45 degree angle from the line of the old buildings. The met gear is in a depression and lined up toward the camera, so it’s hard to identify.
Ed Caryl (12:54:51) :
Those Stevenson screens were moved to their present position, probably when the blue building was built. They are not there in the earlier picture.
(in the Dial M article)
Rai LeCotey (Eureka Station Manager) (18:04:04) :
Unfortunately, our ‘official’ temperature recording site has not moved for over 50 years and thus is greatly influenced by the cold Arctic water from Slidre Fjord when the winds are from the East, South or West during the summer months.
AnonyMoose
April 24, 2010 9:07 pm
In AnonyMoose (20:48:45), I called the metal box near the Stevenson screens a bluish box. Gray is a better description. It’s the Navy-like gray which is common on NEMA weatherproof metal enclosures.
Someone who has been there
April 24, 2010 9:35 pm
Rai or Ray LeCotey, I didn’t remember his name but that is him. He was the station manager that didn’t take crap from anyone, he is the mayor of Eureka, the big blue complex there is just like a hotel, and if you have the money you can book reservations there, it is expensive so be prepaired to pay. But they are good people,at least to me they were to my superiors that were making demands there Not So, Rai or Ray put them in their place, at one point there I thought we including my superiors were not allowed to visit the weather station anymore. I felt ashamed of what the OC and the SWO did or said to them at the station, and I had to go down there and conduct business with the new frinds I met with this discord in mind of not knowing what we ( my superiors ) had done to make them angry. Fortunately They didn’t hold that against all of us, as I was always courtous with the station personnel. Ray or Rai, was the king of that castle there, don’t get on his wrong side or you will know!!! just a warning to you.
There was another Station Manager there first when we arrived, he was part of a Nascar team, and wanted to get back to that. Rai replaced him, Rai is about 5′ 8″-9″ tall long black strangly hair, shoulder lenght. A musthache, heavy around the waist ( beer-gut, the whole keg going there) and to me talking to him sounded like talking to a woman, he had that feminine way about him. Made me feel uncomfortable around him at times but was an ok person over all.
Rai LeCotey a scientest? I don’t think so, more like a politician, the other 3 or 4 people there were conducting all the climate readings, and the other 2 were Joby and guy with maientance, basicly they were the air port crew there too, LOL, and 2 more were the cooks. They made the best pizza I have ever eaten those cooks there. and with 24 hour day light there, on the weekend you partied and didn’t know what time it was until you got pissed tired drunk and looked at your watch, I remember one time it was brekfast, because the cook on shift came in and yelled it. so we went to eat breakie. lol and yes Rai was there too. But the Weather/Climate duty person on shift was not. they were not allowed to partake in the feastivities before a shift, As per any other job you would have to do.
Someone who has been there
April 24, 2010 9:42 pm
Over all they were a good crew there, I like them, very freindly, but like anyone they can be cranky too, lol. Just don’t step on rai’s toes or you will know it!
Someone who has been there
April 24, 2010 9:55 pm
Hint, the building labeled power house is the water storage building 3 large tanks there that feed the Main (BLUE ) Complex. The power generators,I am not sure if they are in the same building, but I thought they were in the building labeled new garage, as there was a door linking the water storage and the power house. But it has been a while since I’ve been there.
Ale Gorney
April 24, 2010 10:29 pm
What if all of the warming in the world can be blame on the eureka station? Should we be concerned? I’m feeling a bit weirded out… are there polar bears in that area anymore??
geo
April 24, 2010 10:39 pm
Someone who has been there (21:35:34) :
Thanks for the testimony. There is nothing inherently wrong with being “a politician”. In the words of Freud, the first human to hurl an insult instead of a rock was the founder of civilization. And, I would add, the first politician.
Paul Vaughan
April 24, 2010 11:00 pm
If you’re living out in Eureka, what do you think about? I have the answer. Mr. LeCotey & Others, I can suggest the following:
Note on Confounding of Lunisolar Harmonic Spectrum & Solar System Dynamics http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/Confounding.htm
Ulric Lyons & Others, be sure to check out the table.
For those of you who work in R, I have done a data scrape of the Canadian Met Office weather database for Eureka. It consists of hourly data from 2000 through 2009. It is available here (1.1 Mbytes, use right click to “Download as …”).
It consists of four files: datamatrix, weathermatrix, goodmatrix, and goodweather.
Datamatrix is an 87,672 by 11 matrix of numeric values headed “Year”, “Mon”, “Day”, “Hr”, “Temp”, “Dew”, “RH”, “WDir”, “WSpd”, “Vis”, and “Prs”. These correspond with the headings at the weather database listed above. I have changed the wind direction from 1 – 35 to 10° – 360°.
Weathermatrix is an 87,672 by 1 matrix of text descriptions of the weather, corresponding to the last column at the weather database listed above.
Goodmatrix and goodweather are the same, but all hours without data (two hours per day) have been removed.
To access the file, download it to your R working directory. Then use the instruction
junk = load(“Eureka2000_2009.tab”)
This will load the variables. It puts the variable names into the variable junk, viz:
Where are the negative errors ?
If the errors are random you could also find -73.4 F.
Erik
April 25, 2010 2:03 am
@IAmDigitap (16:17:12)
————————————————————–
It caught on and Al Gore led the world in creating a fifth column of government called “Global Warming is Destroying the World, Change Policies to Ours Now or You’ll Die.”
————————————————————–
Now let’s see what Chris has to say tomorrow 🙂
“Chris Horner revealed today that the Obama administration will be hit with its first major scandal on Monday”
“It involves green jobs, the stimulus, and a high level Obama administration person with ties to Al Gore”
Imapopulistnow
April 25, 2010 2:22 am
Honest scientists who take pride in maintaining accurate data.
Maybe we could outsource our work to the Canadians?
Nick
April 25, 2010 3:21 am
With the Foehn, its a localised effect. ie. a relatively few square miles. However, of that is your sample for a million square miles or more, its a big issue. The micro climate is not representative of the larger climate.
A bit like saying the average human height is 6 foot 8 inches on the basis of a sample of players at a Celtic’s game.
Josualdo
April 25, 2010 4:16 am
It’s good to have Rai here, I say again. Obviously I’m following this with great attention and interest.
I can stomach any measured outlier — outliers exist too.
I find it hard to reason it as a bout of north wind, as the recorded wind direction is roughly from the north all day, except west at one hour. There is nothing unusual on a north wind in that day.
The foehn (sp?) thing, if wikipedia is to be believed, doen’t help me either, as it says it raises the temperature in a few hours — and as the hourly record doesn’t show it, then the 21 ºC (approx.) rise and fall back occured necessarily in less than an hour. But in this I’ll take the meteo experts opinion, as I know next to nothing about winds. Weird things happen.
More idle statistics comments could be done.
Slabadang
April 25, 2010 4:21 am
A Stupid Question Anthony?
Well even if Im just a laymen ive realized that the global warming dudes avoids and misses the most obvious things.
Im trying to find if there is any summary of daily lokal weather reports on cloudiness “clear” “misty” “cloudy”… and compared with the worlds surface temperatures. Since satellite era begun we have more accurate measures and also over the oceans. Cooling periods…warming periods? Does such data and comparence make any sense or give any value?
Pytlozvejk
April 25, 2010 5:09 am
I like this exchange. This is the genuine spirit of scientific enquiry. Questions, answers, more questions, more answers. Eventually we get to a better understanding of the world than we had at the beginning. Three cheers for Mr LeCotey, and for WUWT for providing this forum for open information.
jason
April 25, 2010 5:26 am
So the obvious thing to do then is to strip out the obvious local climate temp changes, then from the more realistic data see how that effects the eurkea readings.
Also are we saying that climatologists are not aware of the quirks of Eureka and are not adjusting the data. And further, are we saying they don’t know Eureka is milder than the area as a whole so are smoothing the data for thousands of km in ignorant bliss?
I will join the others in congratulating Rai LeCotey for his willingness to share information about the data and makingll things clearer. If only there were more people like him in climatology. We’re all trying to get to the truth of the matter and more people working on a problem like this is means better and more robust results.
This particular posting motivated me to finish up my climate_scraper program which can download all historical data from any Canadian station in either hourly or daily format and store it on the users hard drive. The link to download the program is: http://drgimbarzevsky.com/Downloads.html/climate_scraper.7z
and you can get some information about how to use the progam at: http://drgimbarzevsky.com/Boris_blog/blog.html
(currently the first blog entry)
The program is written in VB6 and hence runs only on windows. Some windoze installations may be missing necessary DLL files but these are easy to find on the internet. Source code for the program is provided in the 7z file format for those who like to tinker with the code.
S.E.Hendriksen
April 25, 2010 6:52 am
The Stevenson screens isn’t 2 metres above surface for temperature measurement.
REPLY: The standard is 1.5 meters -A
Despite the differences in absolute temperature between Environment Canada and GISS, the anomalies are remarkably similar. I’ve looked a several places now. For Eureka there are some years with big differences: http://diggingintheclay.blogspot.com/2010/04/canada-3-comparing-eureka.html
(Anthony – you indicated more posts coming up on Eureka – use any figures that help.)
George M
April 25, 2010 8:12 am
This temperature spike event reminds me of one which happened in north central Texas near Lake Whitney in about 1959 or 1960. A localized temperature spike occurred which damaged or destroyed crops over tens of acres and ignited a small fire. I never heard any believable explanation at the time, only observations of the effects. In a much more recent conversation with a Meterologist, he described it as a compressive downburst (I think, memory failing). I don’t think thare were any official observing stations within the affected area, so the peak temperature was estimated from the damage. I wonder how common (or rare) these kinds of events are?
Lance
April 25, 2010 9:23 am
Pascvaks (07:42:49) :
More pics for those interested in Arctic Deserts http://www.jproc.ca/rrp/alert_photos3.html
Interesting setup eh! While i was up there I had a DND ride up to Whiskey I believe back in spring ’80. Took wonderful photos from on top of the ridge looking down at Greely Fjord and Tanquary Fjord (360 degree). Sunny, not a cloud in the sky that day. Wonderful area up there! unfortunately, they are pictures and i don’t have a scanner, otherwise I could scan a few in and display.
MaxL
April 25, 2010 9:50 am
jason (05:26:33) :
“Also are we saying that climatologists are not aware of the quirks of Eureka and are not adjusting the data. ”
I have also worked extensively in the research area of meteorology. As such, I have had dealings with some climate scientists. My impression is that many had little knowledge as to how weather data is actually collected and what the potential errors may be. I believe they assume that local effects are just averaged away on the longer term. It is one of the reasons that many operational meteorologists are very skeptical of the whole climate science area.
melinspain
April 25, 2010 10:56 am
Ale Gorney (22:29:18) :
Ale, if you see the visitor guite in point “2.3.10 Emergency conditons…you read…….An emergency consists of fires, polar bear sightings…………”
They take those seriously
Rod Smith
April 25, 2010 11:06 am
@MaxL (09:50:30):
I think you have hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t agree more!
I’d also like to congratulate Rai LeCotey for clarifying what was going on that day at Eureka as well as giving specifics on temperature measurements at that site. What would be interesting would be to correlate nearby station records with the Eureka record named the Alert, Grise Fjord and Resolute stations (for some reason Alert data stops in 2006). I count a total of 23 weather stations in Nunavut that would appear relevant and hopefully someone will look at all of the raw data from them to see if the same sort of things that are happening at Eureka occur in other places.
In my previous post I mentioned a program that I’d written which allows people to download all of the data for a Canadian station. The program is called climate_scraper and can be downloaded at: http://drgimbarzevsky.com/Downloads.html/climate_scraper.7z
Information about the program is given in the source code, or at: http://drgimbarzevsky.com/Boris_blog/blog.html
as the first entry (until I am moved to post something else to my infrequently updated blog)
Rod Smith
April 25, 2010 12:49 pm
The max & min temperatures are not included in these METAR reports per regional agreements as far as I can see. However they are coded in the SYNOPTIC reports from this station.
stumpy
April 25, 2010 12:55 pm
I was going to mention the winds last time you posted on this, you can have very sudden changes in temperature when mountains are involved. If warm moist air rises over a mountain range and loses its moisture and then drops down the other side it ends up warmer. Here in Christchurch, NZ its can be 8 degrees with a cold damp southerly flow, then in an hour its can be 23 degrees as it turns “nor west” and we get heated dry air from the southern alps. I have experianced quite extreme cases of this in the past, leaving my house in the morning wearing t-shirt and shorts (in winter) and coming back an hour later in snow!
Sorry for the double posting, was half-asleep when did first early morning post. Also, there was an error in the link to the climate_scraper.7z link on my blog page (Thingamablog’s unique idea of what link to the file should be). Link now fixed.
INGSOC
April 25, 2010 4:34 pm
As a Canadian, I am particularly grateful to Mr. LeCotey for his candor and openness. (Are you sure that’s how he spells his name?) With someone like that in charge, the professional professors, grad students and others with agendas will have a much more difficult time fabricating results.
On a more serious note; I would be curious as to how often Dr David “3 speed” Suzuki drops in for a grand tour? It is my guess that they have to fly in extra drums of diesel to cater to his enormous entourage. (To say nothing of his ego) I further surmise that the station could save plenty of funds by filling their balloons with his exhalations during his visit. I wonder if his recorded words would have the same effect, thus making it possible to supply hot gases for the balloons year round in his absence?
I digress…
Gail Combs
April 25, 2010 5:58 pm
To Mr. LeCotey
Thank you for your open response to the questions from WUWT readers. It is appreciated.
Bob Labonza
April 25, 2010 7:43 pm
Has anyone checked all the data on EC’s website for that particular station for the entire month of July 2009? Because EVERY SINGLE DAY contains errors between the hourly observations and the Monthly Summary.
Go ahead and look, and every single one of them in the Summary lists HIGHER temps.Not one of the errors was a lower daily temp. The errors range from 0.5 to 6.0 with a few even higher.
Same thing for August 2009 too. Again, every single temp higher, not a single one lower. There’s a little more to this than the odd random error. Seeing as it’s every day for two months that I checked.
Out of curiosity, I checked the readings for Ottawa for July 2009 and found errors in most ( but not all this time) of the entries, again all stating higher temps in the Monthly Summary than the actual daily observations. Minimum difference is 0.3, some were considerably higher.
I’m going to randomly check other EC weather stations across Canada for random months when time permits.
If this is the quality of data that forms part of the basis of AGW which will result in more dire predictions and whatever legislation may be coming….
Wow. Seriously, check out more Eureka data. And it’s not just Eureka that EC seems to have faulty data for.
As it is an internet custom to demand links from anyone whose opinion may differ form yours, here…. http://www.climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/climateData/dailydata_e.html?timeframe=1&Prov=XX&StationID=1750&Year=2009&Month=7&Day=1
On the left you have a link for each day.Note the stated max temperature. Click on an individual day and compare that number to the actual hourly recorded temps.
And as I mentioned, it’s not just July /09 that has “errors”.
Gerald Machnee
April 25, 2010 8:14 pm
RE: Ulric Lyons (18:37:15) :
Gerald Machnee (18:03:24) :
“as the sun would be in the north”
About 55 degree West of North at 22:00hrs.
___________________
I meant in the general northerly direction.
How do you obtain 55 degrees west of north?
Thanks,
Gerald
melinspain (10:56:04) :
Ale Gorney (22:29:18) :
Ale, if you see the visitor guide in point “2.3.10 Emergency conditons…you read…….An emergency consists of fires, polar bear sightings…………”
…—…—…
(Robt wonders when the polar bears will learn that creating fire “on” the buildings will force the people “out” of the buildings …..
AnonyMoose
April 25, 2010 9:41 pm
Bob Labonza (19:43:50) :
Has anyone checked all the data on EC’s website for that particular station for the entire month of July 2009? Because EVERY SINGLE DAY contains errors between the hourly observations and the Monthly Summary.
I suspect they’re differences and not errors. If the high or low temperature happens during an hour but not at the start of an hour, the hourly record won’t show the same number. The daily extremes may be coming from devices which record the maximum and minimum during the entire period.
Has anyone checked all the data on EC’s website for that particular station for the entire month of July 2009? Because EVERY SINGLE DAY contains errors between the hourly observations and the Monthly Summary.
The Eureka station uses a min-max thermometer that measures the temperature every minute. So the max temperature and the hourly temperature will be different. In addition, they don’t use the average of the hourly temperatures or the average of the hourly max and hourly min, to calculate the daily mean temperature. Instead, they use the average of the day’s instantaneous high and low … seems goofy, but there it is.
I don’t know if they are using the average of the minute-by-minute temps for the hourly value. If not, they should be … perhaps Mr. Lecotey could enlighten us about that. I suspect that they don’t use the average, but instead use the reading on the hour … but what do I know?
Bob Labonza
April 25, 2010 10:00 pm
….AnonyMoose (21:41:59) :
If the high or low temperature happens during an hour but not at the start of an hour, the hourly record won’t show the same number. The daily extremes may be coming from devices which record the maximum and minimum during the entire period.
That might explain it. Can anyone confirm this? That additional observations may be made at times not strictly on the hour? If so , why werent they recorded with the rest of the Daily data? I’m not arguing, just curious.
Since I made my first post, I’ve been looking at EC data for various Canadian cities and various months/ years,comparing the Daily Reports with the Monthly Summary ones.Every single one of them contains the errors I mentioned earlier. Just now looking at Montreal for May 1980 and finding errors for every day I’ve looked at so far. And every error lists the max temp higher than it actually was.
So this isnt something that started recently. Could ALL the Climate Info collected,archived and passed on by Environment Canada be suspect?
Anyone who goes and looks through this stuff will seriously ask themselves the same question.
KevinUK
April 26, 2010 3:23 am
Bob labonza (22:00:58)
“So this isnt something that started recently. Could ALL the Climate Info collected,archived and passed on by Environment Canada be suspect?”
Well have a look atthis colour coded map which shows the rates of warming for the globe for the 1970 to 2010 period. This is for the GISS raw data. http://www.climateapplications.com/GHCN/images/GISSraw1970to2010map.png
and here is the interactive version of that same map. http://www.climateapplications.com/GISSMaps/stationtrends1970to2010raw.asp
Notice something strange about the Canadian stations? Clearly rate of global warming increases significantly immediately as you pass over the 49th parallel from the US to Canada.
Bob Labonza
April 26, 2010 11:22 am
“KevinUK(03:23:45) :
“Notice something strange about the Canadian stations? Clearly rate of global warming increases significantly immediately as you pass over the 49th parallel from the US to Canada.”
Yes, something strange and very pronounced. The difference on that map is very noticeable to say the least.
Some continuing investigation is required here. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it appears that Environment Canada consistently uses higher daily max temps in their Monthly Summary reports than wnat are actually recorded in the Daily Hourly readings.
And it’s not just the little remote stations either.I thought at first that major cities with busy airports would have more accurate readings ( Vancouver,Montreal).They dont.
I’m guessing that the problem is with the way EC compiles the Daily reports into the Monthlies.I think there is no blame at the local weather station level.
But there is something wrong, and wrong on a huge scale.
Rod Smith
April 26, 2010 12:46 pm
Bob Labonza (22:00:58) :
“That might explain it. Can anyone confirm this? That additional observations may be made at times not strictly on the hour? ”
Standard METAR reports are taken at a specific time, usually just prior to the hour to represent the “hourly” report. This allows any central collecting agency to build a “collective bulletin” containing METARS for a specific hour to be transmitted as a collection of observations from a specified geographical area, for example, maybe Eastern Canada. Reports can appear in more than one collective.
Intermediate observations, SPECI (Special off-hour) reports, are taken if conditions vary significantly enough from hourly reports to affect aircraft operations, but temperature changes are not one of the parameters that will trigger a “special” report. Thus the actual max and or min temperatures may or may not appear in standard METAR hourly reports.
Daily max/min temperatures from Eureka are in the Synoptic reports, not METARS, although some countries, the US for example, do transmit max/min temperatures (from some stations) in selected METAR reports. These deviations from WMO spec are called “Regional Agreements” and vary by country around the world.
I could only speculate as to what and how EC processes and archives this data.
So if the daily Min/Max Temps aren’t shown on the hourly reports, what is the point of producing an hourly report? It seems that, in this case, the record high of 20.9C was a short-lived event—obviously not over an hour in duration—and that a 10 or 20 minute gust can turn the Arctic crimson on GISS charts.
AnonyMoose
April 26, 2010 3:00 pm
Bob Labonza, see the comment Willis Eschenbach (21:58:57), which was probably sent while you were typing your immediately-following comment. You haven’t gone back to reread what others said before your comments.
Bob Labonza and Sean Peake – Eschenbach says there is a separate device which checks once a minute for the highs and lows. As we can see, one advantage of hourly reports is to be able to see if the high or low may be due to something unusual. Doesn’t look like the people being paid to process the data are paying attention to all the data.
AnonyMoose
April 26, 2010 3:04 pm
Anthony, it would be nice if there were comment permalinks displayed to us so we can link to preceding comments. REPLY: It would be nice if there was an edit feature, an image inserter, and every time somebody left a comment I got paid a dime. But wordprss.com, which host this bog will have none of the features. -A
RE:
** Sean Peake (12:59:58) :
So if the daily Min/Max Temps aren’t shown on the hourly reports, what is the point of producing an hourly report? It seems that, in this case, the record high of 20.9C was a short-lived event—obviously not over an hour in duration—and that a 10 or 20 minute gust can turn the Arctic crimson on GISS charts.**
Hourly reports are required for aviation forecasting such as TAF’s (Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts). Cloud, visibility, and wind are also required.
RE Max and Min Temperatures. They are not taken from the hourly readings. They have been done using Maximum and Minimum thermometers where the stations are manned. In unmanned stations they would be done by computer from the thermometers.
RE: SPECI or special reports. The following may now be correct. The criteria have changed and a change of 5 degrees when the temperature is above 20 deg C is now used. So the temperature at Eureka may have been too low for this special.
AnonyMoose (15:00:59) :
Aye, there’s the rub.
It would be interesting to see 20 years worth of instant data to see how long the temp spikes (up or down) last and what the conditions were at the time.
Rod Smith
April 26, 2010 4:29 pm
Sean Peake: “So if the daily Min/Max Temps aren’t shown on the hourly reports, what is the point of producing an hourly report? It seems that, in this case, the record high of 20.9C was a short-lived event—obviously not over an hour in duration—and that a 10 or 20 minute gust can turn the Arctic crimson on GISS charts.”
There are several reasons for hourly weather reports besides feeding climate analysis and/or GISS. For example, the primary use of METAR reports is for safe aircraft operations. Simultaneous reports give rise to an instantaneous weather snapshot for the globe and are therefore useful in analyses.
A better question is, can you think of any reason safe aircraft operations require a max daily temperature? These operations are much more sensitive to winds, pressure, precip, clouds, visibility, obstructions, etc.
And as for the “crimson on GISS charts,” that sounds like a good question for the gurus at GISS.
Rod Smith
April 26, 2010 4:43 pm
AnonyMoose: “Eschenbach says there is a separate device which checks once a minute for the highs and lows. As we can see, one advantage of hourly reports is to be able to see if the high or low may be due to something unusual. Doesn’t look like the people being paid to process the data are paying attention to all the data.”
Several decades ago, many U.S. weather stations used “Thermographs” to continuously record temperatures. These were sent to Asheville even then, but “processing” would have been a real bear in those days. If memory serves, there were about 2500 observing stations in the U.S. at aerodromes during that time.
Gerald Machnee (16:09:49), Rod Smith (16:29:27) :
I am assuming that the runway at Eureka is gravel and the only planes that lands on a regular basis Twin Otters, which can land in almost any weather, any temperature so I’m confused about how EC records data because the hourly temps. are not terribly important—unless planes only land on the hour every hour except from 00:00 to 02:00 hrs.
To me what is more important is to see the duration of these temp. anomalies and whether it is correct to put these massive swings that apparently last less than an hour into the record. The way it stands now, EC puts out a monthly record that no one can confirm except EC. Is it “secret” data that can’t be shared (which I doubt) or is it just the way the system is set up? If the latter is true, it needs to be changed.
Gerald Machnee
April 26, 2010 7:58 pm
RE:
Sean Peake (17:55:39) :
Gerald Machnee (16:09:49), Rod Smith (16:29:27) :
I am assuming that the runway at Eureka is gravel and the only planes that lands on a regular basis Twin Otters, which can land in almost any weather, any temperature so I’m confused about how EC records data because the hourly temps. are not terribly important—unless planes only land on the hour every hour except from 00:00 to 02:00 hrs.
To me what is more important is to see the duration of these temp. anomalies and whether it is correct to put these massive swings that apparently last less than an hour into the record. The way it stands now, EC puts out a monthly record that no one can confirm except EC. Is it “secret” data that can’t be shared (which I doubt) or is it just the way the system is set up? If the latter is true, it needs to be changed.
Various planes land there. In the 1970’s an American Globemaster landed there using all the runway.
There is no secret about the data. You can get it within a few days at the following site: http://www.climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/Welcome_e.html
Hourly records are necessary to follow trends for public and aviation forecasting and analysis. In Canada some are EC and some are Transport Canada. Maximum and minimum thermometers came into use because an observer checked mercury or alcohol thermometers once an hour. This can be done electronically now. Most average or mean temperatures are calculated by adding the max and min and dividing by 2. It is not the best but has been done that way for years.
You state that hourly temps are not important – maybe for yourself. All the weather elements are important to a forecaster(or to a computer which does a lot of it now). Forecasts are issued in advance, so you cannot stop observations.
I suggest you get a good text book on meteorology such as From the Ground Up which is used in pilot training.
Gerald Machnee (19:58:45) : “You state that hourly temps are not important – maybe for yourself…”
My point, which I guess I didn’t make very well, is that I don’t think hourly observations that are used primarily for aviation are indicative enough for use in climate forecasting—except that we can see that the spikes up- or downward were anomalies that lasted for a short time. Look at the debate about station sitings near airports; temperatures from those stations record the effects of the local environment not necessarily climate trends. So the question is how to use readings that are prone to wild swings because of where the stations are situated? For Eureka in particular, because of its terrain of rock and gravels and nothing else except Musk oxen and wolves should one apply UHI adjustment to its readings because clearly something abnormal is going on there.
Gerald Machnee
April 27, 2010 7:33 pm
RE:
Sean Peake says:
April 27, 2010 at 5:46 am
**I don’t think hourly observations that are used primarily for aviation are indicative enough for use in climate forecasting—except that we can see that the spikes up- or downward were anomalies that lasted for a short time.**
The climate forecasters do not really use hourly readings – they will use longer term averages. The spikes you note are probably too complicated and numerous to be taken into account worldwide for long range forecasting. With a station like Eureka you may have to live with what you have. There should not be a UHI adjustment if the instruments are sited properly. The water and slope effects have occurred over a long period of time so long term changes are what should be looked for. There are UHI effects in and near many cities that are not accounted for properly.
Climate forecasting unfortunately uses too many assumptions in the models which causes errors. They are using infilling between stations which changes means.
I have tried to stay away from trying to do climate or seasonal forecasts because of too many built in errors.
With respect to checking errors such as have been found at Eureka and other sites, Budget cuts have resulted in less manpower being available to do detailed verification. At one time everything was checked manually. This has changed to more automated checks and less checks.
I discussed the two Eureka errors or possible errors with a co-worker. On one of them the wind was fairly steady from the north and the temperature still seemed to zoom up 7 degrees, then down again. This is possible in a variable foehn situation, but it seemed quite steady. I think there is also an ice cap or glacier some miles to the north.
Interesting indeed. Good to see that they are using RTDs.
My experience dealing with EC has been that they openly admit any errors without hesitation.
“The Station Manager Mr. LeCotey says that the July 14th new record high temperature error was real, and a function of wind direction bringing air from the North that has been warmed by terrain.”
We really need to start talking about total system energy and stop talking about temperature when discussing global warming. This is obvious when you consider some thermodynamic properties of water and air:
Specific heat:
Water – 4.2 KJ/KG-K
Air – 1.0 KJ/KG-K
Latent heat of vaporization for water:
~2200 KJ/KG
Now consider the volume of 1KG of water (1 Liter) and the volume of 1KG of air (~800 Liters at 1 atmosphere). You quickly realize that ignoring the transfer of heat from oceans to atmosphere and vice versa is idiotic.
Those Stevenson screens were moved to their present position, probably when the blue building was built. They are not there in the earlier picture. Is there a step in the temperature record?
REPLY: I’m trying to determine the date of the blue building addition to check. Seems like it may be 2004 as I see construction machinery as well as some temporary sealant tarp on the building- A
Anthony, i’m confused:
“Some errors are real, such as the January 1st 2007 METAR error.
”
I think here you mean “it’s really an error”.
Later:
“The Station Manager Mr. LeCotey says that the July 14th new record high temperature “error” was real, and a function of wind direction bringing air from the North that has been warmed by terrain. ”
Here you mean “it wasn’t an error but real”. So you use “error is real” in two ambiguous ways…
REPLY: Yes I agree my wording choice is confusing. Look for the uncertainty to be resolved in the next post. The bottom line is that the Jan1 2007 error is real, confirmed, and a transcription error. The July 14th 2009 “error” appears to be a real temperature reading, not a transcription error. -A
I worked as an operational forecast meteorologist with EC for many many years and still do some contract work for them. One of our forecast areas was the arctic, including Eureka. I do not know of any deliberate attempts to falsify or questionably adjust data. Certainly there are instances when some bad data gets into the system. This is especially true now with all the auto stations. In older times, humans would actually take and input the observations. Errors were caught much more readily. There are many known systematic errors from auto stations which get into the database Anyone using the climate database needs to be aware and cross check the observations that may seem out of sorts. Downloaded data contains flags for each parameter which may indicate that errors are possible.
I followed yesterday’s thread and the discourse over the July 14th 2009 20.9C reading with great interest. For the temperature to peak at 20.9C so late in the day does seem quite unbelievable. But I am happy to take Mr. LeCotey’s word that the reading was correct and that it was caused by an entirely natural sudden warming event due to north winds from presuambly sun-warmed terrain.
That said, this must have been an extraordinarly event and as such very rare.
Which leads me to suggest that Chefio’s argument (that the effective extrapolation of the Eureka data such that it can be used to potentially ‘colour’ an area of up to 3600km in diameter) is still very much a valid concern. Using Eureka’s data but excluding other settlements in the high Arctic is fundamentally bad/junk science. Irrespective of whether the 20.9C reading was caused by a nearby deisel engine left running, or a natural warm north wind, this was evidently an extremely rare and localised event, which lasted less than an hour, and cannot (with any credibility) be used as an example or consequence of AGW; as it clearly had nothing do to with CO2 emissions, local or global. If you will it is more akin to UHI, but with sun-warmed bare rocks au naturel, rather than ashpalt/concrete.
It is nice to see such a clear and upfront response from Mr. LeCotey. Did you contact him, or is he a reader?
REPLY: He is a reader, and contacted WUWT via comments first. – A
Give that man a ceee-gah! Nice to see an honest chap, a real scientist, in the bunch!
…oh… and how do we send good guys like this some support… I have a very old bottle of scotch that may be useful as back-up generator fuel 😉
I understand that real errors such as transcription screw-ups, when discovered are corrected in the main Environment Canada data base by some established process. It would be nice to know what that process is and how well it works, i.e. how long it takes, stuff like that.
I wonder then what happens to the corrections. That is does EveCan issue an exception or correction report? Do users or collectors of the data then update their data holdings? Things like that.
RE: Mangled Data.
Perhaps a standard should be set that any software used for collecting this type of information should be required to include ‘bogus abnormal data’ (BAD) detection routines to flag or exclude single point anomalies.
“July 14th so late in the day” has little meaning so far north in the “land of the midnight sun”. I remember playing baseball in shirtsleeves at 2AM at Thule on July 4th. During July the temperature doesn’t change much around the clock if the wind is steady. I also experienced rapid temperature shifts depending on whether the wind was blowing from the land or the sea.
The WinIDE system is very good and follows the observing criteria of MANOBS very well. It will not allow an observation to be sent out over the met circuit with any errors or unnatural trends as in the case of the temperature being entered in as +23.0°C when it was supposed to be -23.0°C. ”
Ummm… so how did the real error occur then? He seems to be claiming that the error doesn’t exist, even though you say he’s trying to get it corrected. It’s obviously possible to somehow not get corrected…
“The 23:00 & 00:00 observations are missing as NavCan does not pay us for those two observations. ”
I’m a physician not a climatologist but this caught my eye.
Is this standard paractice?
Would this not bias the average daily temperature higher by eliminating night-time observations?
It’s important to clean up what’s going on in the Arctic.
Holdren’s keynote shows a Hansen et al. globe from 2006, with the big deep-red Arctic, suggests a disruptive(!) climate change now.
Strong words. Weak facts.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/22/ostp-director-holdren-keynotes-engineering-academy-summit
Very impressive, well, sort of … if you are not a WUWT reader.
Haven’t we seen some graphs lately, showing temperatures, ice cover, sea level over time with not a bit of disruption anywhere?
Hummm,
From this exchange, it seems our Mr LeCotey is a scientist – weather watcher, and intellegent to boot. I look forward to more from him, no matter what he “thinks”. We need more, many more of this type to sort out what’s happening to our world, and how best to use it.
Mike
Thanks as always Anthony.
I am rather surprised that the printout is in F° vs C°. Temps are recorded in C and only converted on request … at least at the lay level.
Clive
REPLY: that is from Weather Underground, F done for American consumption -A
RichardS (13:40:10) :
“The 23:00 & 00:00 observations are missing as NavCan does not pay us for those two observations. ”
“Would this not bias the average daily temperature higher by eliminating night-time observations?”
Many stations in the arctic only take observations for a limited time during the day…some for only 12 hrs or less. Forecasters very often have to wait for the first morning observation to find out what is actually happening. It is all a matter of funding and it is not going to get better.
Anthony,
One more item if I may. Can the “Eureka story” be put in a single PDF when completed for submission to various authorities.
Of course the significance of possible errors at Eureka are monumental when it is such a pivotal site.
Thanks for your efforts. They will be rewarded one day.
Clive
It may be of passing interest to readers to hear the origin of the name “Nanavut”
When Nanavut was granted autonomy by the Crown and the Canadian government, the representatives of the residents were asked what wished their newly semi-independant region to be known as- they said “nanavut”
(“Nanavut” in the local native language translates as “government idiot”)
REPLY: Rubbish. -“Nunavut” means “our land” in the Inuit language of Inuktitut.
http://www.gov.nu.ca/English/ – Anthony
Is Eureka the station that is being used by some to measure the temperature for the 1,200km diameter area mentioned in an earlier article? Is that right?
The Visitor’s Guide is interesting reading.
Looking back a long, long, long way – what is hot and what is not:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/dinosaurs/7624014/Dinosaurs-died-from-sudden-temperature-drop-not-comet-strike-scientists-claim.html
Interesting comment by Mr. LeCotey, about the wind from the north. On the previous WUWT article I was going to mention the fact that the only way the temperature could spike up like that would be a north wind. Having heading many times towards Black Top Ridge for a hike (north of Eureka), there was a noticable difference in temperatures away from the Fjord. Also, they are linked up now with the south, gotta like it. Back when I worked there as an Upper Air Tech. and surface obs. we had: no live TV, limited water during winter, no telephone, … i could go on… glad to see that its a much more habitable place now!! Good on him to be so forth right on information. thanks Mr. LeCotey.
Lance – Eureka – 1979-80. (PS. I arrived just after they set the N. American record for coldest month ever recorded -47.9C in Feb 79, I think its still holds.)
Nice to see professionals having a civil interaction.
Good stuff.
MaxL (14:18:08) :
RichardS (13:40:10) :
Further to Max’ note, Eureka is far enough north that the normal “night” and “day” variations apply a lot less. Thinking of summer as “day” and winter as “night” makes more sense to me than the 24 hour clock that means so much to the densely populated areas. Yes, there will be some variations because of the angle of the sun in the sky (or on the other side of the planet) but I doubt that they’d be significant for aviation or the purposes of tracking maxima/minima.
If I wore a hat I would lift it to Mr. LeCotey. He both accepts that some data were erroneously logged, and provides an explanation for an (apparently outrageous) anomaly. In a polite and factual manner. I would listen to what he has to say.
You state that there will be more on Eureka. Will there be anything from Mr LeCotey on what is involved in the day-to day running of a weather station like this? I’d be interested.
I am glad to hear that Mr. LeCotey was open and honest with you. I am sure he is a man of good character.
As an after thought though he has nothing to lose by telling the truth. What is EC going to do to him? Send him to Toronto 😉
On second thought….Toronto….Eureka…Toronto…..Eureka. Hmmm tough one.
Waiting for this thread to develop and just signing on for follow-ups.
“The Station Manager Mr. LeCotey says that the July 14th new record high temperature error was real, and a function of wind direction bringing air from the North that has been warmed by terrain.”
In all likelyhood a Foehn. An example of ‘warming’ produced as a microclimate effect, and not evidence of global warming at all. If this is representative of a large area, its another area that needs to be looked at.
Is it possible to identify? ie. The heat for the warming comes from water vapour.
A combination of humidity, wind directions, and temperature measurements. Does it show the effect?
Nick
Foehn – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foehn_wind
I was so surprised to hear someone speaking about climate, and it actually sounding like technologically and instrument management/data analysis coherent speech, i thought i was on the wrong article or one from before Hansen, Schmidt, Jones, Stevens and Mann came along and made lying as a government employee steering policy, the legal norm in western countries.
Just telling the truth and it all making sense; as opposed to ” I haz new magic heat u can’t kno cuz i copyrighted my government funded work but world ending tee-hee-hee!”
Well, there’s one station that we can see plainly the people who massage data to instill terror, that lends some capacity for them to claim they didn’t do anything to it.
Unfortunate thing is when someone’s in the climatic forecasting business they’re supposed to have done something at that point: average it in.
Whenever I hear climate employees in government talk about management of data it makes me want to puke.
Phil Jones, the one caught SAYING he knew it wasn’t heating in 2005 (the scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if i said the world had cooled since 1998. Ok it has but it’s only seven years’ data and it isn’t statistically significant.”)
Phil Jones running the world’s ORGANIZATION and DATABASE ANALYSIS MANAGEMENT REPOSITORY for the G.L.O.B.E. kept a shop SO SHODDY that the author in the HarryReadMe file, in leaving his usage notes for one of the math models (now having their statistics rejected by the Royal Statistical Society as not even being real math, in actual fact: although it hasn’t been formally declared that way, just remarked by the Society’s head, that the statistics are simply not properly done), the author of HarryReadMe made long, and very clear discussion on how simply unNAVIGABLE the records there ARE: even detailing how, as he was constructing his own model parameters, the people there had taught him what their methodology was, and he showed how by every pass through the databases people were making up or REmaking up data out of the clear blue sky: and LEAVING it.
Why was that? Because the data was so spottily kept there in the FIRST place.
Incredible that political parties catching onto this “steer policy through spreading terror” scam are able to do these things and law enforcement being told sit down and shut up, can pretend this kind of policy steering isn’t EXACTLY what transparency laws are made for, and what TERROR laws are made for.
And don’t be so naive as to be fooled, these guys worked in an arm of business and drew a few cranks, Al Gore made an enormous deal out of it because he felt humiliated losing an election.
It caught on and Al Gore led the world in creating a fifth column of government called “Global Warming is Destroying the World, Change Policies to Ours Now or You’ll Die.”
And between government employees threatening everyone in sight who disagreed, using their tenure as such employees to make themselves literally unfireable.
–
Can any of you imagine if in your particular field even as a researcher, you’d have tried to do what these people do? Are doing, while claiming they don’t know they are doing it?
Well… anyhow it’s just nice to hear someone connected to climate speaking and it not sound like a politician found in bed with a live girl AND a dead boy.
All props to Rai LeCotey. It’s nice to get a sense of “we’re all on the same team just trying to figure the planet out”.
May we assume that the current WinIDE system was installed after January 1, 2007? If not, what happened there to allow that failure of QA?
O/T but only online a min and want to get this up:
24 April: Daily Mail: BBC lectures us incessantly on climate change. So why did their bosses make 68,000 domestic flights in two years?
Deputy Director General Mark Byford took plane to Manchester for the Open golf… three hours by train
Director General Mark Thompson flew to Newcastle for Tory drinks party… and Glasgow for concert
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268613/Every-night-BBC-lectures-climate-change-So-did-bosses-make-68-000-domestic-flights-years.html
The Sun at Nunavut between 21:00 and 22:00 was only about 18/19 deg. above the horizon. Skies were clear. Is there any chance the sunlight can reflect off the white louvres into the box at these angles?
I agree with:
nick (16:10:19)
If there was open water behind the ridge in this picture:
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/2448345
and wind from the appropriate direction there could have been fohn conditions at Eureka.
RE:
nick (16:10:19) :
“The Station Manager Mr. LeCotey says that the July 14th new record high temperature error was real, and a function of wind direction bringing air from the North that has been warmed by terrain.”
In all likelyhood a Foehn. An example of ‘warming’ produced as a microclimate effect, and not evidence of global warming at all. If this is representative of a large area, its another area that needs to be looked at.
Is it possible to identify? ie. The heat for the warming comes from water vapour.
A combination of humidity, wind directions, and temperature measurements. Does it show the effect?
———–
Long time since I was up there. It has been called the Garden Spot of the Arctic because it has more vegetation than other Arctic areas.
Re the Foehn – The warming comes from compression as the air descends to lower pressures. There would not be a significant contribution from water vapour as water would evaporate and use energy instead of contributing it. A thousand feet of descent would add about 3 deg Celcius. At that time of day (evening) I am not sure if there would be any heating from the ground as the sun would be in the north and the north slope that the air would have come from would be in the shade.
Or intelligent even.
Interesting circulation in N. Canada, build an animation on here from say 6th July 2009 for 10 days;
http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/nhemjet_archloop.html
Anthony, Just in from Mark E. Gillar and his radio program.
Chris Horner Drops Bomb: Predicts first major ethics scandal of
the Obama Administration to be revealed on Monday.
April 24, 2010
This morning on Global Cooling Radio, Chris Horner, author of the recently released book, Power Grab: How
Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom And Bankrupt America, revealed that a major ethics scandal
involving someone in the Obama administration will be unveiled on Monday. Here is the complete quote that
comes at the 29:01 mark of the interview:
“You’re going to see the first ethics scandal in the Obama administration. We’ve got our hands on some internal
documents revealing a serious conflict of interest at a very high level on these green jobs and stimulus and the
policies that Carol Browner was talking about. It isn’t Ms. Browner, but it is someone tied to Al Gore.”
– Chris Horner
Note: The statement comes at the 29:11 mark in the interview.
Gerald Machnee (18:03:24) :
“as the sun would be in the north”
About 55 degree West of North at 22:00hrs.
Jeff,
Whatever floats your boat…I ain’t purfict lik U
Mike
pat (16:54:13) :
. . . BBC lectures us incessantly on climate change. So why did their bosses make 68,000 domestic flights in two years?
Flying is safer.
Ulric Lyons (18:23:36)
Good link, especially for me and the southern hemisphere.
Note the male ‘BT’ figure over Australia. 🙂 An Aussie version of Aeolus ?
http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_sohem_00.gif
I applaud Rai LeCotey’s openness and honesty.
The observed temperature excursion to +20.7 degrees C should be a lesson to all who (ab)use the data. It makes a mockery of using the average of extremes as a basis for making decisions.
A time averaged heat content of the air would be more sensible (excuse thermodynamic pun). The necessary measurements seem to be available. The extra computing power required is (nowadays) trivial. All the data are “up-linked” anyway.
But even such doesn’t produce representative data if stations are so dispersed that local effects such as the one due to a change of wind described, are inherently extrapolated over a distance of 1500 km in order to “fill the gaps” on the computer models. The only fix is more stations if a meaningful surface climate model is to be supported.
ISTM that the failure to adapt to the capacity to measure and calculate is driven by certain “climatologists” already “knowing the answer” to what they want to find. The extreme case of this has already been demonstrated, where the “known outcome” was produced no matter what the input data. That’s willful ignorance.
It’s refreshing to see the Eureka staff are highly professional — not surprising though, given what they volunteered for.
The explanation for the brief, but legitimate warm spell argues against using just the low and high for the day to compute the average. Might this explain some of the difference between the surface data and the satellite data (amongst all the other explanations)?
1. Item 7 says that negative/positive errors are reduced through the checking by WinIDE. So how did the January 1 2007 error get in the record?
2. No word yet on whether there’s been a change in wind patterns from the North. It’s unlikely that someone has studied one station’s wind patterns, except there are people being paid to manage climate data quality.
3. When did the water lagoon and sewage facilities get built? Large bodies of water absorb more sunlight than do most land types.
4. There seem to be conflicting opinions on the Stevenson screen locations. I don’t know which is Caryl’s “earlier picture”, but if it is the 1997 Wikipedia photo, the Stevenson screens are there. On the right side are drums, to the left construction equipment and a red trailer. The screens are left of the trailer. Two screens lined up with the camera, and the bluish box peeking out from behind them. Look at “Arial 1” at the top of this page and note the pipeline and hydrogen shed at far left of the Wikipedia photo; those show the camera was a long walk at a 30-45 degree angle from the line of the old buildings. The met gear is in a depression and lined up toward the camera, so it’s hard to identify.
In AnonyMoose (20:48:45), I called the metal box near the Stevenson screens a bluish box. Gray is a better description. It’s the Navy-like gray which is common on NEMA weatherproof metal enclosures.
Rai or Ray LeCotey, I didn’t remember his name but that is him. He was the station manager that didn’t take crap from anyone, he is the mayor of Eureka, the big blue complex there is just like a hotel, and if you have the money you can book reservations there, it is expensive so be prepaired to pay. But they are good people,at least to me they were to my superiors that were making demands there Not So, Rai or Ray put them in their place, at one point there I thought we including my superiors were not allowed to visit the weather station anymore. I felt ashamed of what the OC and the SWO did or said to them at the station, and I had to go down there and conduct business with the new frinds I met with this discord in mind of not knowing what we ( my superiors ) had done to make them angry. Fortunately They didn’t hold that against all of us, as I was always courtous with the station personnel. Ray or Rai, was the king of that castle there, don’t get on his wrong side or you will know!!! just a warning to you.
There was another Station Manager there first when we arrived, he was part of a Nascar team, and wanted to get back to that. Rai replaced him, Rai is about 5′ 8″-9″ tall long black strangly hair, shoulder lenght. A musthache, heavy around the waist ( beer-gut, the whole keg going there) and to me talking to him sounded like talking to a woman, he had that feminine way about him. Made me feel uncomfortable around him at times but was an ok person over all.
Rai LeCotey a scientest? I don’t think so, more like a politician, the other 3 or 4 people there were conducting all the climate readings, and the other 2 were Joby and guy with maientance, basicly they were the air port crew there too, LOL, and 2 more were the cooks. They made the best pizza I have ever eaten those cooks there. and with 24 hour day light there, on the weekend you partied and didn’t know what time it was until you got pissed tired drunk and looked at your watch, I remember one time it was brekfast, because the cook on shift came in and yelled it. so we went to eat breakie. lol and yes Rai was there too. But the Weather/Climate duty person on shift was not. they were not allowed to partake in the feastivities before a shift, As per any other job you would have to do.
Over all they were a good crew there, I like them, very freindly, but like anyone they can be cranky too, lol. Just don’t step on rai’s toes or you will know it!
Hint, the building labeled power house is the water storage building 3 large tanks there that feed the Main (BLUE ) Complex. The power generators,I am not sure if they are in the same building, but I thought they were in the building labeled new garage, as there was a door linking the water storage and the power house. But it has been a while since I’ve been there.
What if all of the warming in the world can be blame on the eureka station? Should we be concerned? I’m feeling a bit weirded out… are there polar bears in that area anymore??
Someone who has been there (21:35:34) :
Thanks for the testimony. There is nothing inherently wrong with being “a politician”. In the words of Freud, the first human to hurl an insult instead of a rock was the founder of civilization. And, I would add, the first politician.
If you’re living out in Eureka, what do you think about? I have the answer. Mr. LeCotey & Others, I can suggest the following:
Note on Confounding of Lunisolar Harmonic Spectrum & Solar System Dynamics
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/Confounding.htm
Ulric Lyons & Others, be sure to check out the table.
For those of you who work in R, I have done a data scrape of the Canadian Met Office weather database for Eureka. It consists of hourly data from 2000 through 2009. It is available here (1.1 Mbytes, use right click to “Download as …”).
It consists of four files: datamatrix, weathermatrix, goodmatrix, and goodweather.
Datamatrix is an 87,672 by 11 matrix of numeric values headed “Year”, “Mon”, “Day”, “Hr”, “Temp”, “Dew”, “RH”, “WDir”, “WSpd”, “Vis”, and “Prs”. These correspond with the headings at the weather database listed above. I have changed the wind direction from 1 – 35 to 10° – 360°.
Weathermatrix is an 87,672 by 1 matrix of text descriptions of the weather, corresponding to the last column at the weather database listed above.
Goodmatrix and goodweather are the same, but all hours without data (two hours per day) have been removed.
To access the file, download it to your R working directory. Then use the instruction
This will load the variables. It puts the variable names into the variable junk, viz:
Have fun,
w.
Where are the negative errors ?
If the errors are random you could also find -73.4 F.
@IAmDigitap (16:17:12)
————————————————————–
It caught on and Al Gore led the world in creating a fifth column of government called “Global Warming is Destroying the World, Change Policies to Ours Now or You’ll Die.”
————————————————————–
Now let’s see what Chris has to say tomorrow 🙂
“Chris Horner revealed today that the Obama administration will be hit with its first major scandal on Monday”
“It involves green jobs, the stimulus, and a high level Obama administration person with ties to Al Gore”
Honest scientists who take pride in maintaining accurate data.
Maybe we could outsource our work to the Canadians?
With the Foehn, its a localised effect. ie. a relatively few square miles. However, of that is your sample for a million square miles or more, its a big issue. The micro climate is not representative of the larger climate.
A bit like saying the average human height is 6 foot 8 inches on the basis of a sample of players at a Celtic’s game.
It’s good to have Rai here, I say again. Obviously I’m following this with great attention and interest.
I can stomach any measured outlier — outliers exist too.
I find it hard to reason it as a bout of north wind, as the recorded wind direction is roughly from the north all day, except west at one hour. There is nothing unusual on a north wind in that day.
The foehn (sp?) thing, if wikipedia is to be believed, doen’t help me either, as it says it raises the temperature in a few hours — and as the hourly record doesn’t show it, then the 21 ºC (approx.) rise and fall back occured necessarily in less than an hour. But in this I’ll take the meteo experts opinion, as I know next to nothing about winds. Weird things happen.
More idle statistics comments could be done.
A Stupid Question Anthony?
Well even if Im just a laymen ive realized that the global warming dudes avoids and misses the most obvious things.
Im trying to find if there is any summary of daily lokal weather reports on cloudiness “clear” “misty” “cloudy”… and compared with the worlds surface temperatures. Since satellite era begun we have more accurate measures and also over the oceans. Cooling periods…warming periods? Does such data and comparence make any sense or give any value?
I like this exchange. This is the genuine spirit of scientific enquiry. Questions, answers, more questions, more answers. Eventually we get to a better understanding of the world than we had at the beginning. Three cheers for Mr LeCotey, and for WUWT for providing this forum for open information.
So the obvious thing to do then is to strip out the obvious local climate temp changes, then from the more realistic data see how that effects the eurkea readings.
Also are we saying that climatologists are not aware of the quirks of Eureka and are not adjusting the data. And further, are we saying they don’t know Eureka is milder than the area as a whole so are smoothing the data for thousands of km in ignorant bliss?
I will join the others in congratulating Rai LeCotey for his willingness to share information about the data and makingll things clearer. If only there were more people like him in climatology. We’re all trying to get to the truth of the matter and more people working on a problem like this is means better and more robust results.
This particular posting motivated me to finish up my climate_scraper program which can download all historical data from any Canadian station in either hourly or daily format and store it on the users hard drive. The link to download the program is:
http://drgimbarzevsky.com/Downloads.html/climate_scraper.7z
and you can get some information about how to use the progam at:
http://drgimbarzevsky.com/Boris_blog/blog.html
(currently the first blog entry)
The program is written in VB6 and hence runs only on windows. Some windoze installations may be missing necessary DLL files but these are easy to find on the internet. Source code for the program is provided in the 7z file format for those who like to tinker with the code.
The Stevenson screens isn’t 2 metres above surface for temperature measurement.
REPLY: The standard is 1.5 meters -A
More pics for those interested in Arctic Deserts
http://www.jproc.ca/rrp/alert_photos3.html
Despite the differences in absolute temperature between Environment Canada and GISS, the anomalies are remarkably similar. I’ve looked a several places now. For Eureka there are some years with big differences:
http://diggingintheclay.blogspot.com/2010/04/canada-3-comparing-eureka.html
(Anthony – you indicated more posts coming up on Eureka – use any figures that help.)
This temperature spike event reminds me of one which happened in north central Texas near Lake Whitney in about 1959 or 1960. A localized temperature spike occurred which damaged or destroyed crops over tens of acres and ignited a small fire. I never heard any believable explanation at the time, only observations of the effects. In a much more recent conversation with a Meterologist, he described it as a compressive downburst (I think, memory failing). I don’t think thare were any official observing stations within the affected area, so the peak temperature was estimated from the damage. I wonder how common (or rare) these kinds of events are?
Pascvaks (07:42:49) :
More pics for those interested in Arctic Deserts
http://www.jproc.ca/rrp/alert_photos3.html
Interesting setup eh! While i was up there I had a DND ride up to Whiskey I believe back in spring ’80. Took wonderful photos from on top of the ridge looking down at Greely Fjord and Tanquary Fjord (360 degree). Sunny, not a cloud in the sky that day. Wonderful area up there! unfortunately, they are pictures and i don’t have a scanner, otherwise I could scan a few in and display.
jason (05:26:33) :
“Also are we saying that climatologists are not aware of the quirks of Eureka and are not adjusting the data. ”
I have also worked extensively in the research area of meteorology. As such, I have had dealings with some climate scientists. My impression is that many had little knowledge as to how weather data is actually collected and what the potential errors may be. I believe they assume that local effects are just averaged away on the longer term. It is one of the reasons that many operational meteorologists are very skeptical of the whole climate science area.
Ale Gorney (22:29:18) :
Ale, if you see the visitor guite in point “2.3.10 Emergency conditons…you read…….An emergency consists of fires, polar bear sightings…………”
They take those seriously
@MaxL (09:50:30):
I think you have hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t agree more!
Paul Vaughan (23:00:12)
Mail me and I will show you some more on the “bashful ballerina”
ulriclyons at gmail dot com.
Put the whole stevenson screen on a dumb waiter, and spin around so as to turn door away from the midnight sun before opening.
I’d also like to congratulate Rai LeCotey for clarifying what was going on that day at Eureka as well as giving specifics on temperature measurements at that site. What would be interesting would be to correlate nearby station records with the Eureka record named the Alert, Grise Fjord and Resolute stations (for some reason Alert data stops in 2006). I count a total of 23 weather stations in Nunavut that would appear relevant and hopefully someone will look at all of the raw data from them to see if the same sort of things that are happening at Eureka occur in other places.
In my previous post I mentioned a program that I’d written which allows people to download all of the data for a Canadian station. The program is called climate_scraper and can be downloaded at:
http://drgimbarzevsky.com/Downloads.html/climate_scraper.7z
Information about the program is given in the source code, or at:
http://drgimbarzevsky.com/Boris_blog/blog.html
as the first entry (until I am moved to post something else to my infrequently updated blog)
The max & min temperatures are not included in these METAR reports per regional agreements as far as I can see. However they are coded in the SYNOPTIC reports from this station.
I was going to mention the winds last time you posted on this, you can have very sudden changes in temperature when mountains are involved. If warm moist air rises over a mountain range and loses its moisture and then drops down the other side it ends up warmer. Here in Christchurch, NZ its can be 8 degrees with a cold damp southerly flow, then in an hour its can be 23 degrees as it turns “nor west” and we get heated dry air from the southern alps. I have experianced quite extreme cases of this in the past, leaving my house in the morning wearing t-shirt and shorts (in winter) and coming back an hour later in snow!
Sorry for the double posting, was half-asleep when did first early morning post. Also, there was an error in the link to the climate_scraper.7z link on my blog page (Thingamablog’s unique idea of what link to the file should be). Link now fixed.
As a Canadian, I am particularly grateful to Mr. LeCotey for his candor and openness. (Are you sure that’s how he spells his name?) With someone like that in charge, the professional professors, grad students and others with agendas will have a much more difficult time fabricating results.
On a more serious note; I would be curious as to how often Dr David “3 speed” Suzuki drops in for a grand tour? It is my guess that they have to fly in extra drums of diesel to cater to his enormous entourage. (To say nothing of his ego) I further surmise that the station could save plenty of funds by filling their balloons with his exhalations during his visit. I wonder if his recorded words would have the same effect, thus making it possible to supply hot gases for the balloons year round in his absence?
I digress…
To Mr. LeCotey
Thank you for your open response to the questions from WUWT readers. It is appreciated.
Has anyone checked all the data on EC’s website for that particular station for the entire month of July 2009? Because EVERY SINGLE DAY contains errors between the hourly observations and the Monthly Summary.
Go ahead and look, and every single one of them in the Summary lists HIGHER temps.Not one of the errors was a lower daily temp. The errors range from 0.5 to 6.0 with a few even higher.
Same thing for August 2009 too. Again, every single temp higher, not a single one lower. There’s a little more to this than the odd random error. Seeing as it’s every day for two months that I checked.
Out of curiosity, I checked the readings for Ottawa for July 2009 and found errors in most ( but not all this time) of the entries, again all stating higher temps in the Monthly Summary than the actual daily observations. Minimum difference is 0.3, some were considerably higher.
I’m going to randomly check other EC weather stations across Canada for random months when time permits.
If this is the quality of data that forms part of the basis of AGW which will result in more dire predictions and whatever legislation may be coming….
Wow. Seriously, check out more Eureka data. And it’s not just Eureka that EC seems to have faulty data for.
As it is an internet custom to demand links from anyone whose opinion may differ form yours, here….
http://www.climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/climateData/dailydata_e.html?timeframe=1&Prov=XX&StationID=1750&Year=2009&Month=7&Day=1
On the left you have a link for each day.Note the stated max temperature. Click on an individual day and compare that number to the actual hourly recorded temps.
And as I mentioned, it’s not just July /09 that has “errors”.
RE: Ulric Lyons (18:37:15) :
Gerald Machnee (18:03:24) :
“as the sun would be in the north”
About 55 degree West of North at 22:00hrs.
___________________
I meant in the general northerly direction.
How do you obtain 55 degrees west of north?
Thanks,
Gerald
Thank you, Boris.
I appreciate your efforts.
melinspain (10:56:04) :
Ale Gorney (22:29:18) :
Ale, if you see the visitor guide in point “2.3.10 Emergency conditons…you read…….An emergency consists of fires, polar bear sightings…………”
…—…—…
(Robt wonders when the polar bears will learn that creating fire “on” the buildings will force the people “out” of the buildings …..
I suspect they’re differences and not errors. If the high or low temperature happens during an hour but not at the start of an hour, the hourly record won’t show the same number. The daily extremes may be coming from devices which record the maximum and minimum during the entire period.
Bob Labonza (19:43:50) :
The Eureka station uses a min-max thermometer that measures the temperature every minute. So the max temperature and the hourly temperature will be different. In addition, they don’t use the average of the hourly temperatures or the average of the hourly max and hourly min, to calculate the daily mean temperature. Instead, they use the average of the day’s instantaneous high and low … seems goofy, but there it is.
I don’t know if they are using the average of the minute-by-minute temps for the hourly value. If not, they should be … perhaps Mr. Lecotey could enlighten us about that. I suspect that they don’t use the average, but instead use the reading on the hour … but what do I know?
….AnonyMoose (21:41:59) :
If the high or low temperature happens during an hour but not at the start of an hour, the hourly record won’t show the same number. The daily extremes may be coming from devices which record the maximum and minimum during the entire period.
That might explain it. Can anyone confirm this? That additional observations may be made at times not strictly on the hour? If so , why werent they recorded with the rest of the Daily data? I’m not arguing, just curious.
Since I made my first post, I’ve been looking at EC data for various Canadian cities and various months/ years,comparing the Daily Reports with the Monthly Summary ones.Every single one of them contains the errors I mentioned earlier. Just now looking at Montreal for May 1980 and finding errors for every day I’ve looked at so far. And every error lists the max temp higher than it actually was.
So this isnt something that started recently. Could ALL the Climate Info collected,archived and passed on by Environment Canada be suspect?
Anyone who goes and looks through this stuff will seriously ask themselves the same question.
Bob labonza (22:00:58)
“So this isnt something that started recently. Could ALL the Climate Info collected,archived and passed on by Environment Canada be suspect?”
Well have a look atthis colour coded map which shows the rates of warming for the globe for the 1970 to 2010 period. This is for the GISS raw data.
http://www.climateapplications.com/GHCN/images/GISSraw1970to2010map.png
and here is the interactive version of that same map.
http://www.climateapplications.com/GISSMaps/stationtrends1970to2010raw.asp
Notice something strange about the Canadian stations? Clearly rate of global warming increases significantly immediately as you pass over the 49th parallel from the US to Canada.
“KevinUK(03:23:45) :
“Notice something strange about the Canadian stations? Clearly rate of global warming increases significantly immediately as you pass over the 49th parallel from the US to Canada.”
Yes, something strange and very pronounced. The difference on that map is very noticeable to say the least.
Some continuing investigation is required here. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it appears that Environment Canada consistently uses higher daily max temps in their Monthly Summary reports than wnat are actually recorded in the Daily Hourly readings.
And it’s not just the little remote stations either.I thought at first that major cities with busy airports would have more accurate readings ( Vancouver,Montreal).They dont.
I’m guessing that the problem is with the way EC compiles the Daily reports into the Monthlies.I think there is no blame at the local weather station level.
But there is something wrong, and wrong on a huge scale.
Bob Labonza (22:00:58) :
“That might explain it. Can anyone confirm this? That additional observations may be made at times not strictly on the hour? ”
Standard METAR reports are taken at a specific time, usually just prior to the hour to represent the “hourly” report. This allows any central collecting agency to build a “collective bulletin” containing METARS for a specific hour to be transmitted as a collection of observations from a specified geographical area, for example, maybe Eastern Canada. Reports can appear in more than one collective.
Intermediate observations, SPECI (Special off-hour) reports, are taken if conditions vary significantly enough from hourly reports to affect aircraft operations, but temperature changes are not one of the parameters that will trigger a “special” report. Thus the actual max and or min temperatures may or may not appear in standard METAR hourly reports.
Daily max/min temperatures from Eureka are in the Synoptic reports, not METARS, although some countries, the US for example, do transmit max/min temperatures (from some stations) in selected METAR reports. These deviations from WMO spec are called “Regional Agreements” and vary by country around the world.
I could only speculate as to what and how EC processes and archives this data.
So if the daily Min/Max Temps aren’t shown on the hourly reports, what is the point of producing an hourly report? It seems that, in this case, the record high of 20.9C was a short-lived event—obviously not over an hour in duration—and that a 10 or 20 minute gust can turn the Arctic crimson on GISS charts.
Bob Labonza, see the comment Willis Eschenbach (21:58:57), which was probably sent while you were typing your immediately-following comment. You haven’t gone back to reread what others said before your comments.
Bob Labonza and Sean Peake – Eschenbach says there is a separate device which checks once a minute for the highs and lows. As we can see, one advantage of hourly reports is to be able to see if the high or low may be due to something unusual. Doesn’t look like the people being paid to process the data are paying attention to all the data.
Anthony, it would be nice if there were comment permalinks displayed to us so we can link to preceding comments.
REPLY: It would be nice if there was an edit feature, an image inserter, and every time somebody left a comment I got paid a dime. But wordprss.com, which host this bog will have none of the features. -A
Bob labonza (22:00:58)
“So this isnt something that started recently. Could ALL the Climate Info collected,archived and passed on by Environment Canada be suspect?”
KevinUK(03:23:45) :
Now you come to mention it the difference across the border is very pronounced.
Even more strange – GISS and Environment Canada produce very different records for identical stations :
http://diggingintheclay.blogspot.com/2010/04/canada-2-ghcngiss-comparisons-with.html
But when the anomalies are calculated the differences are much reduced. I’ve only posted one anomaly graph (Eureka): http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_vYBt7hixAMU/S9QmhDzCkaI/AAAAAAAAAhU/gGNM9hbuYpg/s200/Eureka+anom.png
but much the same for other stations.
RE:
** Sean Peake (12:59:58) :
So if the daily Min/Max Temps aren’t shown on the hourly reports, what is the point of producing an hourly report? It seems that, in this case, the record high of 20.9C was a short-lived event—obviously not over an hour in duration—and that a 10 or 20 minute gust can turn the Arctic crimson on GISS charts.**
Hourly reports are required for aviation forecasting such as TAF’s (Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts). Cloud, visibility, and wind are also required.
RE Max and Min Temperatures. They are not taken from the hourly readings. They have been done using Maximum and Minimum thermometers where the stations are manned. In unmanned stations they would be done by computer from the thermometers.
RE: SPECI or special reports. The following may now be correct. The criteria have changed and a change of 5 degrees when the temperature is above 20 deg C is now used. So the temperature at Eureka may have been too low for this special.
AnonyMoose (15:00:59) :
Aye, there’s the rub.
It would be interesting to see 20 years worth of instant data to see how long the temp spikes (up or down) last and what the conditions were at the time.
Sean Peake: “So if the daily Min/Max Temps aren’t shown on the hourly reports, what is the point of producing an hourly report? It seems that, in this case, the record high of 20.9C was a short-lived event—obviously not over an hour in duration—and that a 10 or 20 minute gust can turn the Arctic crimson on GISS charts.”
There are several reasons for hourly weather reports besides feeding climate analysis and/or GISS. For example, the primary use of METAR reports is for safe aircraft operations. Simultaneous reports give rise to an instantaneous weather snapshot for the globe and are therefore useful in analyses.
A better question is, can you think of any reason safe aircraft operations require a max daily temperature? These operations are much more sensitive to winds, pressure, precip, clouds, visibility, obstructions, etc.
And as for the “crimson on GISS charts,” that sounds like a good question for the gurus at GISS.
AnonyMoose: “Eschenbach says there is a separate device which checks once a minute for the highs and lows. As we can see, one advantage of hourly reports is to be able to see if the high or low may be due to something unusual. Doesn’t look like the people being paid to process the data are paying attention to all the data.”
Several decades ago, many U.S. weather stations used “Thermographs” to continuously record temperatures. These were sent to Asheville even then, but “processing” would have been a real bear in those days. If memory serves, there were about 2500 observing stations in the U.S. at aerodromes during that time.
Gerald Machnee (16:09:49), Rod Smith (16:29:27) :
I am assuming that the runway at Eureka is gravel and the only planes that lands on a regular basis Twin Otters, which can land in almost any weather, any temperature so I’m confused about how EC records data because the hourly temps. are not terribly important—unless planes only land on the hour every hour except from 00:00 to 02:00 hrs.
To me what is more important is to see the duration of these temp. anomalies and whether it is correct to put these massive swings that apparently last less than an hour into the record. The way it stands now, EC puts out a monthly record that no one can confirm except EC. Is it “secret” data that can’t be shared (which I doubt) or is it just the way the system is set up? If the latter is true, it needs to be changed.
RE:
Sean Peake (17:55:39) :
Gerald Machnee (16:09:49), Rod Smith (16:29:27) :
I am assuming that the runway at Eureka is gravel and the only planes that lands on a regular basis Twin Otters, which can land in almost any weather, any temperature so I’m confused about how EC records data because the hourly temps. are not terribly important—unless planes only land on the hour every hour except from 00:00 to 02:00 hrs.
To me what is more important is to see the duration of these temp. anomalies and whether it is correct to put these massive swings that apparently last less than an hour into the record. The way it stands now, EC puts out a monthly record that no one can confirm except EC. Is it “secret” data that can’t be shared (which I doubt) or is it just the way the system is set up? If the latter is true, it needs to be changed.
Various planes land there. In the 1970’s an American Globemaster landed there using all the runway.
There is no secret about the data. You can get it within a few days at the following site:
http://www.climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/Welcome_e.html
Hourly records are necessary to follow trends for public and aviation forecasting and analysis. In Canada some are EC and some are Transport Canada. Maximum and minimum thermometers came into use because an observer checked mercury or alcohol thermometers once an hour. This can be done electronically now. Most average or mean temperatures are calculated by adding the max and min and dividing by 2. It is not the best but has been done that way for years.
You state that hourly temps are not important – maybe for yourself. All the weather elements are important to a forecaster(or to a computer which does a lot of it now). Forecasts are issued in advance, so you cannot stop observations.
I suggest you get a good text book on meteorology such as From the Ground Up which is used in pilot training.
Gerald Machnee (19:58:45) : “You state that hourly temps are not important – maybe for yourself…”
My point, which I guess I didn’t make very well, is that I don’t think hourly observations that are used primarily for aviation are indicative enough for use in climate forecasting—except that we can see that the spikes up- or downward were anomalies that lasted for a short time. Look at the debate about station sitings near airports; temperatures from those stations record the effects of the local environment not necessarily climate trends. So the question is how to use readings that are prone to wild swings because of where the stations are situated? For Eureka in particular, because of its terrain of rock and gravels and nothing else except Musk oxen and wolves should one apply UHI adjustment to its readings because clearly something abnormal is going on there.
RE:
Sean Peake says:
April 27, 2010 at 5:46 am
**I don’t think hourly observations that are used primarily for aviation are indicative enough for use in climate forecasting—except that we can see that the spikes up- or downward were anomalies that lasted for a short time.**
The climate forecasters do not really use hourly readings – they will use longer term averages. The spikes you note are probably too complicated and numerous to be taken into account worldwide for long range forecasting. With a station like Eureka you may have to live with what you have. There should not be a UHI adjustment if the instruments are sited properly. The water and slope effects have occurred over a long period of time so long term changes are what should be looked for. There are UHI effects in and near many cities that are not accounted for properly.
Climate forecasting unfortunately uses too many assumptions in the models which causes errors. They are using infilling between stations which changes means.
I have tried to stay away from trying to do climate or seasonal forecasts because of too many built in errors.
With respect to checking errors such as have been found at Eureka and other sites, Budget cuts have resulted in less manpower being available to do detailed verification. At one time everything was checked manually. This has changed to more automated checks and less checks.
I discussed the two Eureka errors or possible errors with a co-worker. On one of them the wind was fairly steady from the north and the temperature still seemed to zoom up 7 degrees, then down again. This is possible in a variable foehn situation, but it seemed quite steady. I think there is also an ice cap or glacier some miles to the north.