In my travels surveying weather stations around the United States, I met many dedicated observers like this one. It is sad indeed that their painstakingly recorded data by observers like this one gets adjusted by NCDC to give results that aren’t the same as what they observed. I have some comments, data, and photos about the station that follow, but let me say to Mr. Hendrickson first; thank you sincerely for your service and dedication.
NOAA honors New York farmer for 84 years of service as volunteer weather observer (press release)
When Richard G. Hendrickson (seen at right) logged his first weather observation for the U.S. Weather Bureau, the precursor to NOAA’s National Weather Service, Herbert Hoover occupied the White House. Since then the Bridgehampton, New York, farmer has filed twice daily reports, tallying more than 150,000 individual weather observations – playing a critical role in building our nation’s climate history.
As part of the National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program, Hendrickson collects data from the weather observing station on his farm and calls in his observations – temperature, precipitation, wind and any other significant weather factors – to the weather service.
On July 27, Hendrickson, age 101, will receive an award for his long standing service – 84 years – to the nation. Since Hendrickson is first in the history of the program to serve for more than eight decades, the new 80-year service award will be named in his honor.
“Volunteer observers are the bedrock of weather data collection,” said I. Ross Dickman, meteorologist-in-charge of the New York weather forecast office. “Richard has contributed thousands of weather measurements to build the climate record for Long Island, and after 84 years, holds the title of the nation’s longest-serving volunteer weather observer. With this award, we honor Richard for his selfless dedication to his community and the country.”
Hendrickson started volunteering as a weather observer when he was 18 years old. His lifelong commitment stems from personal interest in weather and a sense of patriotism. “I enjoy observing the weather, it’s what I do for my country,” he said.
Hendrickson’s enthusiasm for weather extends beyond collecting data. In 1996 he authored, Winds of the Fish’s Tail, which highlights his years of observing the weather on Long Island’s east end. Hendrickson also writes a column on weather that is published in two eastern Long Island newspapers.
The award presentation will take place before an open house at the weather forecast office in Upton, New York. Throughout the day; residents are invited to tour the forecast operations floor, meet meteorologists and learn how forecasters track storms and issue warnings. The open house is an opportunity for the public to learn how to become weather-ready, become a storm spotter and see a weather balloon launch.
AWARD PRESENTATION:
Sunday, July 27, 9:45 a.m. to 10 a.m. EDT
New York Weather Forecast Office
175 Brookhaven Avenue, Upton, NY 11973
NOTE: Media must register with Tim Morrin to attend the ceremony, 631-924-0227
The National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program has given scientists and researchers continuous observational data since the program’s inception more than a century ago. Today, over 8,700 volunteer observers participate in the nationwide program to provide daily reports on temperature, precipitation, and other weather factors such as snow depth, river levels and soil temperature. Long and continuous weather records provide an accurate picture of a locale’s normal weather and give climatologists a basis for predicting future trends. These data are invaluable for scientists studying floods, droughts, and heat and cold waves.
The first extensive network of cooperative stations was set up in the 1890s as a result of a Congressional Act that established the U.S. Weather Bureau. Many historic figures maintained weather records, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson maintained an almost unbroken record of weather observations between 1776 and 1816, and Washington took weather observations just a few days before he died.
The National Weather Service New York forecast office located in Upton, New York, is the primary source of weather data, forecasts and warnings for about 18.6 million people in southeast New York, northeast New Jersey and southern Connecticut. Visit us at weather.gov/nyc and join us on Facebook and Twitter. For more on how to become weather-ready, visit Weather-Ready Nation.
NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources.
==============================================================
First a look at the station itself from above. The coordinates are the ones given in NCDC’s HOMR metadata.
The Stevenson Screen (white box between the row of trees and the house) is about 25 feet from the asphalt driveway, would would make it a Class 4 station, unacceptably sited:
Climate Reference Network Rating Guide – adopted from NCDC Climate Reference Network Handbook, 2002, specifications for siting (section 2.2.1) of NOAA’s new Climate Reference Network:
Class 1 (CRN1)- Flat and horizontal ground surrounded by a clear surface with a slope below 1/3 (<19deg). Grass/low vegetation ground cover <10 centimeters high. Sensors located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces, and parking lots. Far from large bodies of water, except if it is representative of the area, and then located at least 100 meters away. No shading when the sun elevation >3 degrees.
Class 2 (CRN2) – Same as Class 1 with the following differences. Surrounding Vegetation <25 centimeters. No artificial heating sources within 30m. No shading for a sun elevation >5deg.
Class 3 (CRN3) (error >=1C) – Same as Class 2, except no artificial heating sources within 10 meters.
Class 4 (CRN4) (error >= 2C) – Artificial heating sources <10 meters.
Class 5 (CRN5) (error >= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”
That’s not the fault of the observer, Mr. Hendrickson is working with what he has. NOAA/NWS actually installed and placed the station, and is responsible for its maintenance. The station is also boxed in by vegetation on three sides, along with the house for the fourth side, making it warmer than it should be due to wind inhibition.
What is even more interesting though is what happened to the data in 2012, according to this plot from NASA GISS of the station, there was quite a spike.
Yet amazingly, even though Mr. Hendrickson has been dutifully reporting the daily data, and it is up to date, as seen in his May report below…
…NASA GISS run by Gavin Schmidt, can’t seem to find the time to get their data set current for Bridgehampton, as seen here, only going to 2012. You’d think Gavin could tear himself away from Twitter long enough to at least get the data updated, especially since this man is so dedicated to the task.
More on all this in a later post.
UPDATE: 7/24/14 9AM I sent a Tweet yesterday to Gavin asking why Bridgehamptoon has not been updated at GISS since 2012, and as far as I know there has been no response.
Nick Stokes in comments thought that the lack of GISS updating was a GHCN problem, not a GISS problem.
I also asked the BEST team (who also use GHCN) and Zeke Hausfather responded almost immediately:
Looks up to date to me, as a file was just compiled this morning and is available up on the FTP site: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v3/ . I believe they have a system that automatically compiles it daily.
Here is a chart of station observations in GHCN by month from today’s file. There are 2297 stations reporting so far for June 2014 (none for July, obviously, since its not over yet). If you check GHCN-daily instead of GHCN-monthly, you will find much more data from last month.
My thanks to Zeke for that.
Also of interest are these notes in the status file for GHCN:
GHCNM, V3, status file (users can use this file to determine overall current status, including information related to previous changes and errata). ******************************************************************************** 07/14/2014 On or around 06/06/2014, there was an ingest problem with the “C” source data, (unpublished MCDW), and this caused a signficant reduction of data from that source. However, much of the data were still available through an alternate source (UK Met Office, “K” source flag). The ingest problem was resolved on 07/10/2014, and the expected frequency of “C” source data was restored. ******************************************************************************** 10/17/2013 Government operations have been restored, and regular monitoring of GHCN-Monthly will now resume. During the shutdown of government operations, some ingest of recent international data were not received. These data should be restored with the next processing cycle (e.g. 10/18/2013). ******************************************************************************** 10/01/2013 During the shutdown of government operations, GHCN-Monthly will continue to update automatically, but will not be monitored by the GHCN-Monthly team. We will also be unable to answer questions submitted to NCDC.GHCNM@noaa.gov until after government operations resume. ********************************************************************************
GHCN even continued to update during the “government shutdown” last year, and there is no note indicating late data for all of 2013.
So much for the Nick Stokes theory as to why GISS has not updated Bridgehampton. Now it’s back to Gavin and GISS.
I’m time limited for the next two days, so my promised update won’t happen until this weekend. Tony Heller has done some work in the meantime worth looking at here: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/07/24/more-from-bridgehampton-ny/
The graph of adjustments show Bridgehampton’s data has been dramatically cooled in the past by as much as 1.5°F:
I have not double checked the graph above, but the spike at Bridgehampton in 2012 seems spurious, as I originally noted.
More on all this Saturday or Sunday when time permits.
I’m trying to understand the logic involved in changing the historical data. The station moved, so they changed the data? Unacceptable. The data should have been left alone and the station marked as new and the old location marked as closed. I know that probably doesn’t fit into the agenda, but that’s the way it should be done.
Here is the link to the 2008 article about Richard Hendrikson and his memories of the 1938 Hurricane. The quote above appears at the end of the article.
http://sagharboronline.com/sagharborexpress/tag/hurricane-of-1938
Will someone near by please go an interview this extraordinary gentleman?
Ask him if the station has ever been moved. Ask when the driveway was installed. Ask if the home is original. Ask if the roofing on the house has changed over the years. Ask if he has continued to use white wash and when/if he switched to latex paint. Ask when the trees were planted and what was there before. Ask if air conditioning has been installed in the home. Ask if the color of the house has changed. Ask if there have been equipment changes. Ask how the yard is watered and how has that changed over time.
This is a great opportunity to document how changes in local environment change readings. Bring out the tip jar, I’ll contribute to a travel fund. It will take a few days of visiting, listening to stories, looking at pictures….
84 years, in the same location twice every day, wow…
Nick,
Looking at the information on the NCDC link and comparing the imputed moves with the stated fixes using Google Earth, the 0.1 mile move is highly unlikely to be true. There’s a large McMansion at that location and no indication of a suitable site for an MMTS station “north” of the location in the photo. Also the corrections to the lat-long data simply move the location from the house yard west into the ploughed field. There DOES appear to be an installation, possibly an MMTS (or a bird feeder – they would both cast similar shadows), about 12 meters southeast of the Stevenson Screen.
It may be that regardless of what the NCDC record says, the NCDC information is not trustworthy.
Forget when the tree’s were planted, a better question would be when was the field converted from forest? and does the wind blow from the SW most of the time ;0)
This will be better than the Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero
richard verney says: July 24, 2014 at 9:35 am
“As i say, I am probably missing something important, and I would appreciate a simple explanation. THANKS.”
I’ve given an illustration here. I took hourly data over three years from Boulder Colorado, and shown the average that you would calculate if you were reading an accurate min/max thermometer on a prescribed daily schedule. TOBS makes a big difference. The reason is that reading in the afternoon means warm afternoons tend to be double counted. On a warm Monday, if you read at 5pm, it may still be warm enough to provide the Tuesday max as well. But you’ll only count each minimum once. Conversely, if you read in the morning, minima will be double counted.
Duster says: July 24, 2014 at 11:11 am
“It may be that regardless of what the NCDC record says, the NCDC information is not trustworthy.”
It may indeed. It isn’t actually a NCDC record; they just have to work with what was recorded. FWIW, I agree with your 12m interpretation.
It is partly because of the unreliability of metadata that NCDC tends to rely on homogenisation algorithms.
Nick Stokes says:
July 24, 2014 at 2:35 pm
During the 19th century in California the Department of the Interior hired surveyors to survey what is known as the Public Land Survey. The maps are by and large pretty good and with access to the surveyor’s notes you can normally follow the original survey route, identifying trees rocks, creeks etc. as they occur in reality. But sometimes, it seems clear that the old surveyor was either lost from the get go, or sat in a bar and made every thing up. Fictitious streams and mountains cause me to lean toward the bar explanation. Looking at location information like that in the NCDC link has me wondering about whoever installed the MMTS.
In looking at the location information it seems that 52.8 feet is 0.01 mile – about 16 meters, so maybe 0.1 miles is a transcription error. There would then be no significant “site move”. But “north”? Where was his compass? Another location problem is the elevation. The one-foot move is almost certainly spurious. There is not that much slope in the yard. The difference is in all probability due to the shift from the NAVD 1929 vertical datum to NAVD88. Since they use different geoids there will be a minor difference in elevation. Is homogenization necessary because the folks recording the metadata didn’t know what they were doing?
I’m suspecting that there are a lot of questionable station ‘moves’, based on the gyrations my local weather station/river gauge has supposedly done since 1948…the problem is, the station/gauge was housed in a purpose built, stone structure anchored to the bedrock of the river bank…the current coordinates for my local station place it in a barn, on the top of a hill, about 1/4 mile from the river!
Duster says: July 24, 2014 at 3:15 pm
“Is homogenization necessary because the folks recording the metadata didn’t know what they were doing?”
Imperfection of the record is part of it. But in fact, whether it was .1 or .01 mi, in which direction, is neither here nor there. None of that helps quantify the effect of the move. For that, the only usable information is in the record itself, and that is what the algorithm estimates. It also estimates the time of the move, which here does not exactly correspond to the metadata.
The thing is, there was a move, and a change to MMTS, and it had a discernible effect on the record. It can’t be estimated perfectly, but it’s better to estimate than pretend it didn’t happen.
“Nick Stokes says:
July 24, 2014 at 3:33 pm
The thing is, there was a move, and a change to MMTS, and it had a discernible effect on the record. It can’t be estimated perfectly, but it’s better to estimate than pretend it didn’t happen.”
What you seem to be saying is that two adjustments are being applied to the data, one for a move and one for an equipment change.
The question is, was the move ‘real’ or just a change in the location data. And without knowing if it was an actual physical move, then an adjustment for it may be unwarranted…but seems to be being applied anyway.
Changing equipment is probably a legitimate reason for adjustment. Also, this case it seems the equipment change was not to replace broken equipment but to upgrade it, with the old equipment remaining on site. So wouldn’t it be better to get a side-by-side comparison as opposed to an estimate from an off-site source?
Zeke is probably right from the BEST point of view, assuming that it is the unadjusted GHCNM data which they use, and which he has looked at today. But Gistemp uses the adjusted GHCNM data, and that has stopped at 2012 for some time, so Gavin and GISS are not to blame here.
I’ve a recent post on GHCN issues relating to Irish stations, including this current data disappearance, at GHCN data collection issues (from an Irish perspective).
The January 2014 data for Bridgehampton was present in the early to mid adjusted (qca) and unadjusted (qcu) GHCNM data, but went missing later in February in the adjusted data, showing data only to 2012. The following image shows the last year present in each file for various dates this year (I ran it this morning our time before today’s file became available, but I’ve checked that 2012 is the last year there too).
There look like some other issues with Bridgehampton data as well, although not the same ones as I described in the post referred to above. I’ll add another comment here when I’ve reviewed them, with possibly a fuller post of my own if they need that rather than just a comment.
mjc says: July 24, 2014 at 4:06 pm
“What you seem to be saying is that two adjustments are being applied to the data, one for a move and one for an equipment change.”
No, the change was applied based on the observed change in the record. They don’t try to allocate cause. GHCN is global, and while metadata in the US may be unreliable, elsewhere it is mostly inaccessible.
However, here we do know that there was a change to MMTS and a physical move, at about the time that the algorithm found a discontinuity in the temperature. We know there was a physical move, because the old CRS is still there, and doesn’t seem to have a MMTS adjacent. It fact, as Duster says, it looks a lot like it is a few metres further along the building. But as I said above, if the asphalt really was a factor, then it has receded.
The image was in the preview, but seems to have gone AWOL. See it at Image for WUWT comment
” Nick Stokes says:
July 24, 2014 at 4:21 pm
However, here we do know that there was a change to MMTS and a physical move, at about the time that the algorithm found a discontinuity in the temperature. We know there was a physical move, because the old CRS is still there, and doesn’t seem to have a MMTS adjacent. It fact, as Duster says, it looks a lot like it is a few metres further along the building. But as I said above, if the asphalt really was a factor, then it has receded.”
So in other words…
The change is NOT a correction factor, because it is not correcting for a specific problem, but rather, it is being made because there was an unexpected discontinuity in the data. Basically, this means that the amount being applied is really just an arbitrary number?
Bridgehamptom NY…..Should not Mr. Hendrikson be a climate refugee by now?
How can his temp apparatus still be standing after that once-in-a-lifetime super-duper-storm known as Sandy?
Hasn’t LI been wiped off the map by tornadoes and drought already?
On top of all that – -bring the First Lady in to tell this guy what he ought to be eating. I have a feeling he is a bacon-and-eggs type of guy, and he needs some soy and gluten-free instead.
@jim re shadowing effect , plenty of info here http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/artificial-weather-revealed-post-9-11-flight-groundings
Nick Stokes says:
July 24, 2014 at 2:29 pm
richard verney says: July 24, 2014 at 9:35 am
“As i say, I am probably missing something important, and I would appreciate a simple explanation. THANKS.”
“I’ve given an illustration here. I took hourly data over three years from Boulder Colorado, and shown the average that you would calculate if you were reading an accurate min/max thermometer on a prescribed daily schedule. TOBS makes a big difference. The reason is that reading in the afternoon means warm afternoons tend to be double counted. On a warm Monday, if you read at 5pm, it may still be warm enough to provide the Tuesday max as well. But you’ll only count each minimum once. Conversely, if you read in the morning, minima will be double counted.”
You mean Hendrickson scratched out his log entry and re-entered the minima in the morning?
Anthony provided a shot of his log above. Do you think he would have been unaware of this?
Great story about the man’s achievement.
A very sad story about Man’s achievement.
Never have I seen such blatant disregard for accepting responsibility as those that worship CAGW.
The would rather change the data that doesn’t promote a cooling, hide the data that shows the cooling, or simply extend their predictions until no one remembers what they did.
Brilliant !
I’ve added two more issue images to that file, and changed the title accordingly to Images for WUWT comment
2012 adjusted (qca) and unadjusted (qcu) data going missing, reverting back to 2008, with adjusted data first passing through 2011, reappearing sometime in January 2013.
January 2012 value first recorded as 1.95°C, with code “a” indicating one day missing in calculation of monthly mean, then as 2.28°C with no days missing. The missing day would need a temperature of at least 12.03°C to effect this change, but TMAX for January 2012 is only 7.09°C, the maximum TMAX for January is 8.28°C in 1932 (February also changes at the same time with no indication of missing days, March loses a day, April has a “suspicious looking” 9.99°C with one day missing, which later changes to 10.13°C, still with one day missing).
This wonderful man doing this observing for all this time would no doubt keep very accurate log books. His data is not a state secret, asking the man directly and getting access to his records should not be hard, he would be proud of what he has done. The entire 84 years of records would be a very interesting study, and point a finger directly at the data manipulators.
On Sunday, Chetta and I are taking the 7:30AM Port Jeff ferry over to go to the ceremony. If you could ask Richard G. Hendrickson one question what would it be? If you could ask NCDC one question what would that be?