UPDATE: Another new record at BWI on July 7th:
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC
522 PM EDT WED JUL 07 2010
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE SET AT BALTIMORE MD...
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 101 DEGREES WAS SET AT BALTIMORE MD TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 99 SET IN 1993.
A new record high temperature was set in Baltimore today…
RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC 0547 PM EDT TUE JUL 06 2010 ...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE SET AT BALTIMORE MD... A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 105 DEGREES WAS SET AT BALTIMORE MD TODAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 101 SET IN 1999.
The temperature is measured here at the BWI airport at this NOAA ASOS. It doesn’t look bad from this photo provided by NOAA. In fact with the exception of the building, it looks reasonably well sited. More photos here.
But when you look at this BWI ASOS station from the air, an entirely different picture emerges.
From Bing Maps, see interactive view here.
Here’s the East looking view:
Note how close the NOAA ASOS station is to the asphalt accessway, and how it is surrounded on 3 sides by runway and taxiways.
Here’s a ground level view showing the asphalt accessway:
But also notice the vent in the ILS instrumentation building. That’s an exhaust vent. When the wind blows from the NW, it will carry any waste heat from that vent (note it points downward) directly into the ASOS sensor array, as shown in this zoomed aerial view from Bing Maps below:
Interactive view of above here.
Note the direction of the wind when the ASOS recorded 105° F per this screen cap of the NWS hourly observations for BWI:
The ILS waste heat, combined with the asphalt proximity of the accessway, as well as the runway and taxiway on three sides contributed to the new high temperature record, in my opinion.
When you look at other stations high temps (which I plotted) in the area on the same day, the 105° F record high stands alone near Baltimore, though one other airport, Frederick, also with ASOS measured the same 105° F high. The Baltimore downtown Tmax (at the Museum/Science Center) was 103°F.
Source of observed high temps: http://www.erh.noaa.gov/lwx/observations.htm and http://www.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=lwx
From the website CCF, who also had an interest in the issue, it was reported that some other private stations nearby also didn’t hit 105.
Nearby Weatherbug stations, which are considered to be fairly accurate, were all lower:
- Columbia hit 102F at Clemens Crossing ES.
- Ellicott City hit 100F at Veterans ES.
- Owings Mills hit 100F at The Harbour School.
This suggests that BWI stands alone in the 105 temperature for this area.
Since the Frederick, MD Airport ASOS (nearly 40 miles away) also hit 105, let’s have a look at it:
Interactive view from Bing maps here. Note that this station while an older style AWOS instead of ASOS, also has it’s sensors sited near/over asphalt and near the waste heat of the ILS building and it’s electronics. Just like BWI. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.
And here’s the observations from Frederick:
While the winds at this time weren’t in the direction that would pull waste heat from the ILS building, I’ll point out that the KFDK AWOS sensors are sited directly over the asphalt, where the BWI ASOS has asphalt very close by. This is great for keeping weeds down and mowing, not so great for measuring temperature.
Washington National has similar siting over asphalt (or possibly dark crushed rock, but does not have an ILS electronics building nearby. It does have one feature though, the Potomac river is only 180 meters away.
Of course, the KDCA ASOS station isn’t far from a megaplex of tarmac, terminals, and aircraft.
If you wonder if tarmac/taxiway/runways are capable of generating a lot of heat, this story from Albany, NY yesterday, on the same day the new record high was set at BWI, might be of interest:
Oh, and by the way, Albany’s airport also had a new record that same day:
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ALBANY NY
958 PM EDT TUE JUL 6 2010
...RECORD HIGH MINIMUM TEMPERATURE TIED AT ALBANY NY...
THE LOW TEMPERATURE AT THE ALBANY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT ONLY DROPPED
TO A LOW 76 DEGREES AT 509 AM JULY 6TH. THIS TIES THE OLD RECORD
HIGH MINIMUM TEMPERATURE OF 76 DEGREES SET BACK IN 1911.
It takes some time for all that tarmac heat to dissipate. You can bet they didn’t have tarmac there in 1911. The high temp also got pretty warm:
TEMPERATURE (F)
YESTERDAY
MAXIMUM 96 353 PM 97 1886 82 14 80
MINIMUM 76 509 AM 47 1961 59 17 51
Sources: http://www.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=aly
While this certainly isn’t an exhaustive survey, it does illustrate that the two highest reading airport stations today at BWI and FDK have siting issues.The BWI ASOS went in in 1995 according to the NCDC MMS Metadatabase. It set a new record of 101 for this date 4 years later. We can be certain that in the years prior, the station was not sited just like you see it now. Airports are dynamic engines of change.
Also from the CCF website:
Records go back to 1880 for Baltimore, so this is an impressive feat, and it has been done before. A temperature of 105F has been hit four other times in the the area’s, and many long ago. So these numbers should quell the talk of Global Warming with this hot summer.
Here are the four other dates:
- June 29th, 1934
- August 6th 1918
- August 7th 1918
- August 20th 1983
Another mark hit many times in Baltimore was 104F on these days:
- July 3, 1898
- July 16 1988
- August 4th, 1930
- July 6th: 101F in 1999* BROKEN TODAY with 105F
- July 7th: 99F in 1993
- July 8th: 100F in 1993
- July 9th: 103F in 1936
- July 10th: 107F in 1936 * Hottest of all time for Baltimore
The question is, are airport stations like this at BWI climate-worthy? I sincerely doubt it.
I’d like to share a story that I’m proud of. At ICCC4 in Chicago this past May, I gave my presentation on what I’ve learned from the surfacestations.org project and what is about to be published. One member of the audience came up to chat afterwards. I was surprised to see Dr. Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut, and the only geologist to walk on the moon. He said:
Anthony, I want you to know that you are spot on about these airport stations. I’ve seen them read up to 10 degrees warmer than the surroundings. But that’s what they are supposed to read. Pilots need to know the runway conditions, and these stations measure that. Their primary mission is aviation, not climate.
A proud moment for me, having a man who was a hero of mine, whom I watched on Live Lunar TV in high school, giving praise, but also stating the base truth of the matter. Climate monitoring is not part of the mission plan for airports, but they get co-opted for the task.
For example, BWI also has problems with snow records, which I’ve covered before:
BWI snow record rescinded: Another reason why airports aren’t the best place to measure climate data
Here’s some related reading about Baltimore’s other high reading climate (USHCN) station (now closed):
Full story here:
How not to measure temperature, part 48. NOAA cites errors with Baltimore’s Rooftop USHCN Station
Another mark hit many times in Baltimore was 104F on these days:
- July 3, 1898
- July 16 1988
- August 4th, 1930
- July 6th: 101F in 1999* BROKEN TODAY with 105F
- July 7th: 99F in 1993
- July 8th: 100F in 1993
- July 9th: 103F in 1936
- July 10th: 107F in 1936 * Hottest of all time for Baltimore
Positive or negative anomalies (data rich) increase or decrease for some reason (information poor). The trick is to get out into the field and figure out why (information rich). What amazes me is that those that provide us with these temperature trends do not do so, and they fully admit to not doing so.
I haven’t looked through all these comments, but a few things need to be pointed out:
1 – Downtown Baltimore WAS 105 yesterday, just like the airport. 103 is incorrect.
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/data/LWX/CLIBWI (scroll down)
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/data/LWX/CF6DMH
2 – A record isn’t incompatible when its been measured in similarly bad surroundings for the last century. Remember that a lot of city offices before the move to airports were located on the roofs of buildings. BWI is probably an IMPROVEMENT compared to the past.
Dave Springer writes,
“Oh they’re aware of the UHI and land use effects. They’re also aware that there are no adjustments to the raw data made for such effects. The problem is that people like Anthony Watts and his growing audience are aware of the siting issues and lack of compensation for them too.”
Now I’m confused. I was responding to Owen who claimed NOAA was not aware of position and siting issues. The NOAA scientists I know are well aware of these. Elsewhere on this thread several posters claimed, without evidence, that adjustments for siting biases are made conspiratorially to get a desired warming result. But some adjustments should be made, shouldn’t they?
Also relevant to this thread — are these BWI record temperatures, right or wrong, contributing to anyone’s global temperature index? Many comments here assume that they are, but I’m not sure how. The Baltimore USHCN series I mentioned above is not from BWI, and the Chestertown MD station, which has a similar trend, looks bucolic:
http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=29874
As for Anthony Watt’s surfacestation hypothesis, I honestly look forward to seeing his data. Like the USHCN data he criticizes, Anthony’s data should be made public so that anyone can test for themselves the differences in trends between anomalies from stations with urban or microsite issues and others; and how the categories are defined. If the definitions and trend differences both prove to be robust, this would be an important study.
Joshua Halpern [AKA: Eli Rabett] says:
July 7, 2010 at 8:02 am
“Leonard Weinstein is correct but it is also correct that if the temperature was not increasing the number of record highs and record lows would be about the same, and indeed in the 1950s that was the case. However in the last decade (2000-2009) the ratio of highs to lows had increased to ~2. One can also see the cooling in the 1960s from this figure.
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2.jpg”
Halpern, a drone at the second worst-rated school in the US, bases his belief on one US chart — starting after the hottest decade of the 1930’s. So let me help fill in the gaps that Halpern avoids:
click1
click2 [global]
click3 [global]
click4
click5 [from continuously monitored stations]
click6 [global satellite; no CO2 correlation]
click7 [global temp, normal y-axis]
Neither the bunny nor any other alarmist has been able to falsify the hypothesis that what we are observing is natural climate variability. The planet is still emerging from the Little Ice Age, and there is no testable, empirical evidence showing that CO2 has anything to do with the few tenths of a degree rise in temperature. The only evidence available shows that CO2 rises as a result of rising temperature, and not the cause.
The Frederick, MD station ALWAYS measures higher temperatures than the surrounding areas during the day. I live in the region, and often look up the NWS data for that station. Unfortunately I have not compared the nighttime data but I’m curious to do so after learning about the over-asphalt siting.
JPeden says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:55 am
Unsurprisingly, “tenet-based” Climate Science does seem to be much more “Armchair” rooted than real Science – maybe also because you can’t get too far away from the Warming Models without some rather unpleasant withdrawal effects?
But, but, but go out??? In all that heat? Are you mad??? With the vast dust bowl conditions (and yet somehow deeper oceans) and all that Co2?
Pamela Gray writes,
“This happens when a farmer has become convinced that we will just be getting warmer and warmer (aka the positive trend lines you reported).”
Really, you know a farmer who became convinced it will be getting warmer and warmer, “aka the positive trend lines” I reported?
“Regarding being data rich and information poor: The fact that students, on average at a particular school, score below the national average is data rich and information poor. Weather trends (both the data and the statistics derived from the data) are data rich and information poor. Calling a temperature hot has more information in it than the temperature reading or trend alone does. Having an explanation for why the temperature is hot, how to prepare for it, and when it might go away is being data AND information rich.”
The rich/poor slogan doesn’t work for me because data is one type of information. So what you’ve written above just says that for some purposes, having more information is better than having less information, which is true enough but not deep.
“However, on a blog meant to encourage debate, simply listing data as if data has information in it without further work will certainly encourage debate. If all we needed was data, we would have very short journal articles.”
That’s true, and I write longer articles when I’ve got more to say. But the four slopes I listed do convey information related to the main point of this thread, which I gather you missed. They show a warming trend in Baltimore (but not at BWI) that is similar to the warming trend in a more rural Maryland location. Moreover, both local trends have the same sign but are steeper than two independent estimates of global temperature trends.
Such decadal trends show one dimension of “climate,” just as daily tempertures (the inspiration for this thread) show one dimension of “weather.”
At the moment in suburban Boston, the temperature of my back yard driveway is 144 degrees according to my IR thermometer. My Davis station gives a temperature of 95 degrees in about the best position I could locate it. Urban heat island effect? Yes, we have heard of it.
Gneiss
Anthony and co-conspirators have already reported on a great enough percentage of continental US temperature sites to indict the whole system. The rules for siting are not terribly stringent to begin but it’s painfully obvious that there is no oversight or enforcement of the rules. I’d equate the site placement rules to traffic controls (signals and signs) in Taipei which are for all practical purposes not traffic laws but rather recommendations that are seldom followed.
Pamela
I think “they” know what will happen if they get out into the field and invest some due diligence into the so-called “settled science”. They prefer the data they have now and don’t want to do anything that will change it.
Gneiss, it was my attempt at sarcasm.
Dave Springer writes,
“Anthony and co-conspirators have already reported on a great enough percentage of continental US temperature sites to indict the whole system. The rules for siting are not terribly stringent to begin but it’s painfully obvious that there is no oversight or enforcement of the rules. I’d equate the site placement rules to traffic controls (signals and signs) in Taipei which are for all practical purposes not traffic laws but rather recommendations that are seldom followed.”
This puzzles me a bit. From the summaries on surfacestations.org, I gather that they do indeed have a dataset — but where is it? And the analysis should be easy, something dozens of folks on this site, and thousands elsewhere in science, can do quickly and in many different ways … where are those analyses? Evan reports that a write-up is forthcoming, soon I hope, because the conclusions have been widely foretold.
The stuff I’ve seen revealed so far does not test the main hypothesis that Anthony states as fact in his talks — that the warming trends of the global anomaly indexes can be explained by urban or microsite problems. That hypothesis is so testable it makes the lack of published analysis stand out … so far!
solrey
re; temperature reporting at airports are for pilots
True enough. And if working under the rubric of “it’s better to err on the side of caution” and then taking into consideration that reporting a temperature that is higher than the actual temperature will result in aircraft being more lightly loaded and thus have a larger safety margin… it behooves the safe operation of the airport to exagerate the temperature in a warmer direction.
Regarding temperatures measured in aircraft, a friend of mine used to fly a light twin to get around a few cities in Western Australia. He told me he took off from Kalgoorlie one day when the plane had been sitting on the tarmac for a few hours, and the plane was so hot that none of the LCD cockpit instruments read anything but total black until he had climbed a few thousand feet.
Agreed, outside air temperatures measured in flight would be interesting to compare with the airport temperature.
Dave Springer writes,
“I think ‘they’ know what will happen if they get out into the field and invest some due diligence into the so-called ‘settled science’. They prefer the data they have now and don’t want to do anything that will change it.”
Perhaps ‘they’ are someone specific in your mind, but this stereotype bears no resemblance to the scientists I know or the journals I read. Thousands of field researchers, not just modelers or data analysts, are contributing to climate-related research. The coauthors on research articles often span a broad range of knowledge, from details on the ground to syntheses across studies. Field researchers and modelers talk to each other at meetings, share data and ideas, ask questions and learn things they don’t know. They read each other’s papers. Modelers tend to be keenly aware what aspects of their models “are not well constrained by data,” and where they need better ground-truth research. Field researchers take account of such gaps in considering what and where they should measure.
To imagine that researchers don’t go in the field is just fantasy. And science meetings tend to be all about new data, opposite to your belief that “They prefer the data they have now and don’t want to do anything that will change it.”
Since those are the touchdown markers in that photo, aircraft may well be taking off at full thrust at that very point (depending on runway in use). I can tell you that you can feel the heat from those engines at that distance, when at full power, with a temperature rise of say 10oc easily detectable for half a minute or more (depending on wind direction and strength).
I presume the thermometer would register such a huge increase in temperature to some degree.
.
>> The ILS transmitter is putting out maybe 20 watts max, so
>>aside from the asphalt walkway and the jet exhaust, that’s CRN 2.
ILS transmitters typically put out about 100w of RF. Not sure of how much electrical input it takes to create that output.
But by far the biggest energy output is the jet exhaust. In the one minute it takes to pass the temp station, a B737 will burn about 90kg of fuel, and a B747 about 650kg. That is a lot of heat energy.
.
Smokey:
The planet is still emerging from the Little Ice Age….Tell that to SH frozen inhabitants; check current temperature anomalies in the SH….Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjQyMWU4NDhkMzc2MWEwYTczODY5YzAwZjRkNGEyZGI=
Jonah Goldberg from National Review made a request to explain the weirdness of car thermometers. Does anyone want to take a stab at it?
HankHenry says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:42 am
It would be interesting if someone would do a study comparing soil temperatures under asphalt or concrete runways to temps at various distances from same. My impression from my research into ground source heat pumps was that soil temps at a depth of ten feet or so were a great approximation of average air temps at the surface.
_______________________________________________________
Cave temperature remain constant year round also. I have often wondered why cave temperatures are never mentioned since they would give a very good indication of the real average temperature trends for a region without all the noise in the signal. Maybe one or more of the caving societies has historical records that could be accessed.
“”” Gail Combs says:
July 7, 2010 at 1:15 pm
HankHenry says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:42 am
It would be interesting if someone would do a study comparing soil temperatures under asphalt or concrete runways to temps at various distances from same. My impression from my research into ground source heat pumps was that soil temps at a depth of ten feet or so were a great approximation of average air temps at the surface.
_______________________________________________________
Cave temperature remain constant year round also. I have often wondered why cave temperatures are never mentioned since they would give a very good indication of the real average temperature trends for a region without all the noise in the signal. Maybe one or more of the caving societies has historical records that could be accessed. “””
Well Gail; all I have to do is measure the Temperature of my well water; that’s as good as a cave; maybe better sinc3e it is less subject to winds blowing through.
Come to think of it; I don’t even have to measure the temperature of my well water; it’s 68 deg F (20 deg C); for some reason it never changes; even when we are in the middle of a global warming meltdown like we have today.
As a Baltimoron, I can tell you that the record for July 6 is actually 107 in 1936. I don’t know where they got the 1999 stat from…
“”” Leonard Weinstein says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:34 am
Anthony,
Consider this: In the last 100 years there have been 100 days of each day of the year. If temperatures varied totally randomly, there would be a 1% chance any given selected day of the year would be a record high for the last 100 years. Since there are 365 days in a year, the probability is that between 3 and 4 days of any given year will have record highs for that year. If you add to this the fact that the temperature has slightly increased in later years compared to earlier, the probability of record days in recent years is even higher. Thus a few record highs is no big deal. In fact, if less than 3 records are not made in a given recent year, this would be the odd fact. “””
And when the news media only reports the new records; you get the impression that they are something special.
Well they are still well within the total global range of -90 C to +60 C, so I wouldn’t worry about it.
Too bad that Nyquist fellah keeps getting upset at our sampling methodology. But not to worry; nobody has shown any good relationship between the global average temperature; and the net flow of energy into or out of this planet.
Being an “old guy”, who did a substantial amount of highway engineering and highway/roadway planning (and other related public works projects), I am well aware of the huge amounts of asphalt paving that has been placed in the last 6 decades. Not only has new paving taken place, but streets and highways previously paved with PCC (Portland cement concrete) have been overlaid with asphalt concrete, and parking lots previously covered with course aggregate have been paved with asphalt concrete. Most if not all local governments have street sealing (a thin layer of asphalt and fine aggregate) programs, which renew the asphalt pavement surfaces approximately every 5 years, and this certainly has a significant effect on how high the temperature of the pavement gets. These street sealing programs began to be widespread in the mid to late 1970s.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the conversion of large aircraft from propeller powered to jet powered took place, and the number of large aircraft increased markedly. Jets produce far greater amounts of heated exhaust, and their exhaust is far hotter than that from piston engines.
In my studied opinion, the urban heat island effect is much greater than “climate scientists” estimate, and the UHIE is a great deal more far reaching around an urban area than estimated. Other significant urban heat sources are not even considered to be significant by those same scientists.
Attempting to use temperatures measured at or near airports or anywhere near urban areas for climate change analysis is completely absurd, however those temperatures might be “adjusted”.
Geoff, I have not studied the data, but anecdotally Frederick MD has decent radiational cooling, usually tracking Manassas and a couple degrees below IAD. Then it usually tracks higher in the daytime like you said.