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:
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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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Doug – please send your photos as jpegs with their location and as much information as you have on them to Anthony and I. My e-mail is pielkesr@ciresmail.colorado.edu.
Here is the link to Australia’s BOM site index. The info provided approximates the sort of thing you have shown above. The photos don’t necessarily show nearby buildings and runways though!
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/reference.shtml
95% confidence is for wusses. I will predict the temperature 100 years from now with 99% confidence. The temperature will be 15 deg. C. within plus or minus 5%.
One source gives the current global average temperature as 15 deg. C. That is 288 deg. Kelvin. 5% of 288 deg. is 14 deg., so the global average temperature will be somewhere between 0 deg. C. and 30 deg. C. Given the temperature record for the last 800,000 years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg , I think I’m pretty safe. 😉
Is there any merit in listing and linking to the ones previously covered here? For example: Verhojansk
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/15/giss-noaa-ghcn-and-the-odd-russian-temperature-anomaly-its-all-pipes/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/18/update-on-the-verhojansk-russia-meteo-station-and-data/
Svalbard
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/13/where-the-is-svalbards-weather-station/
Milan
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/04/how-not-to-measure-temperature-italian-style/
I’m sure I don’t remember all of them but perhaps it’ll jog a few memories. Anthony’s got plently else to do besides trawl through WUWT pages to find them.
I am from Zambia and have lived in Lusaka. The city airport is now very secondary to the new airport which is 15kms out on the Great East Road. The city airport was the international airport until the new one opened around 1970.
The city airport is surrounded by the fast-growing city of Lusaka, it is, to all intents and purposes, in the down-town area. What is, even in this urban environment, the principal source of heat for cooking? Charcoal.
Lusaka is, every evening, blanketed in a miasma of smoke from the thousands of open fires used for preparing the evening meal. The devastation of the local bush bears testament to this.
Any temperature measurement taken within 10 or 15 miles of urban Lusaka is invalid. Just go and see why!
Dr. Pielke,
In regards to the lead photo “..a climate observing site in Chiapas Mexico..”, I suggest an alternate title
“Airing The ‘Dirty Laundry’ Associated With Global Climate Surface Observing Sites”.
Smokey says:
August 14, 2011 at 12:56 pm
. $Billions are spent every year based on the temperature record.
——–
sure Smokey I bet you have the exact figures to hand. Now assuming this statement has some degree of truth to it does it matter relative to all the other expenditures in the economy? And does it damage the economy I an significant way? And is the money wasted?
Let’s compare these billions for example to the billions spent on gambling or overeating or any other less than useful pursuit. Does the economy collapse due to these things?
Does one need to download and run the files from the GHCN site to get the coordinates for the stations, or is there a list of all the lat/lon numbers that could be used?
Met station pics from Europe (Hungarian site with poor quality Google translate).
Remember the great story about the Canberra Airport instruments.
How an ACT Green bureaucrat called out the BoM over car parks affecting the readings. I have an FOI thing in progress trying to get the full perspective.
They way it stands, the BoM moved the station a little in 2008 – but instruments are now a bit closer to the considerable commercial developments near the terminals. So – the elephant in the room gets ignored again.
Marvellous stuff.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=218
and
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=447
stephen richards says:
August 14, 2011 at 11:03 am
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” ?
_____
It’s true that skeptics would love to find out that the global temperatures are way off because of bad data, etc. Heck, maybe we’ve not been warming after all! There was even great hope that the Berkeley project would bring forth some big revelation. Well, it just ain’t gonna happen.
There is great value in making sure the data is as clean and uncorrupted as possible, but overall, it just isn’t going to make a huge difference in the temperature record. Don’t expect this to be a fruitful avenue if the refutation of AGW is the goal. It would be about as fruitful as trying to deny that the net increase in CO2 over the past few centuries has it’s root cause in human activities. Skeptics are barking up the wrong trees in both cases.
Brandon Caswell says:
August 14, 2011 at 10:37 am
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?
_______
Well, why don’t you take a look at the preliminary results from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Supposed to be totally objective, using only the best data, and yet it found that essentially the temperature records are pretty much accurate. It’s always good to get the most uncorrupted data possible, and so Anthony’s efforts in this regard are worthwhile, but they are not, under any circumstance, going to change the temperature trends over the past several decades. You can call this being bias, or simply understanding what is and isn’t possible based on the wealth, quality, and types of data that we do have and know to be reliable.
I know others have already chimed in, but I found I had to, too.
The Fall, et. al, 2011 paper showed that while the net result on trends in the USA was not significant, that was because they found two opposed sets of station bias that happened to counteract each other. Without a physical explanation as to why that would be the case, we can’t assume it will be the same world wide. It could just be a coincidence with the USA data the the biases were roughly equal and opposite.
So I just can’t see how anyone can make a statement that investigating data quality standards for non-USA surface stations is not going to alter the overall global temperature trend data. It may or it may not – it’s too early to tell.
djmoore says:
August 14, 2011 at 12:34 pm
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 took it from this site for Zambia station, which has both photos. I’d say being within the offset requirement for bldg and parking lot (and maybe trees?) would be behind the spoiler tag.
Gates: “You can call this being bias, or simply understanding what is and isn’t possible based on the wealth, quality, and types of data that we do have and know to be reliable.”
Bwah haha! Wealth is right, but um, tell me how you measure and quantify “quality” and “reliability”?
I don’t not believe the world is warming due to human activities. How reliable is my belief? 100%. I’ve never stated otherwise. As to quality, my belief is firmer, better and more fully informed than yours and unequivocally of much higher quality.
Lazy Teenager says:
“sure Smokey I bet you have the exact figures to hand.”
The U.S. wastes between $7 and $8 billion every year on “studies” that revolve around the planet’s temperature.
Lazy continues:
“Now assuming this statement has some degree of truth to it does it matter relative to all the other expenditures in the economy? And does it damage the economy I an significant way? And is the money wasted? Let’s compare these billions for example to the billions spent on gambling or overeating or any other less than useful pursuit. Does the economy collapse due to these things?”
OK, we’ll add ‘economic illiterate’ to Lazy’s CV.
The lazy teen once again amazes us with his/her intellect. I thought most people already knew that it is the cheaper foods that have led to the obesity problems. People actually need to spend more money on things like fruits and veggies.
As for gambling … that is a form of entertainment for most people. You might as well list ALL forms of entertainment. Movies, sports, arts, travelling, etc. I guess when you spend all your time in mom’s basement it’s difficult to picture how the rest of the world operates.
Jeff Alberts wrote:
“The locations of most of the worldwide GHCN stations is not well documented”
Should be “are”.
No, it’s correct. Most of the data is simply made up, and we’re not sure of the location where that fabrication takes place…
Ok, someone explain how error bars and CI have any meaning unless the sources of uncertainty of the measurements are accounted for and removed.
The recent ERA-40 and Antarctic errors should raise some red flags.
R. Gates said:
The BEST project did not find that the temperature records are pretty much accurate. It found that its own statistical analysis of a subset of the raw data produced a history of global mean temperature pretty much like what others’ statistical analyses of all of the raw data produced, where “its own” is somewhat different from, and arguably better than, “others’.” This has very little to do with whether the raw data is accurate. Moreover, last I knew, Prof. Mueller(sp?) said that BEST had not yet checked for “systematic error.”
R. Gates: Also, I’m not aware that BEST used “only the best data.” I thought it used a random subset.
Jeff was correcting the singular/plural, not the positive/negative. So he could better have said Should be “are not”.
LazyTeenager says: August 14, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Smokey says:
August 14, 2011 at 12:56 pm
. $Billions are spent every year based on the temperature record.
——–
sure Smokey I bet you have the exact figures to hand. Now assuming this statement has some degree of truth to it does it matter relative to all the other expenditures in the economy? And does it damage the economy I an significant way? And is the money wasted?
Let’s compare these billions for example to the billions spent on gambling or overeating or any other less than useful pursuit. Does the economy collapse due to these things?
The real issue you are missing is that one set of dollars is spent as one wishes, the second is extracted at gunpoint prior to being spent. Your personal feeling about how either is spent is irrelevant.
Mr R Gates Armaggedon from CO2 is not about to happen ever. The tricks to show a warming world for political purpose is exposed. Please back track, take off your rose coloured glasses, and smell the daisies. Have a good long look around and see the manipulation of the temperature record, and tell us all the it is kosher. If you tell us all is well we will understand your condition and give you the correct amount of sympathy.
Smokey says:
August 14, 2011 at 5:25 pm
Lazy Teenager says:
“sure Smokey I bet you have the exact figures to hand.”
The U.S. wastes between $7 and $8 billion every year on “studies” that revolve around the planet’s temperature.
Lazy continues:
“Now assuming this statement has some degree of truth to it does it matter relative to all the other expenditures in the economy? And does it damage the economy I an significant way? And is the money wasted? Let’s compare these billions for example to the billions spent on gambling or overeating or any other less than useful pursuit. Does the economy collapse due to these things?”
OK, we’ll add ‘economic illiterate’ to Lazy’s CV.
************************************************************************************
Smokey, I think you’re being unfair expecting “lazy” to work out why his CV has been updated.
I think we need to spell out the difference between what individuals do with their own cash (individual choice) and what the government takes as taxes and “wastes” on our behalf (bureaucratic, mindless waste &/or oppression).