UPDATE: 7/12/13 1045 PDT DMI concedes the record may not be valid, see here
I’ve been working on this one for a week, and I finally confirmed my hunch about where the weather station is located. The story begins with Jason Samenow at the Washington Post, who made a big deal out of a new temperature record in Maniitsoq, Greenland:
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/08/01/greenland-soars-to-highest-temperature-ever-recorded/
Any time I read about new record temperatures in the Arctic or Antarctic, I tend to think of this simple truth: In near polar settlements, temperature is measured close to that small human island of warmth , and since most such towns are completely dependent on aviation, the measurement is often done at the airport, since weather there is a go/no go factor of primary importance.
It turns out I was correct. What was surprising was just how correct my hunch turned out to be.
First, the Maniitsoq, Greenland data for July 30th, courtesy of Weather Underground:
Source: http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/BGMQ/2013/7/30/DailyHistory.html?req_city=NA&req_state=NA&req_statename=NA&MR=1
Note the yellow highlights for the Tmax. This confirms Samenow’s story, though I find it curious that Weather Underground didn’t round up to 79F based on Samenow’s reported value of 78.6F (which he likes to say is nearly 80F). No matter, there are other issues that I was suspicious of.
First, this is a weather event, it doesn’t have anything to do with climate, as DMI indicated on their weather map for the day, strong warm winds behind a warm front washed over southwest Greenland, where Maniitsoq is located:
Weather pattern responsible for record warmth in southwest Greenland (Danish Meteorological Institute)
Samenow was correct in noting:
It adds the warmth may have been enhanced by a phenomenon known as the Foehn Effect, in which air flows over nearby elevated terrain and compresses and heats on its way down. In this case, DMI believes the air may have passed over the elevated Sugar Loaf ice cap and then dried and warmed up as it descended (or downsloped) on its leeward side into Maniitsoq.
But then falls back into the “it must somehow be related to global warming” position saying:
The DMI says the warmth was not “unnatural”, but explains it fits into a long-term pattern of climate warming.
“[T]here is an indisputable gradual increase in temperature in Greenland,” DMI writes. “Along the way, any ‘warm event’ thus have a higher probability of being slightly warmer than the previous one.”
As I pointed out at the beginning of this article, the temperature was measured at the airport. But how good is that weather station location? Is it biased by its placement at the airport? It took me a week to find it, but find it I did.
First, an overview from Google Earth of the town and the airport. You can clearly see the “nearby elevated terrain” near the airport.
The winds were out of the Northeast at the time of the high reading after 5PM, note yellow highlights:
Next, from aerial closeup and my experience with spotting hundreds of weather stations for the SurfaceStations project, this is where I thought the Stevenson Screen might be at the airport. try as I might though, I couldn’t find a photo of it.
It turned out that a video shot by a tourist (Bart Rietveld) confirmed my suspicion, I found it this morning during a bout of insomnia. Here’s the screencap from the video, looking Northwest from the tarmac at BGMQ aka Maniitsoq airport.
Source: @ 0:15 into this video:
Here is what I conclude about the station placement:
- Maniitsoq airport is a recent development in the history of the area, it has been settled for almost 4000 years. It is an anomaly carved out of the landscape (see first Google Earth image).
- The weather station is surrounded by the airport runway and tarmac, which is unnatural ground cover. Note how dark it is in the tourist video.
- The dark albedo there is enough to melt snow in the winter, in fact they count on it to help keep the airport open. Just like I showed in Svalbard, they have to keep the runway open even after snowfall, and it becomes an albedo anomaly surrounded by snow.
- The local siting effects likely added to the temperature record on July 30th because the easterly wind would also have picked up some of the heat from the terminal building and tarmac and transported it to the weather station.
- For these reasons, it isn’t a good place to measure temperature for climate, but it is the best place to measure weather/temperature for aviation purposes: right next to the runway.
It seems that DMI agrees that this temperature is artificially elevated at the Maniitsoq airport, because according to this story in Nunatsiaq Online, DMI has discarded the record in favor of one in the town. They added this footnote to their story about record heat in Greenland:
[Note: the DMI later rescinded the claim that the July 30 temperature was a record-breaker, saying that the lower temperature recorded at another station in the community — 24 C — stands for that day. That’s 1.9 C lower than the record, which is still to be broken]
Note also that DMI had this to say in the original report on the event:
Whether the 25.9 ° C later elevated to a new record for Greenland will first be decided after further climatological study of the situation.
While I could not find the rescinding announcement at DMI, likely due to me being unable to effectively interpret the language on the DMI website, I can confirm that as of today, 11 days after the event, the old record still stands:
Source: http://www.dmi.dk/groenland/arkiver/vejrekstremer/
It looks like Mr. Samenow at the Washington Post will need to issue a retraction. Ditto for Dr. Jason Box and who also bought into the event without questioning it or following up on it.
And these news articles need corrections (readers can help by sending notes to them):
Related articles
- Greenland soars to its highest temperature ever recorded, almost 80 degrees F. (washingtonpost.com)
- Greenland Hits Highest Temperature Ever Recorded (thesterlingroad.com)
- Global weirding 2013: same temp in Ojai as in Greenland (achangeinthewind.com)
- Record high temperature recorded in Greenland (summitcountyvoice.com)
- Greenland hottest ever (blogs.redding.com)
- Greenland experiences ‘record high’ temperatures (blueandgreentomorrow.com)
===================================================================
UPDATE Dr. Richard Keen adds in comments:
All this discussion of a degree or two is a moot point, since even the “nearly 80 degrees”, i.e. 79F, is still 7 degrees short of the record high for Greenland.
That honor belongs to Ivigtut, down on the southern tip of Greenland (probably not far from Maniitsoq), where it was 86F (30.1C) sometime before 1940. This record is published in:
Climates of the World, in Climate and Man – Yearbook of Agriculture, US Dept of Agriculture, 1941
reprinted in:
Climates of the World, US Dept. Commerce, 1969
and even in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivittuut
So you know it’s valid.
I don’t know the exact date of the record, but suffice it to say it’s before 1940, which explains why the DMI chose to use records starting in 1958. After all, Greenland weather records go back to 1784 (Vinther et al., Extending Greenland temperature records into the late eighteenth century, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 111, D11105, doi:10.1029/2005JD006810, 2006). It’s a common ploy for the Warmers to act as though climate started in 1958, when Keeling starting recording CO2 on Mauna Loa, or 1947, when the PDO went cool, or 1970, when Arctic temperatures bottomed out, to get their upward trends.
Great work on this Anthony !!
Great report.
May I suggest that airports should be equipped with two weather stations, one near the runway, and one way over in unimproved land. The runway conditions are reported to the pilots and the more remote station is used for climatological reporting.
Issue a retraction?
We don’ need no steenkin’ retraction….
Sorry – could not resist –
I got this shown to me earlier today
http://inspiredbyiceland.tumblr.com/post/11858829498/the-invention-of-false-advertising-iceland
BTW great work – as usual it will not get the same attention as the original message – MSM relies on this pragma I assume.
Residents of Calgary are more than familiar with the Foehn Effect, we call it a Chinook. It can raise the temperature from -30C to +20C in an hour as moist Pacific air climbs over the Rockies and drops snow all over BC, then descends to the Plains.
Any mountainous region will experience this at some point, which is why peak temperatures at any location are essentially meaningless. Also, breaking a record going back to 1958 is not even remotely close to a significant effect. Call me when a record going back 1000 years is broken, but even so it’s a transient peak only captured in one measurement.
Even playing by the warmists’ own rules (ie, weather doesn’t matter, just climate) even if the record stood it wouldn’t mean anything. .
It still amazes me how they jump on the tiniest apparent evidence of warming, but are completely blind to the cooling we’re seeing all around us. I personally would like more than the one day of summer we managed so far this year.
“It looks like Mr. Samenow at the Washington Post will need to issue a retraction.”
Nope. His boss Bezos needs to sell some more CO2AGW books. Amazon still has warehouses full of the stuff. (I suspect)
In 1958 did they measure temps constantly…and just grab a peak?
Slightly off-topic, but in the Google-Earth picture which Anthony shows of Maniitsoq, I find the huge glacier-scratchmarks in the bedrock surrounding the village very interesting.
One most-interesting feature to me, that these scratches don’t all run parallel, but some are angled roughly at 90 degrees in relation to others.
During the deep glaciation this spot obviously has experienced during the past ice-age, some very interesting geological as well as glacial effects must have been at play here.
The AGW people use this as a tactic. They take the high ground with fraudulent news releases. Retraction or not, it doesn’t matter; the normal person hearing/seeing the news releases only remembers the sensationalism.
We don’t control the news media, and therefore, we can’t get our information released. The manipulators [who get money from the government] are part of this giant conspiracy: manipulation of the voters!
On the larger scale, AGW is tied with IPCC and World Government, and massive investment/tax money. Maybe I should write a book: “World Wide Domination Via Deceit and Manipulation”.
CodeTech says:
August 10, 2013 at 6:27 am
Also, breaking a record going back to 1958 is not even remotely close to a significant effect. Call me when a record going back 1000 years is broken
===========
sit on the beach and watch the waves. would you be surprised to find that the longer you watched, the more likely it became that you would see a wave bigger than anything previously? yet somehow we forget this simple truth when talking about temperature and climate. If you keep records long enough you will always see a new record high, or record storm, or record flood, or record drought, or record snowfall.
And it has nothing at all to do with climate change. It is simple probability. The odds of tossing a coin and getting 10 tails in a row is low, but if you keep tossing the odds keep improving until it is almost certain. Similarly, the odds of a record high temperature are low, but if you keep recording the odds keep improving until it is almost certain.
People are fooled by the Gambler’s Fallacy. The notion that heads and tails must even out over time, so if you throw 10 tails in a row, people incorrectly assume that the odds of getting a head are improved. They are not. In a coin toss, history has no effect on the future.
However, in the case of Climate, this fallacy is especially misleading. Unlike a coin toss, climate is affected by history. If yesterday was hot, the odds are improved that today will also be hot. If last year was hot, the odds are improved that this year will be hot. What this means is that climate does not behave the way we would expect, it fools us into thinking that “something different” is happening with climate. So we start looking for people to blame, be it witches or owners of SUV’s.
Does anybody have a picture of the Kugluktuk (Coppermine) weather station.
Weatherunderground show its location as a 50 sqft pad about 200 ft from the arctic ocean.
I have been watching it for a few days because its temperature is running 20 to 30 degrees above the rest of Canada. The odd thing is the temperature is tracking solar irradiance… exactly. Without regard for wind speed or direction. I can see that happening in the desert, but on a marshy beach near a less than 40 degree ocean? It doesn’t seem likely.
In your wheelhouse, Anthony – great work! It’s most likely that without your investigation the false high 2013 temp would have become the new historical high temp for Maniitsoq. Too bad that the false high will join the Big Gov. alarming crescendo of the CAGW believers.
We all do know how bad Big Gov. CAGW plotting, whining, sobbing and screeching is.
This post is excellent for mass distribution.
It is amazing and instructive to see how you marshall all of these data into an irrefutable post. You are an impressive dude, dude. 😀
The Gamblers Fallacy of Climate Change
————————————————-
Hot and cold years must even out over time, otherwise this would be evidence of climate change. Therefore, the more hot years you see in a row, this must make it more likely that the next year will be cold. Otherwise, if you continue to see hot years, this is evidence of climate change.
False. Observation shows that Climate has memory. A hot year this year makes it more likely you will see a hot year next year. Thus one should not be surprised by long periods of warming (or cooling) that appear to defy the odds. It is this appearance of “defying the odds” that gives rise to The Gambler’s Fallacy of Climate Change.
DavidCobb says:
August 10, 2013 at 7:29 am
Kugluktuk (Coppermine) weather station…
===============
Here are the forecasts highs for Saturday onwards:
Environment Canada Forecast
27,29,30,29,16,12
http://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/nu-16_metric_e.html
The Weather Network 7 Day Forecast
23,24,24,19,18,15
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/canada/nunavut/kugluktuk
And the IPCC tells us that anything more that 2C warming over the next 100 years will be catastrophic. Yet here we have two different forecasts for the same town, showing as much as 10C difference!!
By the logic of the IPCC, the Canadian Government should be declaring a state of emergency in Kugluktuk. Clearly this 10C difference far exceeds the IPCC guidelines for Thermagedon.
You can’t find the rescinding announcement, because it isn’t there. What DMI usually do, is make a report, with an alarming headline. At the end of the report they write that it may not be so, and then nothing more. No new report, or news. on the topic. The only thing you find in their archive is the original report. If you need to know the truth, you need to dig through the data yourself. Most people don’t. That’s how DMI keeps the global warming myth alive.
It would be interesting to see how this temperature location has varied in the past or has it even been recorded….is it always the highest recorded temp. in Greenland?
Rather than tracking max and min temperatures which, in some cases may be short-lived spikes, a better (but more difficult) approach would be to numerically integrate the temperature over time to obtain a statistic in units of temp*time. This could then be reported for a location for every 24-hour period of time, midnight-to-midnight.
Well done sir Anthony!
I am still looking for news about a barely crop harvest in Greenland. When that occurs, then we can be almost certain that the overall Greenland temperature is near to what it was 1,000 years ago. Until then, Greenland and its climate concerns me not.
True to form, the IPCC will simply ignore any retaraction and report the “near-80° highest-temperature ever” in their next Alarmodrivel™ report, AR5.
Yet another AGW evidence of doom that fails to hold up under reasonable scrutiny.
The list is long and seems to consist of every bit of evidence offered by the AGW promotion industry.
Recent readers of WUWT may not have seen the “How not to measure . . .” entries of several years ago.**** Anthony’s use of Part 94 in the title to this post should be noted. The story for this one is really about the weather and the gullible press, more so than the location of the Stevenson Screen. It’s not as though this box got a blast of hot exhaust from a 4-engine jet or that it is located on a roof top covered with black tar. Look at the second image: Is there a suitable site for a weather station meant for recording “climate” information? It is probably very adequate for the job it is dedicated to do, and that is not climate science.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
****Use the following search string in your browser and find some of the other posts. Some of the low numbered ones are more entertaining. You can spend hours; get your drink now.
How_not_to_measure_temperature
======================================
Good job on this one, Anthony.
Nice bit of detective work Anthony.
WaPo journalist emailed and comment posted after article.
Anthony Nice work.
Several people commented on the shortness of the record-only to 1958. There are longer records although not exactly from the same area, but they show that Greenland was warmer in the 1920 to 1940 period than today. I wrote about Arctic warming in that period recently and provide a short relevant extract below;
” Section Three examines the output of scientists from the modern period examining the 1920-1940 data. Section Four examines that era’s material compiled during that active period of climatology of the 1960’s and 70’s, whilst Section Five reviews the output from the contemporary scientists of the day, and examines other information from that era.
Kelly from CRU (then the University of East Anglia) was present at the 1978 meeting referenced earlier and many subsequent papers were derived from his study of sea ice 1901-1950. CRU remains active in arctic research with Professor Phil Jones illustrating temperatures in Greenland during 1784-2004 (published 2006) It usefully complements the NOAA and NASA (arctic wide) temperatures referenced. His graphic showing coastal instrumental records comes from Page 10 figure 10 of the following link.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/greenland/vintheretal2006.pdf
This link provides the composite data used; http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/greenland/swgreenlandave.dat
“The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades. Two distinct cold periods, following the 1809 (‘‘unidentified’’) volcanic eruption and the eruption of Tambora in 1815 make the 1810s the coldest decade on record.”
The Figure 10 composite raises some intriguing issues. The warmest two decades in the Arctic record- the 1930’s and 40’s- did not apparently cause as much melting as the current shorter-but becoming warmer- Arctic warm period commencing around 2000. That data can be seen in the NOAA and NASA graphs referenced, and also in the link below, where data was brought up to 2011.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Greenland_ice_sheet_summer_temperatures_highest_in_172_years.html
Note the different parameters used here of ‘Greenland ice sheet summer surface air temperatures: 1840-2011’ rather than the coastal temperatures used in the CRU study, but whilst not like for like the general trends can be seen.
——- ——– —–
Tonyb
Want to see an interesting record? This isn’t an “all time” record but an interesting record for the month of December: Kugluktuk, Nunavut, Canada. December record: 81.3F (27.4C)
And that 81.3F record occurred during a month with 0 hours of sunshine.
When I can’t sleep, I paint or draw. You must be the only person who when he can’t sleep goes hunting for pictures of weather stations at obscure airports.
Whatever happened to that big Watts et al paper on US temperature trends?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/
It’s been over a year now, and not a peep. Most papers pass peer review in that time, if they’re going to pass at all….
Sedron L:
re your post at August 10, 2013 at 9:52 am.
Personal requests from anonymous trolls should not be answered. I trust that our host will do the proper thing and ignore yours.
Richard
People will remember this record. It does not matter if it is false or not. This is a record Hot temperature, caused by Global warming. Any retraction will not matter. The only thing that matters is the press releases, that is why the cAGW crowd are winning.
Well done on getting a correction Mr Watts, but I fear all of your work is in vain. They already got their message out. They always win with press releases, they can always apologise to an empty orchestra. 🙁
Richard: It’s a legitimate question.
I wonder what this site would say about another research group who put out a big noisy press release and then failed to deliver the goods. My guess: it wouldn’t be very nice.
DavidCobb says:
August 10, 2013 at 7:29 am
Does anybody have a picture of the Kugluktuk (Coppermine) weather station.
Weatherunderground show its location as a 50 sqft pad about 200 ft from the arctic ocean.
I have been watching it for a few days because its temperature is running 20 to 30 degrees above the rest of Canada. The odd thing is the temperature is tracking solar irradiance… exactly. Without regard for wind speed or direction. I can see that happening in the desert, but on a marshy beach near a less than 40 degree ocean? It doesn’t seem likely.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
David, at low angles, an ocean’s surface makes for an excellent mirror.
Methinks, the high daylight-temps at Kugluktuk reflect (pun intended) increased solar irradiation heating the station’s Stevenson Screen, due to the sea-surface reflecting sunlight on it.
@crosspatch
You wrote: “Want to see an interesting record? This isn’t an “all time” record but an interesting record for the month of December: Kugluktuk, Nunavut, Canada. December record: 81.3F (27.4C)”
I agree, that is an interesting record, given that the average December high for Kugluktuk is
-21.4C, -6.5F; and as you mentioned, this occurred when there was virtually no sunlight. I can see your figure verified here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugluktuk#Climate
Perhaps there was a pocket of CO2 crowding the Kugluktuk airport at the time?
Preview is here.
Thanks Anthony – appreciated!
And, incidentally, an excellent bit of detective work.
My Danish is pretty non-existent, but I think that only three months’ records, as shown in your screencap of the DMI website, are not taken from airport [= Lufthavn (~ Heaven-haven or sky-port)] sites.
Auto
Sedron L:
As a courtesy I am writing to say your anonymous troll comment addressed to me has been read, noted and ignored.
This post can be taken as my courtesy response to all similar anonymous troll comments so I shall not be making an actual reply to them.
Richard
The dark albedo there is enough to melt snow in the winter, in fact they count on it to help keep the airport open. Just like I showed in Svalbard, they have to keep the runway open even after snowfall, and it becomes an albedo anomaly surrounded by snow.
Australia spent several $10s of millions building an ice air strip in Antarctica at a location where it never gets above zero, then found it wasn’t usable for several months a year because of melted water on the surface.
The reason was planes taking off and landing, sprayed black carbon on the ice surface causing melt at well below zero.
When the sun shines at temperatures below zero, albedo rules.
I note that the accepted record is at Kangerlussuaq. This is one of the two main Greenland entry points with regular flights from Copenhagen. I also note that two other monthly highs are also at Kangerlussuaq. It is essentially only a long runway with basic terminal buildings and lots of concrete/ tarmac and dark rock & gravel. (Been there).
Perhaps these ‘records’ could be suspect?
Thomas , Scotland
Sedron L says:
“It’s been over a year now, and not a peep. Most papers pass peer review in that time, if they’re going to pass at all….”
Most papers that are ‘Pal Reviewed’ pass review in a matter of weeks or months. Michael Mann recently got a paper reviewed in less tha two months, IIRC. But even if you are Prof Richard Lindzen with more than 200 publications, papers can easily take more than a year to be reviewed. Dr. Lindzen mentioned a while back that he was still waiting for a paper to be reviewed, and that it had been a year since it was submitted.
The problem is in the journal system, which in the climate field is controlled by people riding the grant gravy train, and they do not want any narrative other than their own to receive the imprimatur of peer review.
Best I can tell (by interpolation) is that the airport is at 65 north latitude.
The runway is going from the southeast to the northwest, right next to the sea, and Google Maps – for what that is worth – says the weather station is next to the runway, a few feet on the land side. This means that the weather station is – as noted above – completely exposed to sunlight reflecting “up” from the open water and flat runways to the south and west of the weather station box for all hours from from just before noon until the sun sets.
So, from the NOAA’s solar calculator website for this latitude for yesterday afternoon:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/neubrew/SolarCalc.jsp
Year-MM-DD-HH Air Mass, Elevation Angle, Azimuth Angle
2013 08 09 04 17.86137 2.31772 55.27559
2013 08 09 05 7.09196 7.70643 68.63968
2013 08 09 06 4.13642 13.76555 81.95252
2013 08 09 07 2.89523 20.05800 95.52560
2013 08 09 08 2.25556 26.20817 109.73129
2013 08 09 09 1.89240 31.81040 124.95727
2013 08 09 10 1.68177 36.40690 141.50659
2013 08 09 11 1.56920 39.51574 159.41527
2013 08 09 12 1.53039 40.72981 178.25969
2013 08 09 13 1.55772 39.86648 197.18739
2013 08 09 14 1.65658 37.05514 215.30292
2013 08 09 15 1.84800 32.67355 232.09510
2013 08 09 16 2.17999 27.19909 247.53103
2013 08 09 17 2.76076 21.09680 261.88273
2013 08 09 18 3.86658 14.78063 275.53310
2013 08 09 19 6.40048 8.62839 288.86248
2013 08 09 20 14.96880 3.05267 302.19672
So, with air mass being relatively low, there is a lot of solar energy getting through the atmosphere to be reflected, and yes, that energy is at the right area to be reflected back up into the sides of the weather station “box” ….
There have been a number of comments about the temperature at Kugluktuk. I do weather forecasting for the Northwest Territories in Canada. It has been extremely hot there for the past couple of weeks, and through most of the summer in fact. Many highs near 30C and above. Just a few days ago Fort MacPherson, not too far south of the Arctic coastline in the west NWT was 33C and a location just southeast of Norman Wells, (near Great Bear Lake) was also 33C. Quite a few record highs have been set in the last few days. A lot of these sites are at forestry stations well away from any airports.
Michael Mann recently got a paper reviewed in less tha two months, IIRC.
Watson and Crick’s took about six weeks.
climatereason says:
August 10, 2013 at 9:27 am
I wonder how the recent warm Greenland ice sheet summer temperatures were measured. Possibly with electric-powered digital thermometers?
morgamboguru
sea is to the north, sun is to the south.
Looks more like poor air flow around the sensor.
Aug 6 had a north breeze which kept the temperature down to just above sixty until it shifted and the temp rose to 75 in just a couple of hours. Historical temp data for month of August this year shows flat dew point but temps rise to around max at noon and stay there till around six or seven at night.
The problem is in the journal system, which in the climate field is controlled by people riding the grant gravy train…
Don’t contrariains like to pass around these lists of the hundreds of non-consensus peer-reviewed papers? Yes, I think they do.
PS: I made a simple requst for the status of a widely announced work. It’s a legitimate question. I don’t understand why a mere request annoys so many people.
Great work, Tony. Brilliant. Who needs professional meteorologists? Let us hear the reply when you write to John Cappelen (the article’s author – above link)
Could you please now debunk the recent ‘record’ temps in Austria and Shanghai?
Re: Kuglutuk in December.
I have a database of temperatures from the former Coppermine and now Kuglutuk airport that goes to 1997. The warmest December temperature I can find is 4.4C in 1934. I think Wikipedia has it wrong, or something amazing happened since 1997.
Sedron L:
Your post at August 10, 2013 at 10:59 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/10/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-94-maniitsoq-greenland-all-time-high-temperature-rescinded/#comment-1386387
says
Of course you do!
Your question has no relevance of any kind to the subject of this thread.
It was clearly intended to deflect from the subject of the thread and – as such – was pure trolling provided with the intent of inhibiting discussion of the subject of this thread. And your pressing the matter with irrelevance (e.g. about publication time of a paper pertaining to biology decades ago) demonstrates that remains your purpose
Your original ;point was completely answered by dbstealey at August 10, 2013 at 10:52 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/10/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-94-maniitsoq-greenland-all-time-high-temperature-rescinded/#comment-1386375
I strongly commend that everybody ignores any further posts from you unless they are clearly on topic. In other words, “Don’t feed the troll”.
Richard
ferd berple says:
August 10, 2013 at 7:23 am “sit on the beach and watch the waves. would you be surprised to find that the longer you watched, the more likely it became that you would see a wave bigger than anything previously? yet somehow we forget this simple truth when talking about temperature and climate. If you keep records long enough you will always see a new record high, or record storm, or record flood, or record drought, or record snowfall.”
Pareto distribution.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ParetoDistribution.html
http://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Pareto_distribution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
All this discussion of a degree or two is a moot point, since even the “nearly 80 degrees”, i.e. 79F, is still 7 degrees short of the record high for Greenland. That honor belongs to Ivigtut, down on the southern tip of Greenland (probably not far from Maniitsoq), where it was 86F (30.1C) sometime before 1940. This record is published in:
Climates of the World, in Climate and Man – Yearbook of Agriculture, US Dept of Agriculture, 1941
reprinted in: climates of the World, US Dept. Commerce, 1969
and even in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivittuut
So you know it’s valid.
I don’t know the exact date of the record, but suffice it to say it’s before 1940, which explains why the DMI chose to use records starting in 1958. After all, Greenland weather records go back to 1784 (Vinther et al., Extending Greenland temperature records into the late eighteenth century, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 111, D11105, doi:10.1029/2005JD006810, 2006). It’s a common ploy for the Warmers to act as though climate started in 1958, when Keeling starting recording CO2 on Mauna Loa, or 1947, when the PDO went cool, or 1970, when Arctic temperatures bottomed out, to get their upward trends. That’s so the Dust Bowl Deniers can avoid the Inconvenient Truth of all those heat records early in the past century (peruse Weather & Climate Extremes, http://wmo.asu.edu/ ). That includes the all-time global heat record of 134F at that other Greenland, Greenland Ranch, which was the focus of discussion at WUWT a month ago.
Anthony, I think you’re putting a bit too much emphasis on albedo. First, it’s not really a problem for catching trends if the surroundings stay pretty much the same. In the Svalbard case, the weather station was established when the airport was built. I don’t know the weather station specifically, but I’ve been to that airport a couple of dozen times. One can perhaps argue that the runway is free of snow and ice more often with increased traffic, but again, I find it hard to believe that it’s measurable. The weather station is on turf (or snow most of the year), measurements are done 2 meters above it, the tarmac is several meters away, and the sun never rises high in the sky at 78N. During winter there is no sun at all for 4 months, in reality probably more than 5 months because of the mountainside rising 500m to the south of the runway.
The real problem with temperature records, in particular for Svalbard airport, is homogenisation when the station has been moved. Most of the Svalbard airport record has been reconstructed from stations many km away, even 10’s or 100’s of km away with very different microclimate, so the reconstruction is only an educated guess. Whether the all time high in Greenland is exceptional depends on how long the station has been in service in its current location.
“mogamboguru says:
August 10, 2013 at 7:03 am
Slightly off-topic, but in the Google-Earth picture which Anthony shows of Maniitsoq, I find the huge glacier-scratchmarks in the bedrock surrounding the village very interesting.
One most-interesting feature to me, that these scratches don’t all run parallel, but some are angled roughly at 90 degrees in relation to others.”
Mogamboguru, I think (not sure, since I’ve never been there) what you are looking at what geologists refer to as joint patterns… these are not the result of glaciation. They often occur in igneous rock, and are often seen in orthogonal patterns. They are generally considered to be the result of decompression of rock as overburden is eroded away. If you look at central and northern Ontario on Google Earth you will see many such examples.
REPLY: to Sedron L Happy to provide an update. We’ve retooled it entirely, and to deal with the TOBs issue, it required going over the metadata and paper records of over 1200 stations, all done in free time, with no funding. If this was a University enterprise, a grant could have been applied for and a handful of grad students put on the job.
We have redone the dataset and the analysis, and have been rewriting the paper. Such things take time. My reality, is one far different from funded institutional science – Anthony
ANTHONY I know this is off thread, but need to get the message to you that here in the UK the site is plagued by pop up video ads from people like Tesco and it is virtually unreadable. I have grabbed a rare gap in the mayhem to get this message in.
REPLY to Old’un
WUWT doesn’t have popup video ads, the problem is some adware/malware that has installed itself on your computer. Consider also using a modern/updated browser with a popup blocker.
Let us be charitable to Sedron L.
He was curious.
He asked a question.
He has a reply.
Next we will see the thank you for the reply and we can get back to the relevant issue of weather monitoring at airports being anomalous for the local area.
Is this more of a problem in cold (polar) regions as the article suggests? Perhaps we can find greater and growing divergence between: Airport weather stations and Nearest Other weather stations, at High latitudes compared to Lower latitudes?
Would this help ascertain if there is or is not a problem with airport weather stations?
Where Sedron is heard, a discouraging word,
But the skies are not cloudy all day.
======================
ANTHONY Thanks for the advice. ‘Pop ups’ were already blocked on Safari (I use an IPad), but I have ‘cleared cookies’ whatever that means and the ads have stopped.
Keep up the good work with WUWT!
To Old’un, Had the same problem. Have just installed “Admuncher” software (trial version). Now the problem [seems to] have gone – touch wood!
To Old’un and others:
I’m pretty ancient myself, but I have learned (by bitter experience) to clear cookies every week or two and I would recommend installing “Ghostery” which gives more protection and is free. Best wishes, Dave.
False, you’ve fallen victim to the Gambler’s Fallacy yourself.
At the very beginning of a long series, it is true that you can expect unusual event X sometime during it. But the further you get into it without seeing one, the odds do not thereby increase. In fact they fall, in proportion to the ratio of the series remaining to be sampled.
Another retraction candidate
Manitsoq appears to be included in Berkeley Earth Greenland
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/station-list/region/greenland
Is the warming then only due to AMO and the little warming since the 1940s peak just due to UHI?
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/greenland
And it gets even “worse”, Arctic sea ice in recent years not different from 70 years ago !
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/arctic-sea-ice-data-collected-by-dmi-1893-1961-259.php
-> Climate sensitivity near zero ?
I think the real Q is, if the airport regularly hits 15C in WINTER, and without the sun (15 being Sydney winter temps) why doesn’t it knock off Kangaroosaq’s fairly modest summer records??
Hello,
An interesting post and comments.
Now; when a ‘temperature’ is ‘measured’ does the ‘temperature’ ‘measured’ have the same probability of occurring as the ‘temperature’ ‘measured’ before said ‘temperature’ measured’ occurring and the same probability as the ‘temperature’ ‘measured’ after the ‘temperature’ ‘measured’ occurring?
The question asks: does any ‘temperature’ measured have the same and equal probability as any other ‘temperature’ that might or could or would be measured anywhere ?.
Is the Keeling ‘curve’ a sampling artifact ?
Much of Greenland has had a colder than normal Summer. The CWG is typical of those with an AGW bend and is notorious for things like this.
Wonder why there is nothing on how cold interior Greenland has been
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/composites/comp.day.pl?var=Air+Temperature&level=Surface&iy%5B1%5D=&im%5B1%5D=&id%5B1%5D=&iy%5B2%5D=&im%5B2%5D=&id%5B2%5D=&iy%5B3%5D=&im%5B3%5D=&id%5B3%5D=&iy%5B4%5D=&im%5B4%5D=&id%5B4%5D=&iy%5B5%5D=&im%5B5%5D=&id%5B5%5D=&iy%5B6%5D=&im%5B6%5D=&id%5B6%5D=&iy%5B7%5D=&im%5B7%5D=&id%5B7%5D=&iy%5B8%5D=&im%5B8%5D=&id%5B8%5D=&iy%5B9%5D=&im%5B9%5D=&id%5B9%5D=&iy%5B10%5D=&im%5B10%5D=&id%5B10%5D=&iy%5B11%5D=&im%5B11%5D=&id%5B11%5D=&iy%5B12%5D=&im%5B12%5D=&id%5B12%5D=&iy%5B13%5D=&im%5B13%5D=&id%5B13%5D=&iy%5B14%5D=&im%5B14%5D=&id%5B14%5D=&iy%5B15%5D=&im%5B15%5D=&id%5B15%5D=&iy%5B16%5D=&im%5B16%5D=&id%5B16%5D=&iy%5B17%5D=&im%5B17%5D=&id%5B17%5D=&iy%5B18%5D=&im%5B18%5D=&id%5B18%5D=&iy%5B19%5D=&im%5B19%5D=&id%5B19%5D=&iy%5B20%5D=&im%5B20%5D=&id%5B20%5D=&monr1=6&dayr1=1&monr2=8&dayr2=8&iyr%5B1%5D=2013&filenamein=&plotlabel=&lag=0&labelc=Color&labels=Shaded&type=2&scale=&label=0&cint=.25++&lowr=-2&highr=2&istate=0&proj=Custom&xlat1=40&xlat2=90&xlon1=-60&xlon2=-10&custproj=Cylindrical+Equidistant&level1=1000mb&level2=10mb&Submit=Create+Plot
richardscourtney says: August 10, 2013 at 11:15 am
Re Sedron L:
Richard, with all due respect, Sedron’s question is related to the issue of weather station siting, and is pretty closely related to the topic here.
I think some dissenting opinion in here adds to the debate (and I do wish authors of dissenting opinions were not all labelled ‘trolls’). Disagreeing with other’s opinions is not necessarily trolling.
And sometimes the ‘off topic’ diversions are informative.
WUWT could very quickly end up following the SKS method of slicing and dicing discussions at the whim of every disgruntled moderator if that issue got taken too seriously.
ferdberple says: “…Observation shows that Climate has memory. A hot year this year makes it more likely you will see a hot year next year. Thus one should not be surprised by long periods of warming (or cooling) that appear to defy the odds. It is this appearance of “defying the odds” that gives rise to The Gambler’s Fallacy of Climate Change.”
AKA autocorrelation.
Anthony Watts says:
August 10, 2013 at 12:04 pm
“My reality, is one far different from funded institutional science”
——-
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present
and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite. ”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
================
I’m careful by nature, this is a whole other level now.
Eventually.
markx:
Your post addressed to me at August 10, 2013 at 8:44 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/10/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-94-maniitsoq-greenland-all-time-high-temperature-rescinded/#comment-1386734
misleads by selectively quoting from my post at August 10, 2013 at 11:15 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/10/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-94-maniitsoq-greenland-all-time-high-temperature-rescinded/#comment-1386401
I take umbrage at your suggestion that I do not want to engage with differing opinions.
On the contrary, I like to debate with those who disagree because then I learn.
And that is WHY I abhor trolls
Trolls intend to prevent learning about a subject by deflecting a thread from its subject.
As my post which you have misrepresented showed, Sedron L was a troll.
And subsequent events have confirmed that Sedron L was a troll. He obtained an answer to his original question from Anthony Watts but did not acknowledge that answer in any way.
If a variety of views are to be heard then trolls need to be ‘slapped down’.
Richard
Joe Bastardi says:
August 10, 2013 at 8:27 pm
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Ahem:
http://tiny.cc/
http://www.shorturl.com/
http://goo.gl/
😉
intersting…
Anthony Watts says:
August 10, 2013 at 12:04 pm
REPLY: to Sedron L Happy to provide an update. We’ve retooled it entirely, and to deal with the TOBs issue, it required going over the metadata and paper records of over 1200 stations, all done in free time, with no funding. If this was a University enterprise, a grant could have been applied for and a handful of grad students put on the job.
We have redone the dataset and the analysis, and have been rewriting the paper. Such things take time. My reality, is one far different from funded institutional science – Anthony
Garethman says, well done Anthony for giving an update. I’m looking forward to this paper and also wondered how long it may be before I could see the finished study.
By the way, I also have huge problems with advertising pop ups on WUWT in the UK , I use Apple software OS X 10.8.4 (12E55) and have a background check continually running from MacScan which detects any malware or tracking. What happens is that I click on a WUWT link only to be directed to an advertising banner which is usually just a small window on the homepage but becomes a large copy on a new page. No problems with any other site, any advice from posters would be very welcome!
By the way the other link I commonly end up on after following the usual sea ice data link is this one. ( It has only started in the last week.)
“Not Found
Apologies, but the page you requested could not be found. Perhaps searching will help.
Search for: “
markx says:
August 10, 2013 at 8:44 pm
//////////////////////////////////
I usually find myself agreeing with much of what richardcourtney has to say and I always find his comments of interest, and therefore always look out for his appearance on a thread. But I agree with you that we should not classify all disenting commentators as trolls, and I for one like to see all sides of the debate.
There are some commentators who I consider are properly classified as trolls, but even so, I like to read what they say and would not support a policy that bars their appearance..
We are all adults of independent mind and we should be free to make up our own minds as to the quality, relevance and materialiy of any comment, and we should embrace debate, not seek to shut it down.
The AGW crowd is desperate and will grab at any isolated anomaly in light of the recent warming plateau, which is destroying the rationale for economically destructive and freedom killing green policies.
@ Gareth Philips, look for an email in your inbox
Steinar Midtskogen says:
August 10, 2013 at 11:43 am
“Anthony, I think you’re putting a bit too much emphasis on albedo. First, it’s not really a problem for catching trends if the surroundings stay pretty much the same. In the Svalbard case, the weather station was established when the airport was built. ”
And human infrstructure is known to never change. /sarc
The old record referred to by dr Richard Keen is the 30.1°C maximum reading from Ivigtut on 23 June 1915. It is probably an error of at least 5°C, but the weather conditons on this particular day were conductive to high temperatures. There were three thermometers at this station at this time, a maximum thermometer, a minimum thermometer and a regluar one read at fixed times. The highest reading on that thermomter was 21.0°C at 20 pm on 23 June. For some unclear reason this value is in some derivative printed records said to have taken place on 23 April – which is clearly an error, according to the DMI yearbook the maximum that day was only 0.4°C. I don’t have access to the original observation list (only the yearbook) but I don’t belive that the April and June mixup has been made in the yearbook, but when the tabels there have been copied to some other list. Regarding >20°C in Greenland one must keep in mind that the inland stations which regularly observe so high temperatures only started to observe after or during the 2nd world war so the 1958 date that the DMI uses is perfectly natural. In the older records there are many >20°C observations but the anomalous 30.1°C at Ivigtut is the only one above 25°C that I have found before 1920.
Get a PC. 😉
hahah….I got confused reading your article…!! I’m not such a good weather theorist =)
They’ll issue a retraction like they did for the north pole meltout: “yeah, we were wrong, but it doesn’t matter because (insert ridiculous rationalization here)….”
Slightly O/T but about Greenland. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2389991/Global-warming-Scientists-discover-heat-INSIDE-Earth-melting-areas-Arctic-ice.html
Of course this is substantially a model led piece of research, but nonetheless, the point raised is of interest.
Anthony, just a heads up that Samenow has posted an article following up on the issue. Hasn’t issued a retraction yet because DMI hasn’t offiically invalidated the record quite yet. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/08/12/greenland-may-not-have-recorded-its-highest-summer-temperature/
We’ve retooled it entirely,…
Did I miss the follow-up press release announcing this?
PS: Do you or do you not receive funding from the Heartland Institute?
There is NO 30.1c AT Ivigtut in 1915, That record is 100% BOGUS. The reading was 20.1C but it wqs miswrote as 20.1C The all time highest temperature at Ivigtut NEVER EXCEEDED the 24C, I have all its complete serie, so get your facts right.
The 30.1°C value is printed in the DMI yearbook (p.47). Do you have a copy of the observation journal for June 1915? The value is, as I have said before, almost certainily wrong, we don’t have to argue about that, but it is printed NOT in April, but in June along with other observations of the same day, one of these (at 20 pm) being 21,0°C – higher than 20.1°C you mention. Is that reading a bogus as well? On 13 July the maximum temperature in Ivigtut is printed as 21.4°C and 23.3 on 9 July in Ammasalik, the minimum there on the same day printed as 14.4°C – very high for Greenland.
PS (again): Do you or do you not receive funding from the Heartland Institute?
Do you receive money from _anyone_ to blog or do climate-related work?