WUWT readers may recall that I wrote about this experiment being performed at Oak Ridge national Laboratory to test the issues related to station siting that I have long written about.
This effort promises to be greatly useful to understanding climate quality temperature measurements and how they can be influenced by the station site environment.
From the USCRN Annual Report: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/publications/annual_reports/FY11_USCRN_Annual_Report.pdf
Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon writes about the the first results of this experiment presented at the recent AMS meeting in Austin, TX. The early results confirm what we have learned from the Surface Stations project. Nighttime temperatures are affected the most.
Two talks that caught my eye were on the land surface temperature record. They attacked the problem of land surface temperature accuracy in two completely different, but complementary ways.
One, by John Kochendorfer of NOAA at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is a direct test of the importance of siting. They’ve installed four temperature sensors at varying distances across a field from the laboratory complex. The experiment has only been running since October, but already they’ve found out a couple of interesting things. First, the nighttime temperatures are indeed higher closer to the laboratory. Second, this is true whether the wind is blowing toward or away from the laboratory.
It’ll take a lot more data to sort out the various temperature effects. One way the buildings might affect the nighttime temperature even when the sensor is upwind of the buildings is infrared radiation: the heated buildings emit radiation that’s stronger than what would be emitted by the open sky or nearby hills.
More here: http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2013/01/dispatch-from-ams-looking-at-land-surface-temperatures/
Biases Associated with Air Temperature Measurements near Roadways and Buildings
Wednesday, 9 January 2013: 9:15 AM Room 15 (Austin Convention Center)
John Kochendorfer, NOAA, Oak Ridge, TN; and C. B. Baker, E. J. Dumas Jr., D. L. Senn, M. Heuer, M. E. Hall, and T. P. Meyers
Abstract
Proximity to buildings and paved surfaces can affect the measured air temperature. When buildings and roadways are constructed near an existing meteorological site, this can affect the long-term temperature trend. Homogenization of the national temperature records is required to account for the effects of urbanization and changes in sensor technology. Homogenization is largely based on statistical techniques, however, and contributes to uncertainty in the measured U.S. surface-temperature record. To provide some physical basis for the ongoing controversy focused on the U.S. surface temperature record, an experiment is being performed to evaluate the effects of artificial heat sources such as buildings and parking lots on air temperature. Air temperature measurements within a grassy field, located at varying distances from artificial heat sources at the edge of the field, are being recorded using both the NOAA US Climate Reference Network methodology and the National Weather Service Maximum Minimum Temperature Sensor system. The effects of the roadways and buildings are quantified by comparing the air temperature measured close to the artificial heat sources to the air temperature measured well-within the grassy field, over 200 m downwind of the artificial heat sources.
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Early results of what has been learned in the surface stations project can be seen here:
New study shows half of the global warming in the USA is artificial
h/t to Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.
A typically obvious, no-brainer, and trivial aspect. N’est-ce pas?
Gail Combs says:
January 20, 2013 at 2:39 pm
Ben D. says:
January 20, 2013 at 2:19 pm
Does this mean a readjustment downwards will be undertaken once the effect can be accurately quantified?
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Are you kidding? Hansen will figure out some way to use this to ADD a couple more tenths to the global and US temperature record.
Hansen, in his best impersonation of Captain Jean Luc Piccard, says “Make it so.” and the historical record is adjusted by the requisite amount.
Over the past 60 years Tokyo has warmed by 2.0~2.5 degC, while Miyake Island, ca. 180 km from Tokyo, shows practically no trend in temperature. There are many such examples in Japan, and no doubt in most countries too.
Obviously no ‘climate scientist’ has ever had a pet that needs to relieve itself at night or this ‘discovery’ would have been realised much sooner. I have often leant against the warmer bricks of the house whilst waiting for the pooch, rather than suffer the cooler temps away from the house.
Once this is quantified and instrumented, the next step is to point the instrument at the night sky to measure “radiative forcing”. Not measuring any? Re-calibrate!
OK
So now alarmist know the data they are currently using shows no warming for 15+ yrs.
Now is Hansen going to have the ability to go back and lower past temps some more?
cn
We were recently in New Zealand. When there, we visited the Mt Tongariro national park. A virtually uninhabited and building-free zone for many hundreds of square miles. Imagine my surprise when we drove straight past the local weather station. It was located less than 2 metres from the asphalt road.
@Brad Hoffman I drove Highway 48 (Bruce Rd) tonight from the entrance all the way up to to Whakapapa, and dind’t see it. Can you help me locate it?
Kev-in-Uk says:
January 20, 2013 at 4:31 pm
“I’m pleased that someone has actually bothered to measure this (and in what appears as a rural location too?)
However, in practise, most scientific folk have known about this type of problem for many years but it was never considered as being important because the effect is assumed to be constant, which in short timescales, it pretty well is – only when new build and towns are constructed around stations will a noticeable effect be seen.”
The US and the UK are on different time scales regarding building. For example, Atlanta grows relentlessly. It is like some sort of monster that never rests. I have not seen anything similar in the UK including London. I don’t mean to put down the UK. I just think those are the facts.
It astounds me how slow the process is. For many CAGW probably qualifies as a psychiatric delusion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion
Delusions die hard.
“As I recall, warming that showed a greater rise in Tmin than the rise in Tmax was supposed to be the “Signature of CO2 induced AGW”.
If you compare the difference between how much temps go up today, vs how much they fall tonight, there is no tread. I have a number of graphs the the url linked in my name.
In Russia the snow is too deep to make such experiments practical.
http://rt.com/news/winter-snow-russia-weather-275/
Of course, in the USA, obvious common sense takes a century to even consider. :).
I have just found this case of BoM claiming an all-time hot day record at Leonora, West Australia – in a Post Office yard where solid fences have progressively enclosed the instruments since 1998 and in the last half decade a junk yard has evolved less than 10m from the instruments.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=2029
@Doug Huffman
>About “canyon effect” and “heat sinks”, how about the radiators varying characteristics due to size and distance. I know that radiation from a point source is attenuated by R^-2, and that as the dimensionality increases from line to surface to volume and as the dimensions increase the physics gets real complicated.
Actually it is a point source radiating spherically outwards that follows the R^2 law’. A wall radiates much more like a hot plate: largely perpendicular to the surface plus some to all sides.
The experiment is useful, simple and the results will be believable. I agree they should have planted another set of instruments a 90 degrees to the first and where possible, a third at 180 degrees. That would have answered a lot of additional questions i have.
NOOOOOOO! NOT HOMOGENIZATION!!!
What homogenization does is to identify outliers and bring them into conformity with the others.
Four out of five USHCN stations flunk the microsite test. One out of five are in compliance and yield reliable results.
Guess which ones get identified as “outliers” . . . Yup, you guessed it.
Now, I approve of the experiment, really I do.
But when they homogenize the data, they always wind up pasteurizing it. I have been getting a real snootfull of that during my travels helping Watts et al. up to speed (just call me Al).
NZ Willy wrote;
“The individual photons bearing the heat energy, in their own frame, simply step across from source to target without any passage of time in between — time does not elapse at the speed of light.”
Well, that is sort of correct. However time does indeed elapse when radiation travels, it might be a very small amount of time, but it is finite and more than zero.
If you have ever placed an international phone call that was routed via satellite (or watched a news interview that did the same) you will notice a definite 2-4 second delay between the question and the answer. This is the time for the radio waves to travel up to an orbiting satellite and back down again. A phone call made via undersea cable (while travelling slightly slower) does not have this noticeable delay simply because the cable is MUCH shorter than the distance to/from the satellite.
A good rule of thumb is that 1 nanosecond is about equal to 11 inches, give or take a bit depending on the impedance of a cable or the refractive index of an optical fiber.
And indeed this “time of flight” is actually used to good effect in the engineering world (those clever humans what won’t they think of next) where “laser trackers” (expensive, but very real devices) are used to assemble large structures (ship building, bridges, airplanes, building, etc.) into exactly the desired location. Modern laser trackers provide knowledge of the location of a point within about 50 microns (~0.0002″) or so. All this is done by measuring how long it takes a pulse of laser light to travel to a retro-reflector (a specialized mirror) and return. With enough retro-reflectors on a large object you can tell where it is (relative to a datum) within tens of microns. It’s done every day in construction and manufacturing, and there are now some inexpensive DIY measuring tools that can measure the location of a surface within 1/16 of an inch without ever contacting the surface.
So, time does indeed elapse when travelling at the speed of light, but you sure can’t use your grandfather’s stopwatch to measure it.
Cheers, Kevin.
I wonder if UHI ‘is’ global warming? If the only increase in temperature is UHI. Everything else is natural variations of the weather.
People congregate and as cities grow everybody demands more energy to do their work for them. To move them around, for entertainment, etc. Even small towns exhibit some warming from UHI as they grow and depending on the location of their station maybe significant warming.
I wonder, are civilization and growth causing the increased temperature readings?
With so many people using energy for work and play, burning fuel, creating heat there must be some warming. But, I don’t think the warmth is caused by CO2, I think it’s the heat generated by people using energy 24/7.
Take a car and fuel for instance. The energy in a gallon of gas is not generating heat. As the gas burns heat comes out from everywhere. The tail pipe, muffler, engine, radiator, etc all generating heat from that gallon of cool gas. Each part too hot to touch and warming the air surrounding them. And not just cars but thousands of other heat generators like refrigerators and dish washers and clothes dryers.
I don’t see any harm in this type of warming. People should congregate and warm is good.
I certainly don’t want us to stop our global growth just to prevent some warming in the growth areas of the world. If people get to where they can’t stand it they’ll move. A couple of degrees of warming is not to hard to take as long as you have energy….
and air conditioning.
What say you?
cn
Classic “Duh?” moment. I’m inclined to go with the absolute minimum here, with respect to the very lowest bar you must BEST. Which, by necessity, encompasses the obvious. Closer to a heat source, relative to the sticks, the more observable the thermally relevant emissions of denser mankind etc.etc.are.
That’s the BEST we can do?
At yet another half-precession-cycle-old possible end extreme interglacial?
One has to wonder if this is not evolution in action. Go climate-security-blanket green, rub-out GHG emissions to whatever your modeled sub-tipping point may be. You might just be environmentalist enough to tip us into the next glacial, within which lies climate chaos which no one in your presently known internet family tree has any genetically transmittable knowledge of..
If we, the people, fund research that can come to what must obviously be the correct natural conclusion with respect to effect relative to distance from source in (insert years here), what part of that instructs us as to how this specie of the genus Homo will navigate”
“The onset of the LEAP occurred within less than two decades, demonstrating the existence of a sharp threshold, which must be near 416 Wm2, which is the 65oN July insolation for 118 kyr BP (ref. 9). This value is only slightly below today’s value of 428 Wm2. Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the glacial inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again.”
http://www.particle-analysis.info/LEAP_Nature__Sirocko+Seelos.pdf
with respect to:
“An examination of the fossil record indicates that the key junctures in hominin evolution reported nowadays at 2.6, 1.8 and 1 Ma coincide with 400 kyr eccentricity maxima, which suggests that periods with enhanced speciation and extinction events coincided with periods of maximum climate variability on high moisture levels.”
http://www.manfredmudelsee.com/publ/pdf/Trends-rhythms-and-events-in-Plio-Pleistocene-African-climate.pdf
All tipping points in play, Mr Mosher et al, it probably does not matter who is right or wrong, Extend the present interglacial to beyond our next potential hardware upgrade, some 200kyrs in our future, and then beyond somehow again, or strip, mitigate, the only thing prognosticated so far to be capable of extending the present interglacial. For, at least, two more glacials…………..
Representing the only known society so far capable of funding such a resource, democratically, NOAA need to up its game in light of
“Briefly, the data indicate that cooling into the Younger Dryas occurred in a few prominent decade(s)-long steps, whereas warming at the end of it occurred primarily in one especially large step (Figure 1.2) of about 8°C in about 10 years and was accompanied by a doubling of snow accumulation in 3 years; most of the accumulation-rate change occurred in 1 year. (This matches well the change in wind-driven upwelling in the Cariaco Basin, offshore Venezuela, which occurred in 10 years or less [Hughen et al., 1996].)”
“Abrupt Climate Change – Inevitable Surprises”, Committee on Abrupt Climate Change, National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, 2002, ISBN: 0-309-51284-0, 244 pages, Richard B. Alley, chair
Just sayin……………..
Book him, Danno, for public indecency.
And the Antarctic!
Theo @ur momisugly 4:10 “The experimental work must be done”
Precisely. That is what I was asking. Have they looked at the effect on anomalies. Nearly everyone here is assuming that finding different temperatures near the building is critical. I am pointing out that it is only critical if it affects the temperature differences from the long term average as measured using the same apparatus, located at the same point, and measured at the same time of day. Otherwise no big deal.
jimmi_the_dalek;
I am pointing out that it is only critical if it affects the temperature differences from the long term average as measured using the same apparatus, located at the same point, and measured at the same time of day. Otherwise no big deal.
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Of course it matters. For 100 years there is no building, then someone puts up a building and for the next ten years it is warmer and then someone puts up another building and for the next ten years it is even warmer than that…. how could it NOT matter?
jimmi_the_dalek says:
January 20, 2013 at 9:01 pm
Every meteorologist and every climate scientist should have a bright red face all day everyday out of shame that they interpose some human’s contrivance, anomalies, between actual measurements and what they record. I do not consider professional hockey a real sport because the game is often interrupted so that players can fight on the ice. I will never consider meteorology or climate science to be genuine sciences until they do away with anomalies.
Chuck Nolan says:
January 20, 2013 at 8:05 pm
“I wonder if UHI ‘is’ global warming? If the only increase in temperature is UHI. Everything else is natural variations of the weather.
People congregate and as cities grow everybody demands more energy to do their work for them. To move them around, for entertainment, etc. Even small towns exhibit some warming from UHI as they grow and depending on the location of their station maybe significant warming.
I wonder, are civilization and growth causing the increased temperature readings?
With so many people using energy for work and play, burning fuel, creating heat there must be some warming. But, I don’t think the warmth is caused by CO2, I think it’s the heat generated by people using energy 24/7.”
In the suburbs of Atlanta, the answer is yes. The addition of new shopping centers on three sides of your five acre property will send the temperature right through the roof.
Theo Goodwin
I do not consider professional hockey a real sport because the game is often interrupted so that players can fight on the ice.I do not consider professional hockey a real sport because the game is often interrupted so that players can fight on the ice.
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I take umbrage with this remark. Hockey is a shining example of just how far we have come in just two millennium. Ancient Rome had huge buildings called “coliseums” in which thousands of spectators would watch as paid athletes would do combat with sticks to which were affixed various blades. When a favoured combatant gained the upper hand, the crowd would leap to their feet and shout “kill ‘im! kill ‘im!”.
This is nothing like a modern coliseum in which thousands of spectators gather to watch as paid athletes do combat with sticks with blades attached because nowadays the blades have little variety and must be within a narrowly defined standard. When the paid athletes do engage in combat,, and one favoured combatant appears to gain the upper hand, the crowd leaps to its feet and shouts “kill ‘im! kill ‘im!”
How anyone could not see the vast difference is beyond me.
Can I source the group and ask for calculations? Take an airfield near you that has a weather station. Calculate the volume of airfield up to 100m above ground. Obtain figures of daily fuel consumption from the airport operators. Convert the burned fuel heat to temperature spread over the volume. See if there is a possibility of warming this way, or whether it can be discounted.
It’s not the same problem as jet wash impacting thermometers, but airports are often mentioned as having a bias. Can we calculate orders of magnitude and either kill or revive the question?