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.
On this link here http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__dataent_CET you will find another link to the C.E.T. ‘Triangle’ here,http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/cet/map.html
I think they only use about four or five stations from inside the triangle to compile the C.E.T.
D. J. Hawkins says:
October 10, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Charles Gerard Nelson says:
October 10, 2012 at 2:09 pm
it surprises me that no-one talks much about the actual waste heat that we produce and its effects on ambient temps.
Basically, all human energy producing activities per annum amount to less than one (1) hour’s worth of energy from the sun.
============
However, the sun’s energy is spread across the globe, while human energy use is concentrated into urban areas. Sort of like focusing a magnifying glass out in the sun, what was only warm suddenly becomes hot.
Doing the calculations on our urban property, out energy use works out to 9 W/m2. Not much when you look at the average contribution from the sun. However, the IPCC calculates that 3.7 W/m2 is the net effect of a doubling of CO2.
Thus, CO2 doubling would have only a small effect on our urban property as compared to the heat from our energy use. Which is what we find. A good deal of the surface area on our urban property is maintained at 20C/70F, regardless of the effects of CO2 or the sun.
I expect many other urban dwellers will find the same. If they place a thermometer randomly on some point on their property, the air temperature 2 meters above ground level will read 20C/70F, depending on whether the point selected is inside or outside.
This is what is overlooked when talking about UHI. In a rural setting, everywhere that is 2m above surface is “outside”. In an urban setting, a good percentage of the surface is “inside” where it is temperature regulated. What remains is in large part pavement, with some domesticated grass and trees thrown in along the borders. For the most part it has no resemblance to the rural area it replaces.
Makes one wonder if those radical (deniers) who maintain that temperatures have hardly risen at all may be closer to reality than we thought.
Large red area in South Yorkshire – looks like my wife is turning the heating on during the day again ;>)
Tallbloke or Tim
Are you able to superimpose the CET area on to your map as it demonstrates the heat island effect nicely?
http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/cet/map.html
This private email from the Met office to me describes the allowance made for UHI as follows;
“The urbanisation corrections to the CET series have been applied since 1974. Initially they were just 0.1 degree C, in certain months, then gradually for more months of the year; from about 1995 onwards some of the corrections increased to 0.2 deg C, and by about 2002 all the corrections were 0.2 deg C.”
The question needs to be asked as to whether this allowance is enough as England has some 55 million people crammed into a small area (with lots of attendant industry) and is a heat island itself, so in effect CET is measured within a heat island within a heat island. Despite the undoubted warming effect temperatures have declined sharply over the last decade (although still remain at a high level)
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
Perhaps this might make a good thread Anthony, whereby readers could try to determine the proper allowance for UHI on CET?
Tonyb
I’m sorry. I’ve been trying for 1/2 hour to put this thought into the Tips and Notes page.
Along the theme of temperature trends and verification of historical records. I got to thinking about soil temperatures. As an agrarian by education, we use soil temps to determine planting times and seed germination.
The ARS has a number of sites throughout the midwest, and many states have their own research stations with long soil temperature records.
Would not a station with a 50+ year record of soil temperature at the 5cm and 45 cm depth provide a decent record of climate? This record may give us an indication of both the air temp and the solar heating average with some degree of blindness to the increasing CO2 concentration?
From this temperature plot I can readily identify every city and major town in England.
Suddden thought!
So why aren’t the maximum heat records in the hot spots?
If you go to the map site http://ceo.decc.gov.uk/nationalheatmap/ and click on layers and just tick only on industrial heat density and commercial heat density it gets a lot hotter!
Someone asked where are the Climat surface stations on the map at the top of the article.
The simplest answer is that only two appear to be in areas showing surplus heat: Heathrow, which is probably around the western fringe of the red heart of the London blob, and Hurn, which is somewhere in the northern part of the yellow blob furthest west along the Channel coast.
All of the others appear to be in blue/green zones: Leeming in the Vale of York, Waddington south of Lincoln, Shawbury north of Shrewsbury, Wattisham north-west of Ipswich and Manston south-west of Ramsgate (these two are also within the expanded map, but neither is marked), Lyneham south-west of Swindon, and Camborne out in the far South West. All are in fairly rural areas.
@QuestingVole,
Even the one’s in generally rural areas can be subject to micro climate heat sources such as (grills, trash burning bins, AC exhausts, pavement) All things that rural stations in the US have been found to be exposed to. The problem is that temp stations (especially the newer automated ones) tend to be built close to human habitation even in rural areas.
“The interesting thing of course will be to understand the scientific basis of the rating system itself. That is, get the field test reports which determine that this is something more than a rule of thumb. There are some studies of temperature gradiants as you move away from paved surfaces that bear looking into. Where is Geiger when you need him.”
Looks interesting
http://www.ucprc.ucdavis.edu/
The temperature differential for various types of concrete is rather huge up to 20F difference depending on the type of pavement you have. Berkeley ( LLB labs) has a bunch of research on this, basically to cool cities by using different types of and finishes of pavement.
Bob Mount says:
October 11, 2012 at 10:09 am (Edit)
From this temperature plot I can readily identify every city and major town in England.
##################
thats because its not a HEAT (temperature ) map. its a map of ELECTRICITY usage done in “heat map” format. Heat map is a TYPE of map. This maps electricity usage and shows the electrcity demand in a heat map FORMAT. That’s why, for example, when you zoom in you can see that roads etc have no “heat” or trees have no heat
http://flowingdata.com/2010/01/21/how-to-make-a-heatmap-a-quick-and-easy-solution/
That Said, the real test will be to see how well electricity usage correlates with actual temperature measures. basically there you will be looking for the waste heat contribution to UHI.
So. This is not a map of temperature. it is a HEAT MAP ( a type of format ) of electricity demand. A heat map is a type of map that turns numbers ( kilowat hours ) into COLORS.
or more precisely is is a map of Kilowat demand ( what they call heat demand ) in a heatmap format. Just to be clear
@Fred Berple
I agree in some sense however you are ignoring other factors of your energy consumption, for example the 50KWh you consume driving to and from work gas consumption, and the reduction is transpiration cooling for the built area of your property. I’d wager if you took this into account your “Footprint” would be something of the order of 30-40 watts per square meter, or about 10 x CO2 theorized effect for a doubling, and about 100 x the theoretical effect of CO2 for the increase from 1960 to now. Let’s assume energy use on your property increased linearly from nothing (wilderness) in 1960 to your current estimated 33 W/ Sq m, That results in a gradient of 3w/m2 per decade for UHI growth and a maximum of about 80/310 * 3.7/11 per decade using a linear approximation or 0.086 w/m2 for CO2. So we have a situation that a thermometer placed on your property would experience extra heating energy trend of 3W/m2 per decade for UHI Vs 0.086 W/m2 per decade for CO2 – and they think from this noise they can extract the CO2 component accurately. To quote a famous Australian Film ” The Castle” , tell-em they’re dreamin’
Oh Fred, the calculation (above) assumes your 9w/m2 for your property is correct
While this is primarily about UHI, rural areas also have had changes causing warming, with likely a greater overall effect because the land area is much larger.
Since the 1950s there have been large increases in field drainage, which reduces evaporation and hence increases temperatures, this in turn has allowed earlier planting of crops, generally reducing albedo (again causing warming), and hedgerows and small copse of trees have been removed (in the 1970s and 80s as much as 2% of hedgerows were removed every year), reducing turbulence and boundary layer mixing at night. Without getting into the details, reduced boundary layer mixing, locally cools, but over wider areas the net effect is warming.
Thanks for the responses and links regarding the surface stations! Interesting.
I must admit I’m a bit puzzled by the reliance on surface station data though. I would think that there must be fairly standardized high quality weather data recorders based on satellites extending back at least 30 years or so. True, that’s rather short in terms of geological time periods, but given the likely near-immunity to local fluctuations and heat island effects and such things I’d expect that “trends” would be fairly clear, up, down, or stable. No?
– MJM
“PRD says:
October 11, 2012 at 9:12 am
…
Along the theme of temperature trends and verification of historical records. I got to thinking about soil temperatures. As an agrarian by education, we use soil temps to determine planting times and seed germination.”
You are correct, ground temperature is the body temperature, entropy, not the ephemeral layer of gas. Moreover it is an integrating measure which largely avoids the Nyquist violation so endemic in what passes for measurement.
I’ve spent a lot of time on ground temperature data. I found that wrong adjustments to the data have been made. Also, the available data is in a worse state than air measurements, perhaps because it has received so little attention.
There is a very common misunderstanding of the infamous Stephan Boltzman equation, a purely theoretic thing where it has to connect with the real world via “magic”. The key is the surface thermal conductivity and thermal capacity, as I showed via modelling the lunar surface, matching the Diviner data (but not the wrong public web version, undergrad errors). http://diviner.ucla.edu/
Lunar dust behaves as highly thermally insulating, in a large part because it is in high vacuum which defeats gas conduction. Radiation is a very weak energy transfer mechanism. This has been known or correctly theorised for many years but the true implication seems to have been missed.
I like it when maths and measurement agrees.
The earth behaves as highly conductive but is far beyond my meagre capability at figuring out. I could make some observations, best kept private since I am in strong disagreement with many. Nevertheless much the same process takes place at the air/ground interface.
The ground behaves as a thermal delay line introducing a phase lag with depth (acts as a natural low pass filter). The energy flow is bidirectional on a thermal capacitance. The body rotation and orbital is critical to almost all parts of the physics yet largely ignored in climate, want a fixed world.
An exactly similar effect is taking place with objects near Stevenson screens hence phase delay is introduced. I have seen sites where temperature rise _after_ peak insolation, known heavily contaminated sites. If pristine high resolution data is available that is a signature.
michaeljmcfadden,
Yes, any actual trend in the satellite data would be clear and largely un-affected by UHI or other micro climate effects.
The problem is that there are known natural climate cycles with periods longer than 30 years, so the satellite record is useless for trying to attribute that trend to a cause or causes.
For the people pushing the catastrophy idea, a catasprohy that they can’t blame people for is useless.
Very useful informations, thankyou very much!
K.R: Frank
Image reminds me of IR mapping of a mother board.
“Here’s a question I have often asked but have never received a satisfactory reply to;
Given that few machines even approach 100% efficiency and that every machine generates excess heat and that we ‘burn’ giga-tons of fossil fuels as well as utilize nuclear, hydro, wind power etc….has anyone ever tried to calculate how much ‘heat’ is added to the atmosphere in a generalized way (as opposed to measurable UHI effects)?”
Answer from Max:
Considering that the daily input from the Sun is on the order of 1,000,000 times the total amount of energy “release” from coal, nuclear, gasoline, fossil fuels in general..the contribution of the “heat load” from our energy sources is miniscule. Now DO NOT be lead down the “primrose path” that “Well, ‘we’ should get all our energy from the SUN…and not use any of these non-Green sources…” As this is where we get into the concepts of ENERGY DENSITY, energy distribution (time and space) and ECONOMICS. All of which make SOLAR and WIND terribly useless logistics wise (time and space) and HORRIBLY expensive (ECONOMICS).
(Not So Mad) Max
P. Solar;
It is important to keep in mind that the airport stations are fit for purpose — their own purpose: the reporting of takeoff and landing atmospheric conditions over the tarmac. Planes urgently require that info, so those stations are not about to become “good” general weather stations. Ever.