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.
Max;
+1
The issue with UHI is the misrepresentation of a specialized subset of readings as representative of the whole, despite their obvious unfitness for that purpose.
The whole “sustainability” push, too, is a farce. Time-travel back 100 years, and advise our ancestors what to “conserve” for our needs. There is nothing they used that we now care about, or isn’t in plentiful supply. We could advise them to lay off the slaughter of passenger pigeons and Dodos, perhaps, and encourage the substitution of petroleum for whale oil, but not much else.
And the technological change over the last century is nowhere near as swift and unpredictable as the next’s will be. It is risible to imagine we can “save” anything the future economy will care much about.
I know of RAF Waddington near Lincoln. I lived there once. All that area is subject to drought and being flat is generally a temperate area. It was once home to the Vulcan V bombers and it featured in Thunderball, the 707 movie in the 60s, my ex was flying one of the Vulcans featured in it. The Vulcans have gone and I believe very little military aircraft are there anymore.