They say “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, so color me flattered. I’ve been remiss in writing about this effort by Roger Tattersall (aka Tallbloke) and his colleague Tim Channon, but a tip from WUWT reader David Schofield brought me to think this would be good to mention it, so they can make comparisons. First, as you may know, they have an ongoing effort to catalog UK surface measurement stations. Details here.
They are using the Leroy 2010 methods as I use in Watts et al 2012, for example here.
A recent post talks about 20 UK CLIMAT stations, which are used to report to GHCN. It might be interesting to see where those stations are located in relation to this:
This is an official output from the UK DECC website called “The National Heatmap”:
http://ceo.decc.gov.uk/nationalheatmap/
The plot is generated by turning on layers using the interface. TB’s stations that he has surveyed could easily be added since this is a Google Earth product. All he has to do is get the source data from DECC. Or, some manual overlays could be tried.
Given the recent paper highlighted on WUWT about heat density/UHI in China versus surface temperature, this would seem to be a good exercise.
Here’s a closeup of London, showing the heat map along with power station locations plotted.
The station that got all this started with an errant temperature, Gravesend, is east of London along the Thames. I theorized then that that Thames itself might be a source of heat for that station, and given the density of power plants along it shown above, there might be some truth to that theory.
Broadness Radar. Swanscombe, Kent, Great Britain. This is the shipping radar station at broadness helping keep river traffic safe Date: 4 September 2005. Photo by Glyn Baker via Wikimedia Commons and Geograph. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Broadness_Radar_-_geograph.org.uk_-_48941.jpg
Look at the location located by Tim Channon:
That spit of land juts into the Thames. If the Thames is warmed by power plant cooling outlets putting out waste heat upstream, I would think this station is getting a huge dose of the heat seen in the national heat map.
Steve Keohane,
He’s not paying attention to us.
Steve Keohane & D Boehm,
That is a version of it yes, but I was actually thinking of the video posted in the WUWT article I linked to.
Perhaps the surface station was cursed by Pocahontas. She is actually buried at Gravesend, but the exact location is not known.
Mark Cooper says:”I have photocopies of the original hand-written thermometer records for the first ever weather station in the world, at Durham, UK. The actual written data for the early 1700′s is between 5 and 10 deg C cooler than the Met Office quoted temperatures derived from the same records.”
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5 and 10 degrees is huge. Wouldn’t that mean that it has warmed quite a bit more than they are reporting? (for your region anyway) i would think they would jump on it. Maybe they know something about the data we don’t–I hope they answer you and you report back.
Most were “dropped” only in the sense of being ignored by GISS and the boys.
Yes; the Great Dying continues. The Great Disregarding would come closer, tho’.
Charles,
You are absolutely correct much of the UHI is in fact waste heat, but also the built environment has heat sinking (thermal mass) effects as well. In fact since energy is never created or destroyed (apparently except for magical CO2) almost 100% of our energy use ends up as heat eventually. For example you might put energy from your electric car into motion, but the energy inherent in that velocity is then converted to heat eventually through friction with the road and other moving parts and via the brakes when you stop, the energy is never “Used up” it goes on and on, from one form to another forever eventually degrading to the lowest form – heat.
So when looking at UHI trends the real influencing factor on UHI is Energy density – that is what is the energy consumption per square meter, rather than the heat emission per square meter. Energy density is related to the population density AND Energy Consumption per capita. I’ll wager that our modern energy consumption profile per capita alone, is enough to create an upward trend in UHI without even taking into account changes in population density.
Anthony, you should look at this factor?
Bob
tchannon says:
October 10, 2012 at 5:26 pm
>>
“marchesarosa says:
October 10, 2012 at 3:56 pm
Which are the 20 UK Climat surface stations, please?”
Goodness knows if this will post, copied from an actual source file.
… station list…
>>
How many of those are major airports? Quite a few it seems.
Heathrow is IIRC the worlds busiest airport with a plane taking off every 30 seconds ! Considering the time it takes to accelerate before take off, that means four turbo-reactors at full power pretty much continuously from early morning until late evening.
How about a back of envelop calculation of the energy burnt to get a large commercial airliner off the ground and how much heat that dumps into the local environment every 30s?
Heathrow has also seen massive growth in the post-war era.
It’s quite amazing they chose that as a climate reference station. Unless, of course, their aim is to increase the correlation of the resulting warming of the temperature record with fossil fuel consumption.
In that case choosing major airports would be an excellent idea.
MarkCooper
I have Durham on my historic temperatures site here.
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
Do you have the older handwrittenDurham records in any sort of digitised format and the comparitive older Met office records? I would like to add them to the site.
tonyb
I just wanted to bump this intriguing comment.
Mark, why don’t you get these photocopies to Anthony, Willis, Marc Morano and Steve Goddard. They are not only incredibly effective in getting to the bottom of these issues, but they also have the means to get these facts in front of millions of people almost instantly.
tchannon says:
‘There is one marked as current at 53.4668,-2.25152, sheesh, although it might not be accurate.
The Google Earth history is unusual, from 2000, see a building rise but this poses a problem: the data starts 1996 when the new building was not there. Maybe it was on the old library. A quick look I can’t see a screen in Hulme Park which is opposite and a more typical location.’
That’s the location, just across the road to the east from your co-ordinates. It’s never been in the park – it would not last five minutes in that neighbourhood.
Hulme Library was built in the 70’s. The surrounding area was redeveloped at that time from terraced streets to quite widely spaced large blocks of apartments (Hulme Crescents). These were in turn demolished in late 90’s and the area redeveloped to what it is now.
The only other data available for Manchester would be Manchester Airport, way to the south and a completely different place.
“If the Thames is warmed by power plant cooling outlets putting out waste heat upstream”
The Thames here is tidal – so downstream heat can get here too.
Tony McGough says:
October 10, 2012 at 12:31 pm
The BBC TV weather forecasts now regularly point out that “these temperatures are for the cities; in the country they may be …” and quote figures that are up to 3 or 4 degrees C colder.
This seems to be an explicit acknowledgement of the urban heat island effect, and a generously large one. So is the CET area (with only 0.2 degrees C) largely countryside? Doesn’t it include chunks of Lancashire and the industrial midlands?
Puzzled …
I can remember in the 60’s London used to be 2°C warmer than the rural locations. Now it’s 3 to 4 degrees!
Philip Bradley:
As I said, it’s a utilities bill map. It’s closer to a population density map than anything directly to do with temperature or “heat”. As such, it conveys no new information. Power stations don’t even show up, because their electricity isn’t metered.
@michaeljmcfadden:
There are a few relatively unchanged and ‘pristine’ thermometers. When you look at those locations, there is little to no warming. At present, the GHCN has something like 60% of the thermometers in use at AIRPORTS. You know, tarmac, cars, jet engines… For some countries is rises to over 90% headed to 100% (Like in the USA and New Zealand IIRC).
For reasons known only to NOAA, they chose to drop from the record most of the thermometes. (Bt keep them in the early years / baseline period). So the peak was about 7000, then dropped to abotu 1200 in 2007 or so. As some of THEM are “new” and codes like GIStemp toss out any records shorter than 20 years, even fewer are actually used in the present (to compare to those older colder ones…)
The temperate records / distribution of thermometers is entirely unsuited for century scale calorimetry….
Small typo right near the start of the story…under the Broadness photo.
“….shipping radar station at broadness helping keep river traffic safe Date: 4 September 2005. Photo by Glyn Baker via Wikimedia Commons and Geograph.”
‘Broadness’ in body text with a cap B, I think.
Sounds like a great project. Now we need something similar here Downunder.
Swanscomb not only gets heat from the Thames but radar has a heating effect, like microwaves, and there is an air conditioner spilling heat from the equipment room. So an unreliable data set from here.
I know I have said this before, but when my children worked in Exeter, Devon during their spare time whilst still at school, I would often have to drive in a few miles to pick them up after work, as we live in the countryside. In winter, on those occasionally frosty nights, I would start my car, the air-con would inform me that ice was a potential issue by flashing -4.0°C outside temp. As I drove out of my driveway this would then show -3.0°C. As I drove up the hill & downthe other side it might read -2.0°C. As I approached the outskirts of the city, it would read -1.0°C or even 0.0°C. By the time I got to the city centre it would be something like 1.0-2.0°C. I know it’s not scientific, the temp sensor can only read to the nearest whole degree, air friction over the sensor could cause temp fluctuatons, etc., but it still “felt” warmer in town than in the countryside, but then again we’re into “feelings” as opposed to data, although if my darling daughter had been waiting around for more than 20 mins she might just disagree with that assessment in no uncertain terms, however, both my cars over the last 8 years had similar air-con systems both being Peugeots, but the temp tracking was the same!!!
Stephen Skinner says:
October 10, 2012 at 2:44 pm
The Heat Density map shows very clearly urban heat. All the main urban areas are clearly visible. Considering that in the space of about 100 years the number of cities of over 1,000,000 people has grown by several 1000%. On this map there are many towns of much less than a 1,000,000 and they show up clearly also.
There are only two cities in Britain with a population of over a million, London and Birmingham. If you added in the surrounding built up areas you would be able to add a few more to that list.
tchannon says:
October 10, 2012 at 5:26 pm
re your list of sites
RAF ‘Kinloss’, lat=57.6456067915196, long=-3.563464535150946},
RAF ‘Leuchars’, lat=56.37735298771637, long=-2.86192902784711},
RAF ‘Leeming’, lat=54.29698920443254, long=-1.533062211300392},
RAF ‘Valley’, lat=53.25267670440459, long=-4.53652739944032},
RAF ‘Waddington’, lat=53.17535595567492, long=-0.5233386419626107},
RAF ‘Lyneham’, lat=51.50313207002159, long=-1.992399086381173},
RAF ‘Belfast, Aldergrove’, lat=54.66377729916611, long=-6.22513985034386}
Aldergrove is an oddity because although it is a civil airport, the thermometer site is on the RAF portion.
Your chances of getting to these sites I would say is 3/5s of 5/8s of FA
As for the Durham site.
All the estate to the west is less than 10 years old, the estate to the south probably mid ’60s.
Apart from the observatory itself, that was pretty much a green-field site at the start of the record.
Matt says:October 10, 2012 at 8:16 pm
Steve Keohane & D Boehm,
That is a version of it yes, but I was actually thinking of the video posted in the WUWT article I linked to.
Matt, I saved that file Feb, 10, 2008. I would suspect it came from a current posting here at WUWT. You might check the old posts from then..
Having stayed in Morecambe whilst visiting our daughter I liked the look of this site just across the road from the sea front
https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ll=54.076429,-2.859825&spn=0.0011,0.00327&t=m&z=19&layer=c&cbll=54.076346,-2.860066&panoid=vpuS0ojWfuZ9M-175pc-_Q&cbp=12,98.6,,0,8.62
The prevailing wind is from the sea but blows across the esplanade and road before getting to the instruments.
James Bull
Why are new stations being sited on high rooftops ?
http://www.cas.manchester.ac.uk/restools/whitworth/photos/
All this is a very good reason to use the satellite data – albeit that is for troposphere rather than surface. If you look at the records in the Climate4you web site the surface record correlates very well to the satellite record, in fact the satellites are showing more recent warming than the surface stations.
If they were getting the surface station record wrong, or making insufficient allowance for the UHI, should we not see a divergence between the satellite and surface station records?
David A. Evans says:
October 11, 2012 at 3:21 am
>>
tchannon says:
October 10, 2012 at 5:26 pm
re your list of sites
RAF ‘Kinloss’, lat=57.6456067915196, long=-3.563464535150946},
RAF ‘Leuchars’, lat=56.37735298771637, long=-2.86192902784711},
RAF ‘Leeming’, lat=54.29698920443254, long=-1.533062211300392},
RAF ‘Valley’, lat=53.25267670440459, long=-4.53652739944032},
RAF ‘Waddington’, lat=53.17535595567492, long=-0.5233386419626107},
RAF ‘Lyneham’, lat=51.50313207002159, long=-1.992399086381173},
RAF ‘Belfast, Aldergrove’, lat=54.66377729916611, long=-6.22513985034386}
Aldergrove is an oddity because although it is a civil airport, the thermometer site is on the RAF portion.
Your chances of getting to these sites I would say is 3/5s of 5/8s of FA
>>
At least RAF stations are generally fairly rural and not the same continual traffic as a commercial airport. Presumably they have decent maintenance. On that basis they are probably on the better end of the quality scale.