In the previous WUWT entry, Willis posted his data on the Svalbard weather station, noting that it is spliced data and that the station data has been merged in nearby station history:
0 km (*) Svalbard Luft 78.2 N 15.5 E 634010080002 rural area 1977–2006
47 km (*) Isfjord Radio 78.1 N 13.6 E 634010050010 rural area 1912–1980
425 km (*) Bjornoya 74.5 N 19.0 E 634010280003 rural area 1949–2006
Svalbard Luft is the airport. As we’ve noted time and again on WUWT, the stations in GHCN have a propensity for airport migration. Here’s what Svalbard Airport looks like to visitors:
Lots of nice black asphalt and buildings there to absorb the feeble sunshine at that latitude. But where’s the weather station?
No help from NCDC’s metadatabase, they have no clue either, all they know is that it is “at the airport”:
The equipment tab gives no clues, and the lat/lon is too coarse to pinpoint a location within the airport complex.
But, the great thing about Svalbard is that it is now a tourist destination. Regular jet flights are available. Fortunately for us, tourists take photos, and upload them to Panoramio. Here’s one photo likely taken right off the plane:
Here are some additional views:
I found another tourist photo on Panaramio, that shows the characteristic metal legs and struts of the Stevenson Screen visible beyond the plane that tourists are boarding:
More tourist submitted Panoramio photos of the airport show just how much asphalt tarmac there is around the station, such as this one:
And when you zoom in on that panorama image at far left, sure enough, there’s the Stevenson Screen again:
It is clear that there’s a lot of asphalt around the station, but there’s also a lot of snow too. What happens when it snows at the airport? They clear the runway and tarmac, of course:
Where’s the Stevenson Screen? Right at the edge of the tarmac.
So, aviation snow removal makes a nice black year round albedo, right next to the weather station. Plus jet exhaust, generators, steam driven de-icers and other tools of the aviation trade are also nearby. Even if the Stevenson Screen has been abandoned in favor of an automated sensor, as often happens at airports, both would still have some locally measured effects in the record.
In the Arctic and Antarctic, aviation is the lifeline of humanity. A warm pocket of energy use in a sea of snow and ice. It would be interesting to plant a few of my portable USB logging thermometers around Svalbard away from this pocket of humanity to see what sort or temperature readings we get. By bet is that we’ll see a local AHI (Airport Heat Island) at Svalbard. It’s a busy place. In 2009, the airport had 138,934 passengers. Source: ^ Avinor (2010). “Årsrapport Passasjerer” (in Norwegian). http://www.avinor.no/tridionimages/2009%20Passasjerer_tcm181-109035.xls.
In Willis’ previous essay, he notes RC calls it a 5 sigma outlier event in April 2006. I had surmised it might be due to a tarmac resurfacing changing the albedo. I could be right. From the Wiki article on Svalbard airport:
In 1989, parts of the runway were re-insulated, giving these areas that previously had been the worst an acceptable solution. In 2006, this measure was conducted on the remaining parts of the runway.
There was construction going on in 2006, Oddly the source of that metadata is from a paper on gauging the airport performance under the “duress” of climate change:
Svalbard airport runway. Performance during a climate-warming scenario. (PDF)
In a study initiated by the Norwegian Airport Authorities in 1995, insulation of the whole runway in a manner similar to the 1989 procedure was deemed the most favorable long-term runway maintenance strategy (Instanes, D. and Instanes, A., 1998). This has so far not been carried out, and a new reconstruction is planned for 2005/2006 to improve the runway. The average global surface temperature is projected to increase from 1.4 to 5.8°C between 1990 and 2100 (IPCC, 2001). Warming at higher latitudes of the Northern hemisphere may be greater than the global average, as high as 4 to 7°C between 2000 and 2100 (ACIA, 2004).
They don’t seem to realize anywhere in the paper that the temperature data they are relying of for input to their models used for permafrost thaw comes from the little white box at the edge of the tarmac. Talk about positive feedback and polar amplification. Let’s build a new runway; hey look it’s warmer we were right! Sheesh.
People like Jim Hansen and Gavin Schmidt who sit up at the top of the climate food chain and take data from these weather stations at face value and then use it to extrapolate to nearby grid cells because there are no other nearby stations in the Arctic really need to get out more and see what the measuring environment is like. Maybe somebody can convince them to get off their taxpayer funded butts and away from their computer screens someday and do some field work.
Of course given what they did to censure Willis at RC when he brought up the issues at Svalbard, I doubt they’d believe their own eyes if it contradicted their expectations.
UPDATE:
The UHI at Svalbard airport has been measured, using the driving technique I first wrote about back in fall 2008 to study UHI in Reno, NV. This study at:
http://climate4you.com/LongyearbyenUHI%2020080331.htm
…was pointed out by commenter Ibrahim and is reproduced below:
=============================================
Longyearbyen UHI experiment, March 31, 2008
Longyearbyen March 31, 2008 16:15 PM (not corrected for summer time), looking WNW from the northern end of the lake Isdammen (see map below). The sky was almost clear, with a few local clouds forming over the fjord. The wind was weak from southeasterly direction, 0.5-3 m/s. The large building in the distance to the right is the main hangar at Svalbard Ariport. Compare with map below.
The general weather situation, measurement equipment and measurement route
The air temperature was about -20oC, and the wind weak from southeasterly direction, 0.5-3 m/s, but with local deviations (see map below). The sky was almost clear. The ground surface was covered by snow. The nearby fjord was ice free, with the exception of a 5-50 m wide zone with new icew along the coast. A thermistor was attached to the roof of a car (c. 1.5 m above terrain), and temperatures were logged at 2 sec. intervals. The time given in the diagrams below are not corrected for summer time. The measurements were carried starting at Svalbard Airport in the upper left of the map below, driving SE along the coast to the town, making a roundtour here, before proceding SE into the lower part of the major valley Adventdalen.
Longyearbyen is the worlds northernmost town and is located at 78o17’N 11o20’E, in central Spitsbergen . The present number of inhabitants is 2,001 (January 1, 2007). There is no official meteorological station located in Longyearbyen at the moment. The official meteorological station is located at the airport, about 4 km northwest of Longyearbyen, close to the coast (see map below).
Topographic map showing Longyearbyen and Svalbard Airport (Svalbard Lufthavn). The red line shows the measurement route March 31, 2008, starting at the Airport and ending in the lower part of the valley Adventdalen to the SE. In between, a detour was made in the central part of the town as shown. The wind was weak, 0.5-3 m/s, from south easterly direction, but with local deviations (blue arrows). The fjord was ice free. The map section measures c. 11 km west to east.
Results
Result of temperature measurements along the route Svalbard Airport – Longyearbyen -Adventdalen, March 31, 2008. The official Svalbard meteorological station is located at the airport. Se map above for reference. Time (not corrected for summer time) is given in hh:min:ss format along the x-axis.
Interpretation of results
The whole area was snowcovered. The sun was below the skyline formed by the mountains, and albedo effects caused by buildings and roads for that reason presumably not very important.
The registered air temperatures show an overall falling trend towards SE along the main measurement route. Near the airport, where the official Svalbard meteorological station is located, air temperatures are relatively high (about -18oC), which is interpreted as the result of the onshore airflow from SE across the ice free fjord. Further towards SE, this local warming effect diminishes, and colder air (about -25oC) draining out of the valley Adventdalen dominates. The temperature difference between the Airport and Adventdalen is about 8oC, representing the open water effect (OWE) at this particular time. In between, the local heat island effect of the town Longyearbyen is only weakly developed. The maximum UHI effect appears to be about +0.5oC at the time of the experiment. The local cold trough recorded within Longyearbyen (16:04) corresponds to the position of the main valley axis, where cold air masses is draining NNE from the glacier at the valley head.
The existence of an urban heat island effect in a relatively small settlement as Longyearbyen may come as a surprise. This is, however, not the first time this has been observed in the Arctic; see, e.g., Hinkel et al. 2003.
=============================================
UPDATE2:
A commenter asked if satellite and surface data deviated here. Willis provides the answer.
I just looked at the MSU versus the NORDKLIM/GISS record, and the surface record shows much more warming than the satellite warming, almost twice as much. The surface record shows warming at 0.10 °C/decade, while the MSU record is warming at 0.06 °C/decade … here’s the graph:
w.
UPDATE3: From comments, we have a close up photo of the Stevenson Screen near the edge of the tarmac. Thanks to commenter “Oslo” for finding it at the Norwegian Metorological Institute website.
I wonder if the cinder blocks are a permanent feature?
UPDATE4
Erik Kempers writes in comments that he has found a Panaramio photo that was misplaced on the map that shows the weather station in perspective with the Svalbard airport runway and taxiway/tarmac. I’ve provided a zoomed and annotated version below. The original is here.
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stevia says:
May 13, 2010 at 9:35 am
Nick Stokes at 1.49am 13/10
That makes an average of 3,858 people per flight. Did the numbers come from Penn State?
“Daily flights from Oslo” doesn’t necessarily mean one per day, but at least one. Besides, not all flights start in Oslo, and there are flights between the settlements in Svalbard as well. Svalbard airport is an extremely busy airport for an archipelago with a few thousand inhabitants. Partly thanks to the AGW hype.
Well, I’ll submit my admittedly apocryphal comments about tarmac temperatures.
I spent 9 years in the USAF as an aircrew member, and as a result spent much more time on tarmacs that one would suspect. My casual observation is that flight line are much colder in winter and much warmer in summer than even just a couple of hundred feet off the edges. They are also much windier. They are generally very miserable places (weatherwise) to work.
Having said that, I am compelled to state that, in my opinion, the use of surface temperatures alone are probably the least accurate way to describe/forecast weather or climate (extended weather), and adding estimated CO2 just muddies the picture. What about moisture, precip, wind (monsoons, or foehn winds), clouds, permanent pressure systems (Shemya or Bermuda), and more?
I would guess the average temperature where I live was about the mid-to-lower seventies for the last 30 days. Would even a more accurate value adequately describe the climate?
That is a different island, Smøla, much further south. They discuss the problems caused by the wind turbines for the local eagles. One eagle is shown cut in two. Actually a rather critical program, not often seen around here.
You can also view the Svalbard Longyearbyen Airport weather station in this youtube video at about the 9:05 mark. Right as the plane is landing, you’ll notice the Stevenson Screen zoom past the window quite clearly!
If you prefer to view it during takeoff (as opposed to landing), then see if you can spot the Stevenson Screen zoom past at about the 18 second mark in this video:
stevia says: May 13, 2010 at 9:35 am
That makes an average of 3,858 people per flight. Did the numbers come from Penn State?
Huh? 138934/365/2=190.32
The example temperature profile in this post (airport then inland) has an important confound factor in assessing the airport pavement affect. The wind arrows show the air reaching the airport has a fetch over the unfrozen fiord. The temperature delta between air and water is at least +20 C. It is difficult to estimate how a short fetch and large temperature delta would change the airport temperature but it is certain the change would be positive. This location is a complex one because of the interaction of terrain, marine air and local glaciers.
Hi Nick at 12.16pm.
I assumed 360 days and that a passenger was only counted once and then slipped the decimal by one place. The speed of the fingers exceeding the neuron connection rate.
Ibrahim says:
May 13, 2010 at 12:34 am
UHI was measured:
http://climate4you.com/LongyearbyenUHI%2020080331.htm
________________________________________________________________________
If you are the same person who did the UHI measurement, Thank you. And of course a very big thank you to Anthony and Willis who just keep coming up with more and more information. My hat off to all three of you.
ScientistForTruth
“On Svalbard it was more than 12 °C warmer than normal in January” (2006)
Yes, of course the famous Svalbard January sunshine had something to do with that…
The speculation about aircraft holding, waiting for inbound flights etc at Svalbard airport are unrealistic. Essentially there is one (1) B-737 or MD-90 flight from Tromsö per day, plus a few short-haul flights (Do 228’s I think) to Sveagruvan and Ny Ålesund.
stevia says:
May 13, 2010 at 9:35 am
Nick Stokes at 1.49am 13/10
That makes an average of 3,858 people per flight. Did the numbers come from Penn State?
Could you show your work? When I do the following:
138934 / (365 * 2) = 190.32
I get about 191 passengers per flight. How did you come up with over 20 times as much?
Signe Moerk says:
May 13, 2010 at 2:25 am
“The Stevenson Screen you see on your picture has not been in use for a long time! It has a completely different location.
Best regards from mee, living in Longyearbyen”
______________________________________________________________________
Where is it? How about pictures, map? When was it moved? The more information the better.
Is there anyone really surprised that Signe Moerk May 13, 2010 at 2:25 am
who claims to be “living in Longyearbyen” has thus far declined to respond to Willis Eschenbach May 13, 2010 at 3:16 am to substantiate the claim that the pictured Stevenson Screen is not the temperature recorder at Svalbard? Just another veristically and intellectually challenged drive-by
nednead says:
May 13, 2010 at 2:18 am
“Interesting, now you believe in the positive albedo effect. So it works over the tarmac but not over the sea ice? I wonder how that can be? How do you determine when it matters and when it doesn’t? Do you have surfaces you allow to have a positive feedback effect and those you do not? Strange indeed…”
_______________________________________________________________________
SIGHhhh Are you really that ignorant?
There is a heck of a lot of difference between the albedo effect of snow, ice and water (at the poles) and the albedo effect of black tarmac. Try stripping in the winter and changing clothes. You will learn real quick it is better to stand in bare feet on nice warm black tarmac than to have your feet stick to the !@ur momisugly#@ur momisugly ICE! And yes I have done it many times. I cave in the winter in wet systems and have had to cut my frozen boots laces off more often than I like to admit. (OK so I am a little weird)
Surface Typical albedo
Fresh asphalt…….0.04[1]
Worn asphalt………….. 0.12[1]
Conifer forest
(Summer)………………. 0.08,[2] 0.09 to 0.15[3]
Deciduous trees………. 0.15 to 0.18[3]
Bare soil…………………..0.17[4]
Green grass……………..0.25[4]
Desert sand……………..0.40[5]
New concrete………….0.55[4]
Ocean Ice………………..0.5–0.7[4]
Fresh snow……………..0.80–0.90[4]
Water is a completely different beast and the angle of incidence of the light changes its albedo big time. (If you sail you will get a really bad sunburn in an hour or two even if you have never burn on land. And yes I have done that too…. once)
” Water reflects light very differently from typical terrestrial materials. The reflectivity of a water surface is calculated using the Fresnel equations …
Although the reflectivity of water is very low at low and medium angles of incident light, it increases tremendously at high angles of incident light such as occur on the illuminated side of the Earth near the terminator (early morning, late afternoon and near the poles)… http://www.answers.com/topic/albedo
Fresnel equations graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Water_reflectivity.jpg
Gail Combs,
Oslo posted this close-up picture above. The station is not on asphalt.
REPLY: I never posted that it was “on the asphalt” just next to the tarmac. – A
To Nick Stokes
Well, first, the page you linked says there are daily flights from Oslo and possibly also daily flights from Tromso. But, you linked a Norweigan travel page which gives you the sites in Norway from which planes go to Longyerbyen. Is it possible there are also connections from Sweden, Russia, the Netherlands, perhaps even so far away as the UK ? I’ve heard they got bigger gas tanks on planes these days
This is very interesting as it brings into question the validity of the anomaly reported by GISS for the Arctic. GISS fills in temperatures for the grid cells that have no ground measurement stations by interpolation from ground stations up to 1200 km away. In the case of the high latitudes in the Arctic there are very few current stations indeed (only three or four )… and Svalbard Luft is one of these. If Svalbard Luft is affected by AHI, then the anomaly reported by GISS for half of the arctic is also in error.
marchesarosa says:
May 13, 2010 at 10:01 am
Apparently there are more polar bears on Svalbaard than humans and the humans are permitted to carry guns for protection against these beastly predators.
See question number 20 on this FAQs about Svalbard: “Do I have to have a gun license when arriving Svalbard..?” http://www.svalbard.com/SvalbardFAQ.html#gun%20license
What a refreshingly healthy attitude to wildlife!
________________________________________________________________________
What a great place to send the Congress critters who are trying to ban guns in the USA. An all expense paid one month tenting vacation with out guns of course where lots of fish and meat is served alfresco.
There are more stations in the Arctic ; historical temperatures from Danmark and Greenland:
http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/index/klima/klimaet_indtil_nu/temperaturen_i_groenland.htm
And there’s always Eureka.
Qrious,
Nope. Note the last Q&A here.
“Only one country, Norway, is reachable from Longyearbyen, Svalbard. with 100% of the airport destinations. “
The flight schedule from the airport is here. Basically one flight per day, to Oslo via Tromso. Sometimes 2 flights in high summer, and, from the look of it there, no flights for much of winter.
And Anthony, in my remark on asphalt I was responding to Gail Combs, who wrote a whole lot about asphalt albedo.
Nick Stokes says:
May 13, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Gail Combs,
Oslo posted this close-up picture above. The station is not on asphalt.
REPLY: I never posted that it was “on the asphalt” just next to the tarmac. – A
_________________________________________________________________________
It looks like the same Stevenson Screen. If you look at the background in the panorama image, it seems to match the background in the photo of the Stevenson Screen but at a slightly different angle. If it is the same screen the photo is taken from the runway.
Ibrahim says:
May 13, 2010 at 3:32 pm
“There are more stations in the Arctic ; historical temperatures from Danmark and Greenland:”
Indeed there are more stations, but I was talking only about the stations used by GISS for their temperature and anomaly calculations. The list of stations is here…
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/station_list.txt
Anomalies close to the pole are calculated from just these few stations…
Number Name Dist from N Pole (km)
43120000 NORD ADS 932.4
200460003 GMO IM.E.T. 1043.4
719170006 EUREKA,N.W.T. 1110
200690003 OSTROV VIZE 1165.5
10080002 SVALBARD LUFT 1298.7
I’ve mentioned before that I’m ex-R.A.F..
Here’s how we cleared runways, peri-tracks etc.
1) a sicard (combination of plough & Archimedes screw) would clear the bulk of the snow.
2) Then, send in the ice clearing, 2 jet engines with diffusers to spread the outlet & melt the remaining snow, also drying the surface to prevent re-freeze.
Wonder if commercial airports use similar methods.
DaveE.
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 13, 2010 at 2:19 am
Great post, Anthony. I just looked at the MSU versus the NORDKLIM/GISS record, and the surface record shows much more warming than the satellite warming, almost twice as much. The surface record shows warming at 0.10 °C/decade, while the MSU record is warming at 0.06 °C/decade … here’s the graph
Willis
The difference in trends looks to be an artifact of the greater variability of the surface record. In particular the dip in the late 1980s (near the start of the record) and the spike in 2006 (near the end) seem to be responsible. There is no long term divergence. The orange and blue line track each other closely between 1983-1986, 1994-1998 and they’ve come together again in the last couple of years.
I am suspicious of the April 2006 anomaly, though. “Nearby” stations such as Danmarkshavn exhibit generally warmer anomalies in 2005 and 2006 but nothing like the Svalbard. I don’t suppose the April 2006 anomaly could have originally been a missing value or something similar. The fact that it happens to be exactly 0.0 and an outlier makes it look a bit suspect.
A proper image of the weather station (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/23883022) can be found by clicking on the panoramio link in Google Earth just south of the western threshold of the runway. (Photo location is not correct)
There are probably two wind masts at location 781500N 152520E and 781442N 153023E (deg/min/sec). In GE there is a faint line shadow visible at these locations. There should also be a transmissometer to report Runway Visual Range but I cannot find its location.
The location of the screen should be as close to runway as possible with ICAO standards as guideline. Be reminded that the main function of these weather stations is to report runway weather conditions in order to enhance flight safety. They have not been set up as climate stations.
REPLY: The transmissometer is visible in the zoomed image I’ve added to the main body of the post. Thanks for finding this. – Anthony