People Send me stuff. I get pictures of weather stations from all over the world. Here we have Henderson Field, serving the capital city of Honiara, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands.
Hi Anthony, I thought you might be interested to see this weather station.
It is the main one for the Solomon Islands, good situation for the airport, but as you can see in the photos, not so good for accurate temperature measurement.
The planes land then turn down the road to the Terminal apron, as they turn onto the apron, the jet exhaust washes over the weather station.
I’m not a technician, but I’ve repaired enough damaged equipment in my time to think that the exhaust heat may cause some problems with calibration over time.
Google earth -9.430025° 160.047393°
I’m trying slowly to get some full size photos loaded into google earth at present, but internet here is sporadic at the best of times, and down right miserable the rest.
Thanks,
Warren Nash
Solomon Islands
Here’s the closeup view of the weather station at the airport, the instruments are inside the fenced in enclosure.
As weather stations go, it isn’t bad, as the Stevenson Screen is 30 meters from the taxiway asphalt. That would make it a CRN2, acceptable by NOAA siting standards.
Here’s a ground level view of the station taken from the terminal:
Here comes a plane!
Coming into the terminal…
Hey, park it over here!
Uh, oh, look where the jet exhaust is pointed:
Hmmm, a new high temperature today?
Back to normal.
Now in the defense of the global climate record, it doesn’t look like this station gets updated at GISS very much:
And here’s the plot of data from NASA GISS:
Source here
Hmmm, pretty crappy data set dontcha think? Why have it at all?
If only GISS could use Weather Underground:
Eh, but that would require a thousands of man-hours, and millions of dollars in grant money to pull off.
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Steven Mosher says:
September 30, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Paolo M. says:
September 30, 2010 at 6:46 am (Edit)
Steven Mosher doesn’t know what a stable nocturnal layer is.
#########
sorry Paolo, You might want to look at a couple things first. the collapse of ABLs at coastal locations at nightfall and the critical windspeed for mitigating UHI.
Who knows you might be able to make a case, but that would require a hypothesis, and a test that you would be willing to accept as definitive.
###########################################
Sorry Steven, but after several years of meteorological job activity, it is possibile that I think some facts are obvious.
One of this is that, if you perturb a stable layer of surface cold air, you rise the T of the layer.
Airplanes and buses and cars in a airport are those perturbations.
Or, have you ever seen those ventilators within citrus fields?
If you wish to stay strictly to facts:
“At the Asheville site, the effect of siting difference
between the ASOS and CRN led to a ΔT local effect of
about 0.25°C”,
just from your reference! 0.25°…. quite a lot!
And it’s very easy to infer that if environmental conditions change at an airport, i.e. much more traffic, also ΔT increases.
I can’t know, of course, what’s the particular situation at Solomon islands’ airport, but as it is written in the title of this post, this is a way “not to measure temperature”, unless you take into account all confounding issues when assesseing temporal trends.
Paolo M. says:
“f you wish to stay strictly to facts:
“At the Asheville site, the effect of siting difference
between the ASOS and CRN led to a ΔT local effect of
about 0.25°C”,
just from your reference! 0.25°…. quite a lot!”
I prefer to stick with the facts, as you note. You claimed that I knew nothing about the stabel nocturnal boundary layer. You said that without any evidence about my history in aviation, my employment with companies who pioneered studies in things like boundary layers and turbulence, without any evidence of my own study of the micro climate of urban environments over the past three years. And while some prattle on about the effect that HAS to be there, I’m actually the only one willing to find actual evidence and consider all the aspects of that evidence. You should note and know that effect of increased heating from different heat capacities of surface material is modulated by several factors:
1. Rain events
2. Wind speeds over the critical wind level. ( depends somewhat on the location)
3. Cloudiness.
4. The relative wetness of the surrounding landscape.
So that .25C difference is not a constant everyday thing. by the time you look at it on a global yearly average scale it is vanishingly small. ( remember, it gets factored by the rate of occurance, by the percentage of airports, by the length of airport service in the record, by the number of surrounding sites, by the percent of land in that area, and finally by the overwelming power of the SST numbers.
So .25*Rc*Pa*Pl ( just simply)
Rc = rate of occurance lets say, 50% of the days are sunny, no wind, no rain
Pa = percentage of stations which are airports, agin just 50% for illustration
Pl = percent of land records in the global average 30%
.25*.5*.5*.3
mousenuts.
steven mosher says:
October 1, 2010 at 11:08 am
So that .25C difference is not a constant…
…mousenuts.
############
Steven, that is a mean value.
What are you talking about?
That each location is different from another?
That’s a novel suggestion!
There are a lot of issues with airports.
And if you use those T readings, you need to account for them in trend assessment. Period!
Great effort, easy to judge that you have worked really hard to grab all the pictures!!! Keep it up!