This is interesting, and of course it goes hand-in-hand with what I have been saying for years.
Scott Sistek, of KOMO News/Weather reports:
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For several years the thermometer at SeaTac airport has been reporting temperatures 1-3 degrees above surrounding areas.
Instead, it seems the thermometer at Sea-Tac is finally back on track, reporting temperatures more realistic with respect to other nearby thermometers. It’s been a long suspicion among some local meteorologists that the thermometer at the airport been running a bit warm over the past few years, frequently reporting temperatures 1-3 degrees warmer than surrounding sites. (Both UW professor Cliff Mass and I have done blogs on this apparent warming in the past.)
Here is just one example from July 16 last year when Sea-Tac reported a high of 88 degrees but everyone else around the Sound was closer to 83-86. (KSEA is Sea-Tac, the numbers on the far right are the preliminary highs for the day. This link will help decode the other cities listed here.)
UW research meteorologist Mark Albright has been tracking this anomaly for the past couple of years and has been among the most vocal in this apparent discrepancy. As just one example, he found for those first two weeks last July that the Sea-Tac gauge ran an average 2.3 degrees warmer than four other neighborhood thermometers placed within a couple miles of the airport.
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Apparently, they fixed the ASOS thermometer, and the problem went away.
Read the whole story here: http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott/Did-Seattles-climate-cool-15-degrees-in-a-blink-of-an-eye-254419491.html
h/t to reader Steve Z.
And as I’ve documented before, such errors remain in the climate record. Like the malfunctioning airport sensor in Honolulu, where the skewed temperature set new high temperature records. See this interview with a NOAA/NWS meteorologist on the issue:
But, even after knowing they were caused by a malfunction, the NOAA/NWS leaves the bogus high temperature records intact. Only government could screw up data this badly.
Here is where the sensor is:
The SeaTac ASOS, according to NCDC HOMR, is located below.
SeaTac is part of the GHCN network used for climate. But was it surrounded on three sides by heat holding asphalt in 1948 when the weather records began there?
Doubtful.
First Sea-Tac Airport Terminal, ca. 1946
I wonder what this revelation will do to this study, which used Sea-Tac and other GHCN stations as the basis for the claim?
New study finds “nighttime heat waves” increasing in Pacific Northwest
UPDATE: more on why these sorts of failures tend to be mostly hot failures:
NOAA, GAO, IRS, and others are too busy lobbying for ever larger budgets and pay and benefit deals for its public sector union than to be bothered with work and thinking about original purpose and mission. That hard stuff is left to automated sensors to give the appearance of being on the job. It would be better to designate a grievously bad data site as a proxy of agency malaise than to point out each and every one.
Last Friday here on Lake Michigan in Chicago, at noon, Midway Airport was reporting 70 degrees. This weather station 3 miles offshore at the water intake crib showed 41.6 degrees! Needless to say in a few hours it got much colder at the airport. The two sensors are about eleven miles apart, and at the same height.
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/metdata/chi/
Now for the real test. Will any news agencies pick up on this data quality revelation in a city of settled science.
OnMarch 15, the gauge was determined to be bonkers. Futher analysis determined that the gauge went from reading temperature to modeling it.
The obvious result of prolonged up error accumulation (Airports) and down error elimination (Russia) in a time series will back them into a corner. Once the bulk of the data meters are adjusted high, the ramp becomes a “pause” in the trend. The escape part is to abandon surface temperature and adopt a more malleable time series.
KNR pointed out that airport thermometers are of interest only to pilots in figuring out the minimum ground speed they can have when approaching (or taking off from) the airport. So, yes, it is important that they are situated near the runways so the pilots can compensate for the local heat flux of the heated tarmac and exhaust. Knowing the minimum airspeed, which is partially determined by air temperature, is important!
So, of course these thermometers are required – for pilots and aircraft, however they do not represent the local temperatures of the area and should be ignored for determining highs/lows, etc. from daily area records. A standard needs to be adopted that considers the area in question and where the best site is for an average reading, not the best site for aircraft readings.
Isn’t that odd…..old temperature records were adjusted down because of thermometer creep…
..and new records are adjusted up…just like UHI…for the same reason
Go back to using the old timey thermometers…as least they adjusted them down…../SNARK
When the data from this site is homogenized this sudden dip from the replacement or the faulty thermometer will cause all the temperature data before it to be cooled by 1.5 degrees.
@jim G:
That is until some government Hansen, I mean hack, suffers “institutional amnesia” and notes an “anomolous drop in temerpature record due to maintenance” and put a (or an additional) permanent “correction” in the workup algorithm for this site’s data.
Bed data is bad data and it does NOT belong in the record.
FWIW … I was sitting in the parking lot of our fav local grocery the other day. My wife had gone inside for a couple of things, and I glanced at my smartphone. I noticed the temp being 82 degrees. I’m in Florida, so not uncommon to see that temp at 3PM. I then glanced at my car temp … newer Dodge with the dash display. 86 degrees. Same town, I’m in the sun, in a parking lot, and the default town temp is +4F. They wonder why I’m skeptical.
With the station in among the runways, I have to wonder how much jet engine exhaust washes over the box from time to time, boosting the local daily high…
Hey, no problem. If we just increase the error bars on the measurements, that will increase the overlap with the models and the modelers can say they’re accurate to within observational error again.
Merrick says:
April 14, 2014 at 10:15 am
> Bed data is bad data and it does NOT belong in the record.
Whether it’s good data or bad data, I don’t want the NCDC in my bedroom either.
Weather Service thermometer records
are simply the worst for studying climate trends. They are always moving,
and replacing them And with little or no regard to continuity, homogeneity
etc. In fact, changes are often undocumented. I know. I used to work
for them as a forecaster.
The IPCC was right. Solving global warming is affordable. A $50 replacement sensor, dash of white paint on a screen there and its gone.
Michael Moon says:
April 14, 2014 at 9:59 am
I’m not sure what your point is. Doesn’t that happen every spring? From that link you provided (I’m too lazy to find Midway’s) similar things are happening today:
Note the effect of north vs south wind. If Midway cooled off, it’s just a lake breeze or cold front.
So who broke the thermometer ?
How many more likewise broken thermometers are out there ?
That new SeaTac thermometer is awaiting a Mann re-calibration to bring it into line with “hide the decline” imperatives.
I wonder how many thermometers are replaced in Russa? That country gives very high temperature readings, if my memory serves me right.
jauntycyclist says:
April 14, 2014 at 9:43 am
can’t provoke the second coming if the world ain’t hot enough for satan yet
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To what purpose, do you pollute this thread?
That was the first thing that crossed my mind too. The way Mosher describes the BEST homogenization process is that it specifically looks for sudden changes and adjusts them out. The slow creep in warming that Anthony described will pass through the filter, but the replacement of the faulty thermometer will result in adjusting the readings so there is no discontinuity. Either the new readings are adjusted up, or the old ones are adjusted down. Either way creates a false warming.
Dear Mr. Albright,
I beg your pardon.
CORRECTION (on page 1): “Well, isn’t that precious of
Mr. Albrightthe Envirostalinists who control the temperature data. NOW…. thathe and his fellowthe AGWers are desperate for temperatures to warm…… they correct the record {per Mr. Albright’s measurements} DOWN,” says Janice Moore who apologizes with the above editing.Glad there is SOMEONE at the UW who is not a CO2 cult member!
Hoping you can forgive me,
Janice
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Hi, Windsong,
Yes, as the crow flies, I’m located about 20 miles NNW of Oso, Washington. No, I do not have a rain gauge. FWIW, having lived here most of my life (and I passed 40 quite awhile back), it was one of our more rainy March’s (and Februarys and Januarys — aaaaarrrrgh — HATE it, but, there are drawbacks to every climate zone in the country…). My “rain gauge” is the field I jog around. Slightly wetter than average is my guess.
Re: Oso — Just another guess (okay — worth little, LOL, BUT, AT LEAST I ADMIT IT’S ONLY CONJECTURE! (unlike the CO2 speculators (pun intended)), but, given historic weather patterns around here, I don’t think excessive rainfall for this year was the CONTROLLING cause, just a contributing one. The “Northwest Weather Service” had issued a high-saturation warning about 2 days prior to that, IIRC, however, so… (shrug).
I hope that you can find some data on rainfall.
Take care wherever in the world YOU are!
Janice
A classic example of the difference between accuracy and precision.
I have a radical theory that the longer and more accurate the temperature record, the more the anomalies will regress to the mean, an anti hockey stick if you will. All the anomalies they have been measuring so far are within the error range of the system. They are measuring under the curve.
Thats why NONE of the climate analysis/data done by hadcrut NOAA, BEST etc can be relied on. It most likely applies to ALL surface data worldwide. re This (AW) site’s analysis of US surface data is a prime example. Purely rural very long term data is CET and Armagh where climate is quite constant and unchanging and starts in 1700’s shows no warming….