Guest essay by David Archibald
A visit to the weather station at the airport is the highlight of any trip to Svalbard. Of course that weather station has been the subject of attention on WUWT here.
Above: The Svalbard weather station at the airport
Figure 1 below shows the closest point the public can now get to the Svalbard weather station, the gate at the airport:
Figure 1: David Archibald, Professor Ole Humlum and Professor Jan-Erik Solheim at the closest point the public can get to the Svalbard Airport weather station which is 140 metres southeast of this point.
Professor Humlum was able to provide details of the siting problems particular to Arctic airport weather stations. For example, at one stage one of the airlines had a flight that got into Svalbard from Tromso on the Norwegian mainland in the late afternoon and then returned to Tromso at 5.00 am the following morning. To keep the aircraft warm overnight, the crew would leave the auxiliary power unit (APU) running. If the wind was blowing from the northwest, this would affect the temperature recorded by the weather station. This was an armed meteorological expedition as shown in Figure 2 following:
Figure 2: Professor Humlum carrying the expedition’s Remington rifle
Why an armed expedition? The island of Svalbard is infested with “warmers” (/sarc – the rifle actually for polar bears) . Note that the rifle wasn’t left in the vehicle. Poor visibility from falling snow meant that one may not be aware of a threat until you are directly upon it.
Figure 3 following shows a warmer nesting site encountered by the expedition:
Figure 3: Permafrost carbon dioxide injection project on Svalbard
This facility was founded on the peculiar notion that carbon dioxide could be stored under the permafrost layer. All the signage is in English no doubt because the Norwegian authorities are too embarrassed to have this inane project signposted in Norwegian. There is no source of carbon dioxide on Svalbard and any injected at the site would have to be transported from one thousand kilometres south on the Norwegian mainland.
As well as being an armed expedition, this was a sustainable expedition with provisioning including local produce of seal meat, whale meat and reindeer. Why go to Svalbard in the first place? It is quite apparent now that ground zero in climate change is not the coral reefs of the Maldives, the delta mouth islands of Bangladesh or anywhere else tropical and third world. It is here, hard up against the Arctic Circle. In fact Svalbard is going to get polar amplification really bad, as shown by Figure 4:
Figure 4: Projected average summer, annual and winter temperatures for Svalbard over Solar Cycle 24 (from Solheim, Stordahl and Humlum, 2011, Solar activity and Svalbard temperatures)
As Figure 4 shows, the average winter temperature over Solar Cycle 24 will be 6.0ºC colder than that over Solar Cycle 23. The economic effects of climate change have already been felt on the Norwegian mainland. Figure 5 shows Norwegian wheat imports and Norway’s domestic attempts are growing wheat:
Figure 5: Norwegian wheat imports and domestic production 1960 – 2012
What is apparent from Figure 5 is that domestic wheat production started replacing imports of the grain from the mid-1970s. From 2007, imports doubled as humid weather at harvest causing fungal infections of the crop and precluded most of it from being used for human consumption. Thus the end of the Modern Warm Period is sharply defined by Norwegian wheat statistics. Norway’s weather is driven by the sea temperature to its west, which also peaked in 2006 as shown by Figure 6:
Figure 6: Ocean heat in the Atlantic Ocean (0-60 West, 30-65 North) from Climate4you.com
Figure 6 shows that the fall in temperature of the Atlantic Ocean to the west of Norway from the peak in 2006 has been just as fast as the rise from 1990. When will the cooling stop and at what level?
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FWTW, I just did a frequency analysis on the daily data from Svalbard lufthavn since 1975 and there is a very small peak at 7days.
It is well buried in the noise and far from being “statistically significant” amid the weather ‘noise’ but there is a tiny bump.
I figured that if there was a traffic based signal it would likely have a weekly component. (Probably a drop in activity at w/e).
lgl says:
Greg
“So you are saying there is no correlation between 1972 and 2000 between SST and dCO2 ?”
No, I’m saying d/dt(CO2) does not correlate with AO (like your graph confirms, 1993 to 2007 is not enough). d/dt(CO2) correlates with ENSO (except after large volcanic eruptions perhaps).
===
Why is 1993 to 2007 ” not enough”.
“d/dt(CO2) correlates with ENSO”. Where, show me? Does it correlate better that AO ? I doubt it, but it would be interesting to see.
Don’t just make bland assertions and assume we all believe you because you called lgl.
RE: Barry Cullen says:
November 2, 2013 at 3:45 am
“Fig 6 If the summer temp change is 0.8°/100 yrs and the winter temp change is -0.1°/100 yrs and the annual temp change is +1.4°/100 yrs, what do spring and fall look like? Certainly >>1.4°/100 yrs or is something else going on here?”
————-
Spring shows +3.7C/ 100 yrs and fall +1.2 C/ 100 yr. Link to the paper below.
We used the normal definition of spring as MAM, but Mach and April are really winter months at Svalbard. The fjord at Longyearbyen may freeze as lata as April. Some year it does not freeze at all, and then the “spring” temperature becomes higher.
——————
RE: Phil. says:
November 2, 2013 at 7:00 am
“As Figure 4 shows, the average winter temperature over Solar Cycle 24 will be 6.0ºC colder than that over Solar Cycle 23.
Please, Fig 4 shows nothing of the sort, if anything it shows a rising trend, the authors have added their guess onto the graph which is 6ºC colder than the present average, that’s all.
In fact when I went to that paper the graph looks different and the extra points aren’t there! How about an actual link to the paper/figure because something’s not right!”
—–
The paper can be downloaded here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nso7w8tz3nkrya2/111129Svalbard%20solflekk%20temperatur.pdf
The figure shown by David (above) is correct. If you read the paper you will see that we found autocorrelations in the residuals for the spring, summer and fall temperatures. We could therefore make a forecast on the 95% level ONLY for the winter and year temperatures. The extra points (diamonds with bars) are forecasts with a 95% confidence interval.
Grain production in Norway:
A message from the Norwegian Agricultural Authority (www.slf.dep.no) can be translated to the following:
“The Norwegian grain production (in 2013) will be only 913 000 ton, the lowest since 1976…..in addition to reduced areas, the wet and cold spring in 2013 damaged large areas, which could not be seeded.”
D. Patterson says:
November 3, 2013 at 8:03 am
The Mauna Loa measurements are garbage for a variety of reasons, including the improper smoothing of the data just to mention one reason.
One can only hope that one day the temperature measurements are as rigorously calibrated and controlled as the CO2 measurements are. See:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
And the raw data (calculated hourly averages from the instrument voltage measurements) still are available at:
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/
if you want to perform your own “proper” smoothing, which BTW doesn’t give a difference in average or trend over a year of more than 0.1 ppmv:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_mlo_spo_raw_select_2008.jpg
Before 1960, we have the Law Dome ice cores over the past 150 years with a resolution of a decade and an overlap of 20 years with the South Pole data:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_sp_co2.jpg
and
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_co2.jpg
GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out), as they say in IT and mathematics:
Pre-Industrial And Current CO2 Levels Deliberately Corrupted.
http://drtimball.com/2012/pre-industrial-and-current-co2-levels-deliberately-corrupted/
D. Patterson says:
November 3, 2013 at 12:38 pm
If you believe that CO2 did migrate through cracks in the ice from inside the ice at 180-280 ppmv towards the outside where one can find 380 and more ppmv CO2, then you may believe the late Jaworowski’s findings. I don’t, therefore I do take all what he said with a grain of salt:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html
And historical data are as accurate as the local variability shows: a high variability means a lot of local sources/sinks at work, thus completely unsuitable to show what the “background” data in the rest of the atmosphere were. Historical data taken over the oceans and coastal with wind from the sea show also today less variability and were around the ice core data. See the reflection of years of discussion with the late Ernst Beck:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html
One must be skeptical about any scientific claim, until proven and reproduced. The Mauna Loa data are reproduced by 10 (NOAA) baseline stations from near the North Pole (Alert, Canada) to the South Pole. And 70 other stations maintained by other organisations and countries. This is rock solid science.
Rejecting the data only because you don’t like them makes your other claims equally unbelievable.
Dr. Solheim,
You are attempting to defend criticism of using the wheat production statistic by citing total grain production, as almost every single critic of the wheat production statistic has recommended. You may even have a valid correlation using total grain production. Yes, bad weather does reduce yields.
Dr. Solheim,
You included in a comment above, “The Norwegian grain production (in 2013) will be only 913 000 ton, the lowest since 1976…..in addition to reduced areas, the wet and cold spring in 2013 damaged large areas, which could not be seeded.”
Thank you for adding that bit of information. The graph alone does not convey that information.
I take ‘in addition to reduced areas’ to mean that there are – probably economic – reasons for less areas of wheat planted, but that what wheat was planted did indeed suffer reduced yields from cold and wet weather. It’s still unclear from the graph presented why the numbers are what they are.
Thanks again for the additional information.
A-a-a-a-a-n-d on the minor topic in this post with which we’ve been having great fun…
… it just occurred to me that, although we in the U.S. are fortunate to have the “Right to Bear Arms,” Svalbardians are equally fortunate that Norway has no “Right to Arm Bears.” Things could get ugly if the bears start advocating for it.
(I’ll get me hat and coat. I was just leaving.)
It is rather ironic how you wrote:
It appears you are doing precisely what you have accused me of doing. Take this business about the reliability of the CO2 in glacial ice measurements as one example.
We’ve had this disagreement many times before. Every time I bring up the evidence of the exobiology experiments conducted on the Antarctic ice cores, which found rather quick biological contamination of the interior of the ice cores, you have always resorted to denying the validity of the evidence with invalid arguments that amount to little more than what you choose to believe in disregard to the experimental results. You appear to refuse to acknowledge that biological organisms are demonstrated to rapidly invade the ice, and their ability to invade the ice confers upon them the capability of altering the gas concentrations in the ice where they have invaded. This is just one of a multitude of problems with the reliability of the carbon dioxide measurements in the glacial ice which have not been researched at all or have not been properly resolved. Another is the failure of the papers you rely upon to take any recognition whatsoever of the PBL differences where the ice was formed with respect to carbon dioxide sources, sinks, entrainment, and plumes over millennial time scales in the Antarctic and its peculiar meteorological characteristics.
As Dr. Tim Ball and his sources have observed and demonstrated in their own scientific publications and U.S. Senate testimony, the carbon dioxide data has been deliberately corrupted. Corrupted data can hardly be reasonably described as “accurate” regardless of how it is to be dressed up as “background” data or any other kind of data. As Bischoff and others have demonstrated in their own research, upper air sampling demonstrates >50ppmv variations in carbon dioxide concentrations. The Mauna Loa and related observations have had their data massaged in ways that do not conform to proper methodologies according to Dr. Tim Ball and his sources.
Such presumptions of certainty betray the falseness of the whole enterprise, when you consider the way we keep finding natural influences that were not accounted for when these certainties were propounded in the first place. Nothing like finding volcanoes underneath the ice shelves to upset wrong assumptions about significant carbon dioxide influences on the carbon dioxide concentrations in the glacial ice.
All of which amounts to big claims that repeatedly fail to stand up to close scrutiny. Take for one example the question of how anyone is supposed to reasonably accept your proposition that the “Mauna Loa data are reproduced by 10 (NOAA) baseline stations from near the North Pole (Alert, Canada) to the South Pole”, when we can see full well these other stations are not located in the Central Pacific Ocean atop an outgassing volcano at several thousand feet of altitude? Is there not any student or master of science who can see the experiment does not reproduce the initial conditions of the experiment? Really? Reproduction of results is much easier when the data is managed or cherry picked to produce a desired result using questionable data selection and adjustments and defended by plausible deniability. Unfortunately, using GIGO methodology and plausible deniability does not meet the standards for independent reproduction of experimental results.
Since the conclusions and analysis were those of Dr. Tim Ball and his sources, you can hardly describe them as my claims. On the contrary, it is up to you to demonstrate how it is possible for your “belief” in such data can meet or exceed the requirements for completeness, accuracy, and applicability for the hypothesis you are arguing, and you have failed to do so. There are more holes in the claims of carbon dioxide measurements than a piece of Swiss cheese, and more and more problems keep turning up as more and more natural influences upon the carbon dioxide concentrations keep turning up year after year.
H.R. says:
November 3, 2013 at 4:37 pm
A-a-a-a-a-n-d on the minor topic in this post with which we’ve been having great fun…
… it just occurred to me that, although we in the U.S. are fortunate to have the “Right to Bear Arms,” Svalbardians are equally fortunate that Norway has no “Right to Arm Bears.” Things could get ugly if the bears start advocating for it.
_____________________________
We have a clear winner! You get the thread Gold Star next to your name.
The fellow carrying the cased rifle reminds me of a Red Skelton poem from many years ago:
Algy saw the Bear.
The Bear saw Algy.
The Bear was bulgy.
The bulge was Algy!
MtK
D. Patterson says:
November 3, 2013 at 6:26 pm
Maybe we have been there in the past, but my memory isn’t that good anymore.
About ice cores: if the ice cores show measurements between 180-280 ppmv and the atmosphere is at 380-400 ppmv between the moment of drilling and the moment of measurement, then there was and is no migration from low levels to high levels. Jaworowski said it does. Jaworowski said that there is no difference between the age of the ice and the average age of the exclosed air. That simply is impossible (except for remelt layers). For me Jaworowski is exit. Let him rest in peace, together with his ideas.
Contamination of ice with dust and bacteria happens. In general IF there is contamination and IF there is sufficient foodstuf, more CO2 will be released. But the CO2 levels are too low, according to some skeptics. Some extremophylic bacteria may survive hundredthousands of years at -40°C, but not more than that, by repairing damage on their DNA by using CO2 as carbon source and nitrogen compounds as energy source. If we take all of the N2O levels as all been used to remove CO2 as building block, that gives a CO2 “depletion” of less than 1 ppmv over 140 kyr… See item K at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/13/4631.full.pdf
Biological life is a matter of temperature and availability of nutritritients. Both lack in Antarctic ice cores. Coastal cores with less cold temperatures and more dust deposits show the same CO2 values as the inland cores for the same average gas age. It would be extremely difficult for bacteria to give the same result in ice cores with largely different conditions.
As Dr. Tim Ball and his sources have observed and demonstrated in their own scientific publications and U.S. Senate testimony, the carbon dioxide data has been deliberately corrupted.
I don’t know where Dr Tim Ball has found the 600 ppmv measured at Mauna Loa. Most of the variability is at +4 ppmv when the wind blows downslope from the volcanic vents and -4 ppmv when the wind is upslope in the afternoon. It doesn’t make one damn difference if you include or exclude these outliers for the average or the trend. As said before, all raw data, hourly averages + their standard deviation are available on line at ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/mlo/ and that since since 1974. Before 1974 the CO2 levels were calculated by hand, from long analog paper data logs. Thus I would like to see the source of the “600 ppmv” and the high variability of CO2 in the upper air (a reference to the right page would be nice). You are insulting hundreds of people working at a lot of institutes and countries by saying that they corrupt their data without a shred of evidence.
Nothing like finding volcanoes underneath the ice
The nearest volcano from the South Pole is over 1000 km away. The winds in general blow away from the South Pole. If there were ice cores taken near the volcano, that might have influenced the local measurements for the duration of the eruption and a few decades later, but that would be noticed as peaks, not seen in other ice cores.
when we can see full well these other stations are not located in the Central Pacific Ocean atop an outgassing volcano at several thousand feet of altitude?
Some kind of illogical thinking here: If one finds the same CO2 levels (within a few ppmv averaged over a year), despite volcanoes, altitude, latitude, temperature, rain, pressure,… then all these other variables are of not the slightest influence on the measurements. Thus the CO2 levels worldwide are within very thight limits. The only exception is on land near huge sources and sinks. That is where most of the historical data were taken and therefore these have not the slightest value for estimates of the past CO2 levels (as good as stomata data give similar problems over centuries of land management).
Reproduction of results is much easier when the data is managed or cherry picked to produce a desired result using questionable data selection and adjustments
Again, you are insulting people who’s only aim is to produce the best “background” CO2 data available. If you have any proof that their method gives different results than simply using all available data including the outliers, only then you may be right.
On the contrary, it is up to you to demonstrate how it is possible for your “belief” in such data can meet or exceed the requirements for completeness, accuracy, and applicability for the hypothesis you are arguing, and you have failed to do so.
I have read the arguments of both sides and found the arguments of the late Ernst Beck too light and of the late Jaworowski outright wrong, even the opposite of what he claimed. If Dr Tim Ball still want to use their arguments, then he makes the rest of his argumentation as unbelievable as these from his sources.
And as I am a real skeptic (that is: to both sides), I have asked for a few days of the MLO instrument voltage readings to see if their calculation of the hourly average CO2 level is performing as they claim. If you want, you may repeat that, simply ask for the data to Dr. Pieter Tans of NOAA. Or have a look at one hour of measurements:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/mlo_raw_v_2006_11_17_18.xls
The previous .xls file was for two full days and is ~2 MB in total. The one hour file with a lot of explanation is here:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/mlo_raw_v_2006_11_17_00h.xls
During WW2, the Svalbard islands and the surrounding seas were the theatre of some really fierce fighting between the Allies and the Nazis, with commando raids to destroy the coal mines (occupied by the Nazis following the fall of the Norwegian government in the summer of 1940), and the struggle of Allied convoys en route toward Murmansk to bring supplies to the Soviet Union.
So, digging in military and historical records, one should be able to found some detailed data on weather during almost 5 years of war, during a period (1940 – 45) affected by some “transition” between the ’30s warm period ant the post-WW2 cooling….
Not to mention the following 45 years of the Cold War, with a lot of weather stations installed near NATO and PoW military bases in the Arctic….
Just my 2 cents…
Wait. They were provisioned with seal meat? I do hope it wasn’t Canadian seal meat. That would be un-European.
I had an opportunity to visit Spitsbergen (Svalbard), Norway this summer. Our ship stopped at both Longyearbyen and Ny Alesund. I could not get to the weather station at the airport outside Longyearbyen (note main article), but I was able to see the weather station in Ny Alesund. The Longyearbyen airport is located 3.5 km NW of the city on an open ridge. The Stevenson screen in Ny Alesund was bordered on three sides by a gravel road. The Post Office was on the north side. The screen was in an open field with only a few other instruments near by. I was unable to find anyone who knew anything about the weather station during the short stay in Ny Alesund. I have pictures of the station from several different directions if anyone would like copies in jpeg format [bshemingway at gmail.com]. Ny Alesund is located on the south coast of Kongsfjorden, west of the Krone Glacier. It is mainly a research station located at 78d 55m N 11d 56m E (d=degrees, m=minutes). There are only a few people who live in Ny Alesund year-round. The main source of man-made heat that could impact the station is from steam that is transported from the local power plant by one foot in diameter pipes to the buildings in the town. None of these pipes is close to the weather station.