Today, NOAA is celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the 134° reading at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, including speakers, guests, and media coverage expected to begin at 11AM PDT, right about now. I find this fanfare odd, particularly in light of how understated the observer was when Mr. O.A. Denton recorded the temperature on the original paper B91 form, a photocopy of which you can see below:
The image above was released this morning on the NPS Death Valley Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/DeathValleyNP
Oddly, it is an entirely different B91 form that NOAA/NWS placed on their “celebration page” under the “about the record” tab here: http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/vef/deathvalley/
Why would there be two different paper records for the same month, one with remarks filled in and the other not? There are other clear differences also. One wonders why two paper records would be needed. Perhaps one was created for “official presentation”. Both forms appear to have identical layouts, but are filled out differently.
[added: Some commenters suggested a “carbon copy”. However, there are significant differences between the two, one is not a carbon of the other. For example “mean maximun” temperature is 116 on one form and 116.4 on another. The mean of max/min is 98.4 on one and 98.6 on another, with what looks like the .4 over written by the .6 And, as Mosher points out, the two forms have different handwriting. ]
Stranger though, that while they have time for this fanfare, neither the NOAA/NWS nor the NPS representatives have time to answers these questions about the record, which I posed to them last week in this email below.
Mr. Berc has since responded, but said he’d only answer my questions if I was present at the event, and when I replied that I would not be present, has offered no answers. Ms. Chipman has not replied.
===============================================================
From: Anthony Watts
Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2013 8:10 AM
To: daniel.berc@noaa.gov
Cc: cheryl_chipman@nps.gov
Subject: Death Valley 134 Celebration
Good morning,
I’ll be covering this event. I have some important questions that I’d like to ask.
1. Do you have press passes available?
2. Why did NOAA decommission the MMTS electronic sensor near the front of the Visitor Center last year and go back to using the mercury thermometer in the Stevenson Screen? What was the impetus? Am I correct in noting that the MMTS thermometer was in use for over a decade prior to last year?
3. When was the last time the Stevenson Screen received maintenance for paint? When I was last there, the screen looked quite chipped/peeling and had some darkened wood from aging. Is it painted with latex paint or the traditional lime based whitewash paint which was the standard in 1913 for all USWB Stevenson Screens?
4. Why does the NPS maintain the electronic sign that shows erroneous readings, such as what was highlighted in an LA Times story during the recent temperature spike?
There are actually 3 temperatures, if you included the bogus 132F from the sign.
It appears the reading comes from the non-official weather station mounted at just above roof level near the front wall of the visitor center. Is that the source?
5. Who is responsible for the weather station at Badwater basin near the turn-off/parking area and where is the data from it collected? Is the data available? In your press release you indicate that the 1913 Greenland Ranch reading is “…the highest reliably recorded air temperature on Earth. “. If Badwater basin station were to exceed the 1913 reading, would it be considered reliably recorded? It seems to be near state of the art equipment.
6. How often is the mercury thermometer in the Stevenson Screen at NPS Visitor Center checked for calibration? From the photo recently posted by NPS showing the 128F reading, it appears to be well aged. What is the age of that thermometer? Has it ever been tested by NIST or similar entity?
7. Is there any sort of backup or reference thermometer in place inside the Stevenson Screen?
8. Do you have a location (lat/lon) for the 1913 location of the station in Greenland Ranch? What date was the Greenland Ranch station decommissioned, and were there other intermediate locations before the station resided behind the NPS visitor center?
Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to the event.
Anthony Watts
WUWT
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After embarrassing myself in my first comment by screwing up my spreadsheet, maybe I can redeem myself as follows:
There are two other forms for the same month available at:
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/orders/IPS-3DF19CEB-2E4A-4CF7-AA21-287E1B8B9C87.pdf and
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/orders/IPS-53FCEC28-88ED-40A0-9B04-541300F51E89.pdf
These may be temporary urls. I accessed them by going to http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/IPS/coop/coop.html and searching for Greenland Ranch under California.
The first one is a U.S. Department of Commerce, Weather Bureau, Climatological Observer’s Meteorological Record for July 1913 on WB Form 1009 (?). The second appears to be a better copy of the “black and white” version in the main post with a cleaned up copy attached as page 2.
My original comparison was in error. Following are (hopefully) correct comparisons between the versions. “Color” refers to the first one in the post with blue lettering. B&W refers to the second form in the main post. WB1009 is the U.S. Department of Commerce form, instead of the U.S. Department of Agriculture form. The fourth form has identical, but more legible information, to the B&W so I omit any direct reference, but I got the numbers from the better quality version.
Date B&W Color WB1009
5-Jul Clear Cloudy Cloudy
6-Jul Clear Cloudy Cloudy
14-Jul(MAX) 127 123 127
20-Jul(MAX) 105 99 105
24-Jul Cloudy Clear Clear
26-Jul Cloudy Clear Clear
26-Jul(MAX) 104 101 104
26-Jul(MIN) 74 75 74
27-Jul(MAX) 105 105 106
SUM(MAX) 3609 3596 blank
SUM(MIN) 2506 2506 blank
MEAN(MAX) 116.4 116 116.4
It looks like the Weather Bureau Form 1009 may have been the original version. The B&W may also be original, but for the Dept. of Agriculture. The “Color” version looks like something that may have been created after the original with some of the temperature data edited.
I don’t think any of these, however, is the original, official version of the temperature record, based on something I found elsewhere. NOAA has a page dedicated to George Washington Carver. If you look at the weather data that he submitted on observations made at the Tuskegee Institute, the forms are stamped with the date received and were reviewed, mean temperatures calculated, and observations made, often in red ink. Sometimes, individual datums were changed, usually with little to no explanation of why temperature values were changed, sometimes by as much as 20 degrees.
The first observation by Carver was for November 1999 and was examined by G. Gardiner (?).
Feb of 1902 has extensive notations,
Feb of 1910 has large adjustments made in red ink.
Dec of 1945 was also edited by there is no indication by whom.
Nov of 1950 also shows some temperature datum adjustments.
Where are the forms for Death Valley (Greenland Ranch), CA for July of 1913 that have the file stamps showing when they were received and the names, initials and/or notes of the reviewers? I suspect that the difference between the various versions was due to just such a review and the adjusted/corrected values ended up on the “color” copy, which was created after the reviews, maybe because it was recognized as a record high temperature and somebody may have wanted to create a clean copy, but who knows?
Finally, I found a digital copy on Google books (http://books.google.com) of Instructions for cooperative observers issued by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture as of February 26, 1915. In paragraph 49, the instructions for filling out the forms are as follows:
As a side note to Anthony, somebody has been very diligently trying to create a weather observation history (including lots of great pictures of actual locations of stevenson screens) for a number of stations here.
On the color copy one might note the notation at the bottom. “In Triplicate” means that 3 copies were submitted.
REPLY: that isn’t an issue nor the question. The question is why are 2 known copies different? – Anthony
Considering the amount of money pouring into the issue from the fossil fuel industry, my bet is both copies are forgeries planted via the use of time machines financed by Exxon. The current unprecedented warmth being again confirmed by Mann’s hockey stick graphs, of course.
Because the copies were made by hand?
Probably for nothing (in this case).
When the government surveyors went out to survey “the west” of the Ohio River, they kept notes.
The notes were brought back to the office, drafted into a map, which was approved by the Surveyor General.
6×6 mile townships, that would later be divided into 1×1 mile sections, divided again as needed or as sold/ acquired by settlers.
So, mid-1800’s you go due west, on a compass bearing setting a marker at every mile.
Then due north (up and down hills, cut a path thru that forest, work thru that swamp).
Yes, the east-west lines are a curve, of latitude. (you’ve got the North star).
Corrections are made every 24 miles.
After working in government for 26 years, this is no mystery. When you need to fill out a form in multiple copies, the easiest way is to do it once by carbon paper or NCR paper if you’ve got to do it without a copier or printer. However, sometimes there’s no carbon paper around or you need to send an extra copy somewhere, so what do you do? You re-copy by hand. Depending on where it’s going, you don’t need to fill out everything, just the relevant parts. So, basically, they end up getting filed in two different places and decades later, don’t perfectly match, because nobody ever figured a routine document would ever be looked at again.
Rattus and Mosher,
Hint, in English language, copies in duplicate or triplicate don’t mean that the documents can have different readings or notations. They need to be identical.
So much for English majors.
It would be helpful to know what the bureau procedures were for submitting forms back in 1913. After looking at the two images, one layered over the other, it does look like the handwriting was from the same person. The difference might be that the black and white version was done day by day and the blue version was done as a cleaned up copy for end of the month paperwork to be sent into some central office. The blue copy does look like carbon paper and it is in a slightly neater hand. That would explain the hash marks in the cloudy/clear column rather than spending more time writing the same two words over and over down the column. It’s also possible that the decimals were required for the submitted form to be sent off to a main office. The day by day would be written in the standard fractions that the writer was comfortable with. As I said, it would be helpful to know what the regs were back then for form submission.
“temperature is 116 on one form and 116.4 on another
I think that carbon paper 100 years ago did not have the precision of todays carbon paper and rounded off the decimals.
Maybe Mr. Denton was dislexic? Or the person copying it? Or it was so darn hot he’d gone nuts? The only way to escape heat like that is in a mine, cave or underground dwelling. No AC back then.
“It would be helpful to know what the bureau procedures were for submitting forms back in 1913.” Deb Wise.
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Exactly.
I couple of points. Ball point pens didn’t come into general use until the 1950s. When I went to grammar school in California in the 1940s, every desk had an inkwell with ink in it. Let me assure you that no sane teacher would give a third grader a bowl of ink if there were a viable alternative. Carbon paper might have been available in 1913, but it would only have been used with typed or pencil written material — not being all that useful for fountain pens. In general, the hateful stuff was used for typed material because of smudging from hands/wrists resting on the paper while writing higher up the page. Office copiers didn’t come into wide use until the 1960s. If two copies of something were required in 1913, the copy would surely have been made by hand. I think we are probably looking at the original and a hand generated official copy. Why make a copy? Possibly because the original was kept on site, and a copy was kept in Washington? But there could be other reasons.
There are probably folks still around who worked around weather stations during or prior to WWII. Probably should ask them how the data was handled.
Two words: “Evaporative cooler”. A natural for a hot, dry clime like Death Valley. Widely used as early as 1385 in Iran.
Commercial product, US Patent #838602 ca. 1906 http://www.google.com/patents?id=04pHAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
.
Apparently not when it comes to actually communicating. You know, with proper punctuation, grammar, etc.
The blue copy has an additional signature. My bet is the black one is the original; the blue one is a cleaned up copy; and the extra signature to the left and below the normal signature line is that of the copier. What doesn’t fit though are the humidity readings added in yhe blue copy. Where did they come from?
_Jim Two words: “Evaporative cooler”. A natural for a hot, dry clime like Death Valley. Widely used as early as 1385 in Iran.
==========
Certainly possible. But my guess would be at the Furnace Creek oasis in 1913, the buildings were probably built of locally available materials — e.g. adobe bricks albeit maybe with a wood roof. They’d have had to haul the wood for a frame building a long way using horses or mules. Not all that cool when temps are that high, but probably 20-30 degrees F cooler than the ambient air. Having encountered 120F air temps in my youth in the upper Salinas Valley, I recall indoor temps as being unpleasant whereas outside temps were simply brutal.
Yesterday was kind of strange day temperature wise for celebration the maximum recorded
in the CRS shelter with conventional max thermometer mounted on townsend support was
measured at 120 degrees.
The real time station that I watch all the time which is the one mounted on pole on side
of Visitor’s Center high was only 117.
Usually never see more than 1 deg difference at most 2 for max,possibly one was influenced
by partial cloud cover that moved in yesterday currently only 102 there heavy cloud cover has moved over most desert stations today Needles currently only 82 Thermal 84 at noon
rain at couple upper deserts stations.
Would have been strange to have these conditions of today for remembering the
infamous 134 occurance.
Entirely consistent with global warming belief. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hcz0NwtU7Q
{ richard verney says:
July 10, 2013 at 4:18 pm
The real story here is that the 100 year record has not been broken. It is that fact that should be hailed.
Everything else is just an aside. }
Except, of course, the only days with maximum temperatures less than 100 degrees was when it rained. Heat of evaporation/humidity in the air, are not accounted for in the official global records.