I had hoped to have this ready in time for heat wave season, as it would have been quite useful in July. Pursuant to my post about July average temperatures being lower with the new Climate Reference Network -vs- the old surface network, let me show you a sneak peak of what will be coming online in a few days.
This is just one of many graphics and data files that will be coming online representing data from the new Climate Reference Network.
Critics will of course say: “So what? Anybody can plot temperatures on a map and do averages”. True, but getting this all programmed, automated, polished, and running without any human intervention producing hourly maps from an obscure NOAA satellite feed is a whole different animal. If it was easy, somebody would have already done what I’m doing in a project that has been in development since Feb 2012.
The goal is to make the pristine “platinum standard” CRN temperature data more accessible, more palatable for the average person, and ready for use in websites and TV broadcasts. Right now it mostly sits in a corner at NCDC, and seldom gets cited in any of the news reports on national or regional temperatures in the USA. It will be a free and open public resource when it is completed. Both °C and °F displays will be provided along with analysis maps, graphs, and data.
While the above single map doesn’t look like much now, the full extent and value of this effort will become clearer later when I post the official announcement in the next week or two.
What about Alaska and Hawaii?
Wow! Stuff I can understand!
Maybe even stuff the warmists can understand!
But certainly the general public will.
Now this I call “outreach”!
Who? Ha! Who? Ha! Anthony! Anthony! Yea!!!!!!
Eugene WR Gallun
noaaprogrammer says:
October 12, 2012 at 7:18 pm
What about Alaska and Hawaii?
===================
Indeed, what do you want to know ?
It is all readily available, all you need to do is ask.
Have you ?
Let’s proceed.
Congratulations on your new baby Anthony!
Accuracy is the key, no?
Thank you, Anthony. Much appreciated.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100184632/radio-free-delingpole-xxii-fighting-windmills/
Apologies for the change of topic but have a listen to James Dellingpole talking to the Author of a book who makes the claim that James Hansen et al, use private computers to email each other and are programmed to automatically erase any data used on those units. Hiding any traceable information when contacting warmist scientists, companies into that farce and EPA, also other Windmill promoters. A very interesting audio program and free to listen to, well worth a listen.
I’m still unsure what use an average temperature is.
Let’s hope someone doesn’t mess with this “obscure NOAA satellite feed” just to be mean. I wouldn’t put it past some climate scientists to be spiteful if they’re in a position to block or alter the feed.
Absolute accuracy sure never hurts, this is going to be a one good addtion Anthony.
Way to go!
I like the cold blue in the text and number.
It will be entertaining to see Warmism and the MSM endeavor to ignore this. Which they will.
Anthony,
Can you include a small write up on the guts behind this for us geeks. Since this is the platinum standard, what technologies did you use such as programming language, frame works, and other stuff. Thanks for this new service. Incredible.
That’s a very good display of temperatures, much better than that given by the Davis WeatherLink maps.
as this is an “extremely smart paper”, although “there are uncertainties inherent in extrapolating from birds to all species”, i feel i must post it on WUWT asap:
11 Oct: Nature: Daniel Cressey: Global biodiversity priced at $76 billion
Researchers hope estimates of conservation cost will spur government action
Protecting all the world’s threatened species will cost around US$4 billion a year, according to an estimate published today in Science1. If that number is not staggering enough, the scientists behind the work also report that effectively conserving the significant areas these species live in could rack up a bill of more than $76 billion a year.
Study leader Stuart Butchart, a conservation scientist at BirdLife International in Cambridge, UK, admits that the numbers seem very large. But “in terms of government budgets, they’re quite trivial”, he says, adding that governments have already committed to taking this action in international treaties — they just did not know how much it would cost…
Under the internationally agreed Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), governments have committed to meeting 20 conservation targets by 2020, including improving the conservation status of threatened species. To come up with numbers for how much this might cost, Butchart and his team asked experts on 211 threatened bird species to estimate the cost of lowering the extinction risk for each species by one category on the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature…
The researchers concluded that improving the status of all the world’s 1,115 threatened bird species would cost between $875 million and $1.23 billion a year for the next decade. Adding in other animals raises the number to between $3.41 billion and $4.76 billion a year.
Another target of the CBD is to protect 17% of the Earth’s land surface. Estimates for this are harder to make, but by extrapolating from known land prices and management costs Butchart and his team put the number at $76.1 billion a year.
Exactly how much is now being spent to meet the convention’s targets is unclear, but spending will need to increase by “at least an order of magnitude”, Butchart says…
Henrique Pereira, who works on international conservation issues at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, says that although there are uncertainties inherent in extrapolating from birds to all species, the work is an “extremely smart paper”…
But Pereira also points out that the figure is for just two of the 20 targets agreed by the CBD. “If you look at the range of targets for 2020, the total bill will be higher,” he says.
http://www.nature.com/news/global-biodiversity-priced-at-76-billion-1.11582
Well done Ant. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you of the potential this has ! Wish I could help but my programming days are long gone.
What’s with the comments about funding? I know there appears to be no malice, but it really bugs me because whether it’s funded by the Kochs, Shell oil, Heartland or Big Government is utterly irrelevant as long as everything is open and honest (which it clearly is) and nothing is hidden (which clearly nothing is). Therefore the only motive here is a desire to expose the truth, and all that is relevant is the data itself.
One should only consider the funding or the individuals involved when there are other motives at play, evident by such practices as hiding data, refusing to release data and code (lest someone finds something wrong with it), the vilification of those who request source data, the refusal to acknowledge when errors are pointed out, etc, etc. That’s when you need to follow the money.
Love a good automation.
Many thanks to the unknown donor!
Anthony,
this is much needed. As you say NCDC went only part of the way (albeit the major part) in establishing the CRN sites. They did so to see if siting made a major difference. I assume you regularly keep an eye on this data and from your other work you know that it does. In the meantime the data from badly sited sensors is still used, while the CRN data is unknown to the public and broadcast media.
What some people seem to be missing is that one of great benefits of this will be that, when the MSM headlines are talking about ‘record hot’, it will be possible to have broadcast standard data accessible to show what the nearest CRN sites are reading in comparison. I suspect many broadcast meteorologists will want to use it, and the lower CRN site temperatures will educate the media and general public as to the effect of poor siting and growth of UHI at local airports and other sites showing ‘record hot’. Expect also that CRN sites may show ‘record cold’.
This will be an example of a small extra effort (that NCDC missed) being able to make a huge impact.
Anthony, you are a doggedly patient man, first you shamed them into sorting out the siting problems. Then you use the good sites to show the real temperature using their own technology, genius. You are proving to be a huge burr under their saddle, well done sir.
Anthony, excellent job – and one that the NCDC should have done themselves with all the funding they have had. I rather fancy that their enthusiasm waned a little when they realized quite how much siting affects the sensors and that they would have egg on their face for using the badly sited ones for so long.
A suggestion – perhaps somewhere relatively obvious show that this network is the only climate/weather network where all observation sites meet the WMO ISO standard. (a hint to those that use the other site networks that they are non-standard and should not be trusted
A question – will the other data from the observations be available also? Humidity, wind, sun etc?
more corporate land than public land?
12 Oct: Las Vegas Desert Sun: K. Kaufmann/AP: Streamlined solar plan approved
Federal officials Friday approved a national plan largely consisting of Riverside County that they say “will lead to faster, smarter utility-scale solar development on public lands.”
Most of the 445 square miles of public land zoned for such large-scale solar projects resides off Interstate 10 east of the Coachella Valley in Riverside County. Two of the projects have begun construction while several others still await final approval…
The Riverside East solar zone has two projects under construction — GE and NextEra’s 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight plant in Desert Center and NextEra’s 250-megawatt Genesis farm near Blythe — and another four projects either on hold or awaiting approval…
Among the companies that stand to benefit from the power generated in the Riverside East zone is Southern California Edison, the large utility that serves the western Coachella Valley.
There are at least 70 pending applications for solar projects in the 17 designated zones, which would be grandfathered under the plan…
Environmental groups like the Nature Conservancy that had been critical of the federal government’s previous approach to solar development in the desert applauded the new plan…
http://www.mydesert.com/article/20121013/BUSINESS0302/310130021/Streamlined-solar-plan-approved?odyssey=nav%7Chead
Tom is not going to be very happy with you again Anthony:-)
13 Oct: LA Times: Julie Cart: Federal plan designed to create large solar energy plants
Incentives to cluster projects on 285,000 acres of U.S. land in the West will be offered and an additional 19 million acres of the Mojave Desert opened for new facilities
The Obama administration has formally adopted a plan to help create large-scale solar energy plants, offering incentives for solar developers to cluster projects on 285,000 acres of federal land in the western U.S and opening an additional 19 million acres of the Mojave Desert for new power plants.
The plan places 445 square miles of public land in play for utility-scale solar facilities…
But developers can sidestep the zones under certain conditions. Companies may construct plants on 19 million acres designated as “variance” zones, but the government offers fewer incentives to build there…
Some conservation groups fought to prevent approval of utility-scale projects in the region, contending that the desert — home to scores of endangered plants and animals — was not capable of absorbing industrial-scale projects…
Critics contend that the policies are too late, coming after years of free-for-all leasing that encouraged rampant speculation. Since leasing began, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has been working to process more than 300 solar applications.
Many of those are for land in California’s Mojave Desert, where counties have seen the cost of private land soar and the desert given over to thousands of acres of mirrors…
Janine Blaeloch of the group Solar Done Right supports renewable energy but said wholesale development of the desert is a mistake.
“This should all be happening on rooftops and in cities,” Blaeloch said. “But that wouldn’t profit the big utilities, and industry wouldn’t be able to get tax breaks, so we wreck the desert instead. We aren’t getting that public land back. Once it’s industrialized, everything that lives there and everything we enjoy about it will be gone.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1013-solar-zones-20121013,0,2819109.story
It does beg the question as to why Noaa haven’t done this. I’m not trying to make more work for you Anthony but it would be nice to be able to compare any uscrn metric to the ushcn equivelant. Perhaps another day.