Jim River, AK closed in on the all time record coldest temperature of -80°F set in 1971, which is not only the Alaska all-time record, but the record for the entire United States. Unfortunately, it seems the battery died in the weather station just at the critical moment.
While the continental USA has a mild winter and has set a number of high temperature records in the last week and pundits ponder whether they will be blaming the dreaded “global warming” for those temperatures, Alaska and Canada have been suffering through some of the coldest temperatures on record during the last week.
For example in Circle Hot Springs, AK on Sunday, 29 Jan 2012 the HIGH temperature was a blistering -49°F, breaking the -44°F record which has stood since 1917. It gets better.
That same day in Circle Hot Springs the low temperature was -58°F breaking the old record of -52°F set in 1941 by six degrees.
Here’s a list of temperature records in Alaska from the past week:
Brrr!
While all that was happening, the weather station in Jim River, AK closed in on the all time record coldest temperature of -80°F set in 1971. That’s not only the Alaska all-time record, but the record for the entire United States. Unfortunately, the weather station stopped reporting at -79°F.
Here’s the data feed at that moment:
2012-01-28 14:20:00,1028.30,-75.0,-87.6,39,,,1021.19,-55.3,-57.7,85,1.5,155 2012-01-28 14:35:00,1028.00,-77.0,-89.5,39,,,1021.19,-54.2,-65.3,48,1.5,155 2012-01-28 14:50:00,1027.90,-75.0,-87.6,39,,,1021.84,-54.2,-67.8,40,1.5,155 2012-01-28 16:05:00,1027.40,-77.0,-89.5,39,,,1022.74,-57.0,-68.2,47,1.7,160 2012-01-28 16:35:00,1027.10,-77.0,-89.5,39,,,1022.74,-54.6,-59.0,75,1.7,160 2012-01-28 16:51:00,1027.10,-77.0,-89.8,38,,,1022.74,-54.6,-59.0,75,1.7,160 2012-01-28 17:05:00,1027.20,-77.0,-89.5,39,,,1022.10,-56.0,-67.2,47,1.4,163 2012-01-28 17:20:00,1027.20,-77.0,-89.8,38,,,1022.10,-56.0,-67.2,47,1.4,163 2012-01-28 17:49:00,1027.20,-77.0,-89.8,38,,,1022.30,-54.7,-66.0,47,1.4,163 2012-01-28 18:04:00,1027.20,-77.0,-89.8,38,,,1019.33,-55.8,-67.2,47,1.7,174 2012-01-28 18:19:00,1027.10,-79.0,-91.6,38,,,1019.30,-55.8,-71.0,36,1.7,174 2012-01-28 18:34:00,1026.90,-79.0,-91.6,38,,,1019.28,-54.6,-67.9,41,1.7,174 2012-01-28 18:49:00,1026.90,,,,,,1019.30,,,,, 2012-01-28 19:04:00,1026.80,,,,,,1019.39,,,,, 2012-01-28 19:19:00,1026.80,,,,,,1019.39,,,,, 2012-01-28 19:34:00,1026.60,,,,,,1018.84,,,,, 2012-01-28 19:49:00,1026.30,,,,,,1018.84,,,,, 2012-01-28 20:04:00,1026.20,,,,,,1018.45,,,,, 2012-01-28 20:19:00,1026.20,,,,,,1018.46,,,,, 2012-01-28 20:34:00,1025.70,,,,,,1018.46,,,,, 2012-01-28 20:50:00,1025.70,,,,,,1018.46,,,,,
Note at 18:49 on 1/28/12 it stopped reporting all data except barometric pressure.
Some background on the equipment tells us the likely cause.
The station is the venerable Vantage Pro2 by Davis Instruments, arguably one of the best weather stations available to consumers. I have deployed several myself and put them online, for example here and here. They are hardy, accurate, and well constructed, being manufactured in the USA in Hayward, CA instead of some Chinese gadget mill. They also have NIST traceability on sensors.
The Integrated Sensor Suite (ISS) communicates wirelessly with the console below, and the console has an optional PC and/or standalone Internet interface (for DSL/Cable modems) attached.
This station at weather station in Jim River, AK was recording temperatures in conditions way out of its design spec, it only goes to –40 F
From: http://davisnet.com/product_documents/weather/manuals/07395-249_IM_06152.pdf
Appendix B: Specifications Complete specifications for the ISS and other products are available in the Weather Support section of our website at www.davisnet.com. Cabled ISS Temperature range: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . -40 to 150° Fahrenheit (-40 to 65° Celsius) Power input: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Console Cable from Vantage Pro2 console Optional Vantage Pro2 AC power adapter Wireless ISS Temperature range: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . -40 to 150° Fahrenheit (-40 to 65° Celsius)
While they operate on solar power during the day, these units have an internal lithium battery for operation at night and through extended cloudy periods.
I suspect the internal CR123A Lithium 3 volt battery in the outside ISS died. Note that on 2012-01-28 18:49:00 the data for barometric pressure is still reporting after temperature and other values die. At that temperature, the battery likely could not sustain enough voltage to keep the transmitter running.
The barometric pressure sensor is in the internal LCD console, inside the house/office where the unit is connected to the Internet. All other sensors are outside in the ISS.
The CR123A Lithium 3 volt battery specifications are:
3V 1400mAh Lithium Battery
Wide operating temperature range: -40°C to 85°C
So it was operating way out of spec as well.
Some people have emailed me wondering about why the readings at Jim River, AK stopped just shy of a new all time record. I don’t see any nefarious motive here, just simple equipment failure under extraordinary extreme conditions combined with Murphy’s Law.
Let’s hope the observer there has a backup thermometer, but who’d want to go outside in cold like that to read it?
h/t to Dr. Ryan Maue and Joe D’Aleo
BTW, if you want one of these splendid weather stations, you can get them here. Details here.
UPDATE: The NWS in Fairbanks moves quickly to disavow the temperature report. I suppose the Drudge link has the phones ringing off the hook. But here’s the interesting thing, the nearest other “official” station, PAPR at Prospect Creek Airport, AK only 0.9 miles away, is also offline.
Data Status
Over the last 28 days, no data was seen on the following dates: 2012-01-04 to 2012-01-16, 2012-01-18 to 2012-01-20, 2012-01-22 to 2012-01-29.
It would be interesting to see how they defend an official airport station failure.
NOAK49 PAFG 302352 PNSAFG AKZ219-222-311200- PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FAIRBANKS AK 252 PM AKST MON JAN 30 2012 ...CLARIFICATION OF TEMPERATURES FROM JIM RIVER DOT CAMP... TEMPERATURES THIS PAST WEEKEND AT THE ALASKA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION JIM RIVER MAINTENANCE CAMP AT MILE 138 DALTON HIGHWAY...STATION JMTA2...HAVE BEEN REPORTED AS LOW AS 79 BELOW. THE TEMPERATURES ARE NOT CORRECT. THE WEATHER STATION IN USE AT THE JIM RIVER DOT CAMP IS A PERSONAL WEATHER STATION THAT IS NOT RATED FOR TEMPERATURE COLDER THAN 40 BELOW. THE UNREALISTICALLY LOW TEMPERATURES ARE BELIEVED TO BE A FUNCTION OF THE BATTERY FAILING AT VERY LOW TEMPERATURES. THERE ARE NO OFFICIAL...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE STANDARD... TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENTS AT JIM RIVER DOT CAMP.$$ RT/JL JAN 12
UPDATE2 1/31/2012 9:30AM PST
According to Gladstone and NCDC MMS, PAPR (Prospect Creek, just 0.9 mile from Jim River DOT station, and holder of the low temperature record from 1971) is an AWOS station, part of the “B” COOP network.
https://mi3.ncdc.noaa.gov/mi3qry/identityGrid.cfm?setCookie=1&fid=22862
Details on AWOS:
http://www.allweatherinc.com/aviation/awos_dom.html
and as I understand it, it is not rated to –80F, the specs for the thermistor say:
Ambient Temperature Sensor.
The sensor shall be thermally isolated in a
motor aspirated radiation shield to accurately measure air temperature.
A. Range. From –40C to +60C (-40 oF t o +140 oF)
B. Accuracy. ±0.3C.
C. Resolution. 1 oF.
Source: http://www.allweatherinc.com/pdf/awos_level_iii.pdf
So, given the official equipment there at Prospect Creek, it seems NOAA has either purposely or unintentionally created an impossibility of the Prospect Creek record of ever having been broken there again.
Anthony Watts says:
“The MMTS system from NOAA is used in Alaska and well as CONUS, and it only goes down to -55F See: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/dad/coop/specs-1.html ”
But the same link links to the MMTS display specs, http://www.srh.noaa.gov/srh/dad/coop/nimbus-spec.pdf which gives an accuracy of 0.5F down to -75F. So NOAA posts two different limits to the MMTS.
My coop station in Colorado got a MMTS in 2004, but I’ve kept reading the liquid-in-glass thermometer for comparison and backup. Frankly, I think the MMTS is pretty good and its indoor display is certainly a lot easier to read on nights when there’s 4 feet of fresh snow. The readings are always compatible with the glass thermometers and several others I keep out in the box.
The MMTS has a “precision” of 0.1F compared to its “accuracy” of 0.3F to 0.5F. For comparison, the Jim River Davis thermometer appears to have a “resolution”, i.e. precision, of 2 to 3 degrees F at very low temperatures, implying that its accuracy is even larger (5F or more, maybe?).
As I type this, the link Anthony provided above:
http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/cgi-bin/wxobservations.pl?site=JMTA2&days=7
shows that Jim River bottomed out at -75 in the past hour (keeping in mind the likely accuracy of that reading). The lowest I’ve read off my MMTS in Colorado was a relatively mild -29.4, a year ago this week.
OMG OMG OMG! It’s Global cooling, and it’s people’s fault. No, wait. OMG OMG OMG! It’s Global Warming and it’s people’s fault. No, no. I mean, OMG OMG OMG! It’s … ah, it’s Climate Change — yeah, that’s the ticket! — and it’s people’s fault! Hold on! OMG OMG OMG! It IS Global cooling, and it’s people’s fault. Now some leftist alarmist control-freak loonies may think I’m ridiculing them. Some probably think that I think these leftist alarmist control-freak loonies are a claque of greentards with their panties in a wad. Well, if you think that. You’re right. I do.
Meanwhile, as we speak, the continents continue to drift, plate tectonics are changing the planet far beneath us, volcanic activity is creating and destroying land mass. The glacial melt that provides all the fresh water continues as it has for thousands of years. The Great Lakes are slowly but surely draining. The moon is gradually escaping the gravitational pull of the earth. Earth is a constant state of change. And it is the REAL change we can believe in, because there is nothing we can do about it.
“”””” _Jim says:
January 31, 2012 at 5:17 am
George E. Smith; says on January 30, 2012 at 8:07 pm:
Who designs this stuff ? Semiconductor diodes can track Temperature down to very low Temperatures, and quite linear with …
Jim’s comment:- “””””
The ‘equipment’ is designed for (albeit) high-end domestic consumer market, not the military; “over-design” and your competitive advantage goes away and you get ‘eaten’ by your _competition_ …”””””
Well Jim, this equipment was being USED for high end domestic market; NOT military, and IT FAILED. I would say it had NO competitive advantage.<<>> And 56 years ago, available CONSUMER grade semiconductor components (even ICs) were no different from MILITARY grade components; they were simply tested to more extreme specs: To be more specific, FAIRCHILD RTL ICs , used in the Minuteman program, and the newer Motorola MECL-I ICs were ALL packaged in HERMETIC 8, and 10 lead (mostly 8) T08 style metal can packages. The 0 deg C to 55 deg C commercial units, were absolutely identical in every way, to the -55 deg C to +125 deg C Military units, only the specs and testing and documentation, were different (and the price). The now very common DUAL IN-LINE package, in both plastic and ceramic, didn’t exist; well to be more accurate, it was just being introduced , right around 1966; too late for me to use them in the COMMERCIAL instrument I designed, Christmas 1965. That instrument, the Monsanto Model 1000 general purpose Counter-Timer, was, as far as is known, the VERY FIRST COMMERCIAL piece of instrumentation to be built essentially entirely of commercially available ICs, those fairchild RTLs, and Motorola MECL ICs. The MECL ICs were emitter coupled logic gates; but I used them as high speed linear signal amplifiers (push-pull output). The digital readouts, Burroughs end view Nixie Tubes, were driven by discrete high Voltage “Nixie driver” transistors, as there were no high Voltage ICs.<<>> You buy $2 cheapies; and you get $2 cheap; so I don’t do that; you can buy REAL flashlights from C. Crane Co, in Fortuna, California; ask for Bob Crane. LED currents aren’t limited by “bulk resistivity” in flashlights; they are semiconductor diodes, whose operating Voltage depends on the logarithm of the current; unlike the global mean Temperature dependency on CO2 abundance; which does not.
Well Jim, you ARE determined to jump off that cliff. The affore mentioned Counter-Timer instrument, went from conception, and “do it” edict; last week of November, to a manufactured, and manufacturing ready instrument delivered to the Director of Central Research (at Monsanto) on New Year’s day. My boss had promised it by Christmas day, so we were a week late, and got egg all over our face for not meeting the deadline. It was publicly shown and available for sale at the New York IEEE Convention in March.
But that was one of my longer projects. I believe the world record for fastest delivery from FIRST CONCEPTION; as in a Xerox copy of a paper hand sketch, of a totally non-existing device, that was nothing more than a wild idea in an engineer’s head (not mine), faxed to a prospective customer; who had been quoted 12 weeks delivery for 200 prototyping examples, of an existing fully production catalogued competitive device; to a prototype order for 200 of “our” gleam in that engineer’s eye, to be delivered in less than that 12 weeks for an off the shelf catalogue product; until that customer (to be un-named) had our 200 units in hand, still stands and is unlikely to ever be challenged. We got the production volume order too, and it went into a very high end el primo test instrument product.
Oh ! I almost forgot, the time from faxing copy of non-existant idea for a product to 200 units delivered to customer; EIGHT DAYS.
The product was a 1/4 inch seven segment LED digital display digit, in a lead frame and plastic encapsulated configuration. NOTHING existed. There was NO lead frame or design for one. There was NO plastic package, or design for one. There was NO LED diode segment chip, or design for one. There were no fab masks existing for any such chip or design for one. There was no tooling to separate the separate digits from the common lead frame they were fabricated on; nor a design for any such tooling. There was NO plastic shipping package to deliver the units in, or a design for one. There was no tester for the product or a design for one.
All that stuff was designed and fabricated/bought/obtained/ tested.packed and shipped to the customer eleven weeks before he could get delivery of a “shovel ready” catalog and very non-competitive product. Ours had a long and successful product life. It did undergo some minor package modifications, in between delivery of tested prototypes to first deliveries of the production volumes; OUR customer was a few months away from HIS production release; but needed to show the full working product earlier.<<<
So now Jim, you are free to go ahead and jump.
Remember too, it’s not enough to simply build it, you have to test it as well, during the development cycle (of course), as well as during the manufacturing cycle (at the minimum a sampling of product if you’re just shipping to the public and 100% if NOAA or various DOTs or govts are your customer!)
Richard Keen says:
January 31, 2012 at 9:55 am
Richard – my observation is that our climate elites do NOT care a whit about destroying the economy (and actively seeking to eliminate jobs they don’t like, such as those in the oil and gas industries) just as long as they get their Climate Ca$h(tm).
For those who haven’t seen this, PLEASE READ THIS DOCUMENT ON THE PROPOSED 2012 BUDGET FOR CLIMATE “RESEARCH”:
Understanding and Responding to Our Changing Planet: The U.S. Global Change Research Program in the 2012 Budget.
Please note the HUGE double digit budget increases being given to our friends at NASA, NOAA, NSF, and DOE. This is over and above the massive increases they’ve seen up to now, AND the gobs of money they received in “stimulus” funds. Did you get your stimulus cash? NO? Guess who got it first ???
AND…PLEASE, remember all of this in November! Vote to eliminate the wasteful and often redundant/unnecessary funding of global warming / climate change “research”…
Doug Cotton: “I would rather see this WUWT site place less emphasis on articles and news like this, and more emphasis on the physics of the situation. ”
I agree that “short term weather is not long term climate” news articles invite shallower discussion, and encourage a less informed type of skepticism that’s probably not as helpful in the long run. But even these discussions can be quite interesting and entertaining, at times.
I suppose we could try to persuade Anthony to label topics categorically so that they can more easily be skipped, or the quality of comments more accurately judged without needing to wade in and read them. For example, he might have titled this post “From ‘The Weather Isn’t Climate’ Dept: Bitter cold, low temp records broken across Alaska.” But I peruse most of the articles anyway, and I think most people can quickly figure out what’s what. Besides, asking even more of Anthony won’t stop people from jumping into the political end of the debate, blindly advocating, or making snarky quips. So I say, leave him alone, and let each person be his own editor.
BW, I really enjoyed reading your web sites. They’re very well written even for lay people. I highly recommend them. I don’t really know what protocols need to be followed, but have you ever made a guest posting here?
Doug Cotton sites
http://earth-climate.com/
http://climate-change-theory.com/
I think the coldest I ever experienced was probably somewhere in the -20s. Once the moisture from your breath starts freezing to your face and you no longer can feel anything on your exposed skin I am not sure if colder means anything. Anyway nice site, nice to see someone who tries to follow the facts not the hype.
Anthony Watts says: “So, given the official equipment there at Prospect Creek, it seems NOAA has either purposely or unintentionally created an impossibility of the Prospect Creek record of ever having been broken there again.”
I must disagree, and do not see any nefarious activity by NOAA or the NWS here. The airport is owned by the State of Alaska, and I’d guess the state installed the AWOS for aircraft operations (even one a day!) and not for climate. Such stations are also operated by Highway Departments, Forest Services, FAA, weather reseach mesonets, and so on, and NOAA simply taps into and archives the data stream. Other agencies like the Western Regional Climate Center (wrcc.dri.edu) also archive the data from these RAWS (Remote Automated Weather Stations).
I just completed a climate study of central Alaska for the National Park Service, and found the RAWS stations useful for comparing averages between different elevations within the parks. However, there’s enough data dropouts and just plain squirrely data (like 150 degree min tempertures) that these stations are not useful for “climate change” analyses. For “climate change”, you need to look at the long term humanized coop stations.
Since no one lives at Jim River or Prospect Creek (or so says Wikipedia), we’re stuck with low-budget and sometimes flaky automated stations.
Now, all this is not to say that some folks at NCDC in Asheville and up in the Seinfeld buiiding in NYC don’t intentially Jimmy (River/Hansen) the data before issuing their “warmest year since the big bang” reports.
When a government or even a business entity commissions to study anything there is an expectation. When the subject is global warming, there is a built in assumption and pre-conclusion that warming will be found. Then we add the money factor. “Scientists” get paid (by the government), so there is a vested interest in confirming a conclusion. So the problems begin. Place the measuring devices in just a little bit more likely spot to get a warmer result, consciously or subconsciously do the rounding up just a bit. The models don’t work, adjust them to make sure they produce the expected result. Maybe it isn’t deliberate, but it happens.
Robert Brown: “Personally I think it would be a lot wiser not to bash Obama but to educate him.”
This is a laudable thought, but Obama has probably hundreds, if not tens of thousands, of supporters who truly believe AGW is real or who really need for it to be real so they don’t lose their shirt. This AGW “thing” along with “cap-and-tax” have a really huge inertia attached to them. Don’t expect it to ever to publicly repudiated in your lifetime .. there is simply too much”face” to save.
You are never going to “educate” Obama. He is too arrogant for that to ever happen, and the facts aren’t important to them. AGW was merely a tool in the arsenal to attack capitalism and consumption. The hatred of oil by the left made it very easy to sell AGW because it meshed perfectly with their already established world views. AGW was perfect for their needs and wants. They want to tax energy and control people. What better way to do that than convince people that their very lifestyle was going to destroy the planet? You can’t convince them of the fact that we are living on a singly ply thickness of tissue on the surface of the planet. We can’t make any permanent impact on the earth because no matter what we do it is going to re-glaciate in the future and scour every trace of us away. We can make messes and make ourselves uncomfortable, but we can’t change the planet irrevocably.
I’m not hard to find, but I hope you find some bears easily.
It is silly for the weather service to define standards for the lower 48 states and ignore the needs of the more extreme weather stations. Or are there other classes of allowed equipment? Not that volunteers could afford many mil-spec environmental sensors.
Isn’t it a problem that “volunteers” are using widely disparate equipment and that you must depend on their reliability and integrity to take measurements that going to be used to formulate policies that have great impact on billions of people?
Richard Keen says, “…But my personal experience is immaterial, since I’m comparing actual observed records at two locations, one of them the spot where the record low was approached. It’s the observed and documented readings that count, not how cold your or my knuckles feel as we ride our bikes.”
The problem is that directors of our government agencies and polliticians can “feel” global warming as they jet across the world. This tells you where their intelligence is.
And you are depending on volunteers to properly place the devices, and accurately record the results, when many of them desperately want to believe in AGW. That is a problem, is it not?
@richard Keen
My point stands, with the equipment on hand at Prospect Creek, that all-time record at that location can never be broken at that location, because the current equipment there is not rated down to that -80F record temperature.
Whether that is by accident or design, we’ll probably never know. I tend to think it is design without thought to the consequences, much like the problems I’ve seen throughout the CONUS COOP network.
With the advent of MMTS, ASOS, and AWOS deployment through much of Alaska, such extreme cold records will likely become fewer because the only thing NOAA has that works at those temperatures below -55F is the LIG thermometers from the original Stevenson Screens, and those are disappearing with increased automation.
Fine atuff
Re: Russ answer: While the sun doesn’t rise in Barrow for weeks, the sun is still not that far below the horizon, and there is enough daylight to influence temperatures. Think of it as twilight more then always being dark. Today for example (Jan 31), the sun rises at 11:46AM local time but civil twilight begins at 10:02 AM. You can pretty much do any outdoor activity during civil twilight.
I’m surprised that no one appears to have commented on the solar weather which accompanies this near record low. When a coronal mass ejection or radiation storm from the sun hits the upper atmosphere, it causes it to warm. It consequently expands. As the radiation storm subsides and the CME passes, the expanded atmosphere looses heat fairly quickly. This is simple gas-law physics. So while carbon dioxide may play some role in the global climate as a whole, this freakish weather is almost nearly a direct result of the solar maximum which we will continue to approach through 2013. But don’t take my word for it. Look at the auroras over Arizona.
Oh, don’t go throwing that into the mix. They don’t want to hear anything like truth. We could talk about the cyclical ocean temps which switch every sixty years. The Pacific flipped from warm to cold in 2008, the Atlantic will probably flip to cold in the next three years. Add the solar cycle to that and we will probably get extended cold climate over the next half century. Poor Al Gore, what will he do then?
[snip – you get to make that criticism of me when you put your name on it, per your own words here:
“Should you ever observe that I (or for that matter any WUWT poster) am mainly criticizing persons, rather than opinions, then it would be fully appropriate to require that personal criticism to appear under my own name, or not at all.”
I’m happy to address your criticism, once you step up. – Anthony]
Has anyone considered that Earth temperatures are not stable ?
Earth has experienced much warmer climates in the past … as well as much cooler climates. Other planets in our solar system have shown similar warming / cooling patterns in the past half century (though I don’t think Ford sells cars in Neptune or Uranus).
35 years ago the media thought we were heading into a new ice age. Then the opposite … global warming was all the rage ( and made Gore quite a rich man ) … but then global temps DROPPED from 2000 to 2010 … and dozens of hurricanes never materialized ( must be Bush’s fault ) … the world’s top 2 hurricane predictors called it quits last year …
Climate is always CHANGING.
Frank K. says:
January 31, 2012 at 9:18 am
Please use this link then to answer the questions I posed. I don’t see that information specifically at your link. You can take your time…
Do your own research, woodfortrees clearly explains its methodology and links to all sources. If you have a problem with temperature records state it and cite your evidence, if you fail to do so I will take it that you agree the world has exhibited a warming trend for the period in question. Please note, I am not here implying anything about the cause of that warming.
Frank K. says:
January 31, 2012 at 9:18 am
Can you demonstrate using the available data that -80F is not exceptional in Alaska? Certainly this is the case at Vostok, Antarctica. Thanks.
It’s the record low in Alaska, so of course it is exceptional, but not unheard of and nothing close to so unlikely that its explanation would require a revision of the laws of physics which is what your initial inquiry seemed to imply. The world has been warming for over a hundred years, even if they disagree on the causes, most people agree on this (it is what all the evidence tells us, if you believe different please cite your own evidence) and throughout this period low temperature records have been set without anyone believing it called the instrumental record into question (and why would they, weather is chaotic, if it didn’t throw out surprises it would be easy to predict). What’s changed?
Tim Clark says:
January 31, 2012 at 9:26 am
“Mary Turner says:
January 31, 2012 at 6:42 am
All I’m showing is that the temperature extremes being discussed are not particularly exceptional at far northern and southern latitudes.”
All I’m saying is that various high temperature records and ~.45C of alledged warming that sends the media and others into histrionics are not particularly exceptional at the location they are taken.
Any information garnered from the media is likely wrong, or simplified/distorted so badly it might as well be, as far as the science is concerned the problem is the proportional shift between low temperature and high temperature records.
Anthony Watts says:
January 31, 2012 at 8:53 am
@ur momisugly Brendan 6:40AM
I laughed hard when I saw that. Excellent! Excellent! Your govt at work!
My former advisor is a great fan of your website. He’s an incredible mathematician and a great experimentalist, and I know he is a constant reader, and has dug deep into the models. He doesn’t like them, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear.
Hmm, can’t call it a record low since the thermometer broke but it can be called a record high even if the thermometer was broke (the record high at the Hawaii airport a few years back…)
I will bet a $1,000,000 the weather station at Death Valley will handle the most extreme heat, that is is for sure
REPLY: I’ll take that bet. http://www.john-daly.com/stations/badwater.htm
-Anthony
Anthony Watts says:
…the current equipment there is not rated down to that -80F record temperature.
This has been a problem throughout history. Coop stations come and go, and the Prospect Creek station lasted only ten years back when the town was inhabited. It is no longer a station published in the NCDC climatological data, and the current instruments are not intended as a continuation of the climate station.
My experience with the NWS guys is that they try their best to properly locate stations and find conscientious long-term observers, but are limited by the shortage of people out there who want the responsibility. They obviously couldn’t find someone to carry on the Prospect Creek station when the pipeline was finished and everyone left.
The next best thing to millions of good observers is automated stations, and, well, it is definitely next best! But if they are going to do the automated route, they need instruments that work under all circumstances.
I appreciate your work on the flaws in our climate observing network (and I share your concerns, as an observer and a climatologist), and hopefully it’s getting some noses to the grindstone.
Donald asked (January 31, 2012 at 6:59 am):
Will the mosquitoes survive this?
Alas, Donald, sadly they will. They’re back every summer (sometimes not so bad; other times crazy), and they’re BIG up here, too. It’s not for no reason that the mosquito is called Alaska’s state bird.
TimO of Ohio, the -60 F. was wind chill guesswork, not temperature, I survived that blizzard also, it was very cold, but not that cold. Couldn’t personally go out to see for sure as doors were all covered with snow.
RHO says:
January 31, 2012 at 11:37 am
Bingo!
I was in the aptly named hamlet of Cold Foot AK (along the Dalton Highway between Fairbanks and Deadhorse on the south side of the Brooks Range east of Jim Creek) in June, 2007 and recall seeing a billboard there proclaiming the coldest temperature ever recorded in North America at -79F in February sometime in the late 1990s. The bill board further noted that -79F was the lower limit of the temperature measuring equipment at this locality and that the actual low was likely a few degrees below that level. So it appears that if we are to accurately measure the coldest temperatures ever recorded in Alaska or NA, thermometers at several key stations will need to be upgraded (if that is the correct term for increasing their lower range) in the next few days so that they can accurately capture what is likely to be an even colder February.