Quality Of Global Climate Surface Observing Sites
By Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.
Anthony Watts, Evan Jones and the numerous outstanding volunteers have provided us with an effective, land breaking documentati0n of the quality of siting of surface observations that are used in the construction of the US Historical Climate Network. Anthony reported on this topic in the outstanding report:
Watts, A. 2009: Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? 28 pages, March 2009 The Heartland Institute.
Anthony’s research as led to our first joint paper on this subject
Fall, S., A. Watts, J. Nielsen-Gammon, E. Jones, D. Niyogi, J. Christy, and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2011: Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 116, D14120, doi:10.1029/2010JD015146.Copyright (2011) American Geophysical Union.
On December 12 2006 I posted examples of photographs of observing sites outside of the USA in the post
Over the next few weeks, I will post the photographs that appear on that site as well as others that I am able to find. I encourage readers of my weblog to e-mail me information on other sites which I can post on the weblog. There is also a need to identify which of the posted sites are GHCN locations. This, hopefully, is a first step to extend Anthony’s analysis world wide. While these stations do not have the photographs from each cardinal direction, they are still very useful.
The first three stations are the following:
==============================================================
Footnote: For all of its flaws, the USHCN has one big advantage over the ROW and GHCN – superior metadata. That said, even then it is difficult to find stations sometimes. For example yesterday I made a road trip to fix a station survey that had been identified as being at the airport in NCDC…except that it wasn’t anywhere near the airport. More on that later.
The locations of most of the worldwide GHCN stations are not well documented in metadata, and lat/lon values published are so coarse that it makes spotting one from Google Earth nearly impossible. That said, documenting the state of the GHCN is going to be an uphill challenge.
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disconnect…………..
The very people that do not trust anything to do with temperature….
……roll over and treat CO2 reconstructions like they are the holy grail
http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/call2.jpg
On behalf of the IPCC, I want you to understand that this type of denialist proganda is completely irrelevant. The science is settled and minor, even if it applies to most weather stations’ aberrations in quality control, will not deter us from exposing the truth on climate change, as seen from the grant receivers perspective, to the entire world.
Our QA/QC protocols on raw data collection for climate statistics are second only to those from Al Gore’s garden, Greenpeace, Zimbabwe and North Korea and therefore can be considered thoroughly reliable in at least 10% of instances.
Yours truly
From my air conditioned private box on the 9th green of the TERI Foundation, New Delhi, India.
Rajendra K Pachauri
Typo:
“The locations of most of the worldwide GHCN stations is not well documented”
Should be “are”.
Latitude says:
August 14, 2011 at 7:41 am
Come on, the subject here is the quality of the global surface stations, not the quality of historical CO2 measurements or ice cores. That has been discussed for the nth time on this blog…
Are these supposed to be examples of poor siting? Am I missing something – what is wrong with the Zambian site?
It’s nice to see a quality control effort for surface stations, as it is certainly needed. However, it should be made clear that none of this will alter the overall global temperature trend data over later part of the 20th and into the 21 century.
And speaking of temperature data, what’s the latest from Berkley?
Zambia site: has it got something to do with the cables extending skywards and suggesting some massive structure in the direct vicinity? (just a guess here – no expertise.)
Hi All – Thanks for your feedback so far. I am showing all the stations I can find; some will be well sited. Jeff Alberts – Thanks ! I will correct the typo in my orginal post.
More sites this coming week.
Annabelle says:
August 14, 2011 at 8:47 am
Are these supposed to be examples of poor siting? Am I missing something – what is wrong with the Zambian site?
——
I think this is another picture of the site:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/usgcos/stations/Zambia/lusaka_city_airport_059.jpg
Does that help?
P.S. Jeff- Anthony will correct as I see that the typo is in the footnote.
“Watts, A. 2009: Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? 28 pages, March 2009 The Heartland Institute.”
The link contained in the above, returns “page not found”
“ R. Gates says:
August 14, 2011 at 9:09 am
It’s nice to see a quality control effort for surface stations, as it is certainly needed. However, it should be made clear that none of this will alter the overall global temperature trend data over later part of the 20th and into the 21 century. ”
Of course not. We already know the fix is in for that.
Have to agree with Annabelle. They look pretty good to me – esp. compared to some of the horror shows Anthony uncovered in the US.
Gates
“…However, it should be made clear that none of this will alter the overall global temperature trend data over later part of the 20th and into the 21 century….”
Could you really show any more bias?
They call jumping to conclusions before the evidence is in, “faith”. You pretend to wrap up your faith in science, but in the end you still “know” the correct answer and feel its your goal to spread the faith to the non-believers. But your no more following science than peewee herman was following shakespear.
Give it a rest.
You’re no different than the UN guys saying the the 5th IPCC report is even worse than 4, even though its not even written yet.
But since statistics can be used to show warming where there was none in antartica, show no medieval warm period despite overwhelming evidence, show a hot spot despite not showing up in the sats or weather balloons. I would be willing to bet that using a “trick” (and that is common in climate science, you all told us over and over, so no complaints from you) one could show a change in the trend.
But then again, I have seen Roger and Anthony be honest and recognize data that doesn’t agree with them, so I doubt they will Stoop to a “trick” even if it is regular climate science.
The arguments about global warming are based on the temperature data. Not the precision of the data, but the accuracy. The change from long-term baseline, the temperature anomaly, gets rid of station-to-station correlation problems but does not get ride of the representation of reality. The warm bias in long term temperature “corrections”, the UHIE under-correction (also warm bias), the non-random nature of temperature corrections at any moment, the extension of temperature values to areas that have no stations – all these go to the accuracy of the data. The difference in only one aspect – the inclusion of “Arctic” data in GISTemp versus HarCruTemp lead to about a 0.12C difference in a temperature rise that, by HadCru analysis, is only about 0.55C (5-year running average). An 18% difference in the data based in the contribution of only one factor makes me question the certainty issue.
How does certainty at 95% result when there is this obvious uncertainty in the fundamental amount of heating the world has seen? Other factors, such as UHIE, cannot in an sound mind be said to be 100%. And as there is clear evidence of a strong warming bias in temperature adjustments, the certainty of overall adjustment ACCURACY cannot be said to be 100% either.
The statistical analysis of individual parameters and problem to get the fundamental temperature dataset strikes me as a bit of bait-and-switch: the certainty that we hear is that of disparate datapoints that, when clumped together, do not have the same accuracy resolution of one measurement repeated many, many times.
Agreed, there are error bars. But do error bars mean that the center of the error bar is 95%? A moving datastream can develop a more accurate trend with time, I agree, but on the basis of two conditions: the errors are not cumulative and the errors are random. GISTemp appears to have cumulative errors in principle as today’s temp anomaly is dependent on a whole series of other anomalies considered to be a priori cooler or warmer than today (MWP, LIA). And the errors for at least UHIE (possibly also cool sites and non-sampled areas) are not random and build, in part, on such warm biased corrections as UHIE.
So, statistically, how do we end up with a 95% certainty? I haven’t addressed all the factors of causation, either. The amount of natural warming has an uncertainty, as does both the radiative forcing of CO2 and feedback, regardless that the feedback is proposed as 100% warming (does not this also have a certainty limit less than 100%).
Again, being skeptical, I ask: how, regardless of computers, slide-rules and the combined intelligence of the world’s population of sperm whales, do we end up with a 95% certainty of what will happen in the next 89 years?
German weather station pictures from the official german weather service site:
http://www.dwd.de/bvbw/appmanager/bvbw/dwdwwwDesktop?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=dwdwww_result_page&portletMasterPortlet_i1gsbDocumentPath=Navigation%2FOeffentlichkeit%2FSpezielle__Nutzer%2FSchulen%2FInteressantes%2FAusflugsziel%2FBilder__Wetterwarten__node.html%3F__nnn%3Dtrue
The climate data is also awailable on this site.
R. Gates says:
August 14, 2011 at 9:09 am
It’s nice to see a quality control effort for surface stations, as it is certainly needed. However, it should be made clear that none of this will alter the overall global temperature trend data over later part of the 20th and into the 21 century
Shouldn’t this read ” it should be made clear that none of this will be allowed to alter the overall global temperature trend data over later part of the 20th and into the 21 century” ?
R.Gates
Further yet. It doesn’t matter if your paper doesn’t completely rewrite history in one single paper.
Science deals with the details and lets the grand picture take care of itself. Small changes matter in science. You can’t wave away a paper simply because it doesn’t completely overturn everything completely.
The IPCC model of climate science is suffering the death of a thousand cuts. Climate is complex. Extremely complex. Even simplified models are complex with dozens of variables. Take the IPCC main models and adjust all the parameters by 1% randomly up and down. Now tell me if the output is the same? You know it won’t be because of their chaotic interconnected nature. The 1% here is amplified by the other 1% and act to exaggerate a seemily insignificant 1% somewhere else, etc..
1% changes matter. Now look the dozens of small changes that have happened in forcing estimates over the last 3-5 years. You and your supporters have been happy to dismiss each one in turn because they (each one on its own) were not big enough to change anything. You show how changing one thing a small amount only had a tiny effect, so you change it back to the original number. But add them all in at the same time and your theory is bleeding to death.
Saying the change is too small to make a difference and then ignoring it, is thumbing your nose at the complexity of climate. 99 is not the same as 100.
I challenge climate scientists to actually add all the “too small to change anything” differences into your models instead of ignoring them. Then tell me how robust your theory is and how they can’t change anything.
“Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable” link goes to “Page not Found” on Heartland Institute.
I’ve been photographing them when I see one….a remote station in Bhutan, a mountain top in France. Is there a place to send my pictures?
Re: Annabelle, Navy Bob
As Dr. Pielke points out in his blog post, all of those sites are too close to human activity that will influence the temperatures in a non-constant way, making them unsuitable for detecting climate change.
Dusty said: “I think this is another picture of the [Zambian] site:
lusaka_city_airport_059.jpg”
I don’t see any elements the two pictures have in common. If they are the same site, they’re taken from such different vantage points it’s hard to see the commonality.
I, too, am with Annabelle. These sites may not perfect, but they’re far from “horror shows”.
Perhaps in the future the most objectionable aspect of the site could be put behind some kind of spoiler tag, so that we in the casual audience can play along at home.
…And I somehow missed JR’s post immediately above mine.
OK, seems reasonable. Not obvious, but reasonable. The second two, in particular.
djmoore,
Check out Anthony’s Surface Stations site:
http://www.surfacestations.org
You will see that it doesn’t take much to put a station way out of tolerance. $Billions are spent every year based on the temperature record, which in turn is based at least in part on uncalibrated, out of tolerance surface stations.
littlepeaks – please use this link http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf