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.
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.
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)
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)