http://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2015/07/07/on-the-record-observing-a-heatwave/
Readers will recall that when I asked for the temperature data at Heathrow for 1st July, I was told it would cost me £75 (+ VAT!!). The next day, however, they published this graph, showing a considerable spike.
Thanks to Willis Eschenbach’s excellent analysis at WUWT, I noticed that the data I had requested had actually been provided FOC to Carbon Brief, a political blog set up to promote the decarbonisation agenda. Carbon Brief, with the help of advice from the Met Office’s Mark McCarthy, then used the data to attempt to prove the assertion that it “woz the sun wot done it, onest guv”.
So, let’s take a look at the data, which the Met Office were so reluctant to hand over to me.
Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WqpCC7AHjfHa686evyNuKRvvhcIRE1bpwW0ElBZYP8A/edit?pli=1#gid=0
We find that the temperature at Heathrow jumped from 35.8C to 36.7C in the space of two minutes. According to Clive Best’s analysis, a Boeing 747 landed on the runway just to the south of the temperature sensor at 14.13, just as the temperature peaked. [UPDATE – We believe that the airline times are BST, and not GMT, as the Met Office have used. Clive is rechecking this]
Also note that there was a subtle wind shift from from the SE to S, from 14.06 to 14.12, just as temperatures picked up. Or 1.6C in five?
Meanwhile, the Met Office have two serious questions to answer:
1) Why were they so reluctant to provide this data to me in the first place?
2) Why are they so keen to help the Carbon Brief with their propaganda?
Is it really possible for a bit of sunshine to increase temperatures by 0.9C in two minutes?
I was the official NWS observer at a weather station Utah for more than 5 years. During that time we were taking daily temperatures with the “old” liquid-in-glass thermometers AND the new MMTS electronic sensors. We submitted all of our data to a research rofessor who was tracking the differences between the two types of thermometers. My observations at this station over 5+ years was that the L-in_G thermos were nearly always 1°F warmer on the highs and 1°F lower on the lows.
So you’re yet another cheater who adjust true, saint data?
curious that the temperature increased by 0.5degrees between 14:12 and 14:13 at the same time the insolation decreased by 50W/ms. But it’s the sun! What’s the lag in those thermometers again?
A meta thought followed by a suggestion.
Thought. This entire episode shows vividly what is wrong with ‘consensus science’ (confirmation bias, shoddy facts, alarmist PR), and why the internet changes everything. Paul writes a series of questioning factual posts. Booker picks up and puts into the MSM. UKMet stung enough to give a BS responce, stupid not to give Paul the data, stupider to give it to Carbon Brief in an attempt to light an internet backfire–which backfired. Judith highlights the kerfuffle. Willis spots Judith, and does his usual excellent analytic thing. Paul spots Willis and closes the circle with the two key underlying political questions for UK Met.
Suggestion. For maximum effectiveness, the whole story needs to be written up and submitted as a paper. And it needs to be written in a separate fashion as a follow on MSM story for Booker, Dellers, Rose, Lloyd, maybe even Revkin (who might be coming slowly to his senses). Plus given in the MSM fashion to UK MP’s and Lords, several of whom (Jenkins, Ridley) can further this crystal clear example of institutional warmunism in the UK Parliament.
Agree totally with you ristvan, I think what also should be added is the facts that:
a) They are using data that has been “adjusted” from sources that are not reliable (all ground based)
b) They are ignoring data that is accurate and cannot be manipulated from satellites.
Anyone with a shred of intelligence would sit on a beach, in a park anywhere except on concrete or asphalt on a hot summers day when the sun is shining.
Also related to this thread… in the early 90s I worked for a local utility company that maintained its own weather station network in the PHX area. One day while out checking on a utility weather station I decided to drive by the official NWS weather station at Sky Harbor airport since I had not yet seen it. The PHX station had been relocated within a year of this time from the middle of the airport (surrounded by concrete asphalt, and lots of planes, to the outer NE edge of the airport property, surrounded by perhaps 40-50 meters of open dirt (or “desert”, if you will). As I drove by I had to do a triple take — the entire area, including an approx. 50 foot-wide strip around the weather station compound had been oiled black. When I got back to my office I asked my boss (a meteorologist) and a meteorologist colleague why the area had been oiled. They were dumbfounded. The three of us immediately went next door to the NWS WFO and asked the MIC — he was shocked… they had no idea it had been done. A day or so later the MIC told us he learned that the FAA had ordered the dirt oiled because they were getting erroneous “dust storm” alerts every time there was a small breeze. And, you guessed it, the temps from that station suddenly jumped up a degree or two.
And that is one good reason why you routinely adjust temperature data automatically. When they relocated the weather station there would have been a different discrepancy between surrounding stations and the new station, compared with surrounding stations and the old station. This lets you work out the change due to the station relocation (or the change due to the station surround being painted black, for that matter). If done correctly the degree or two difference would have been automatically corrected.
For, while local temperature variations are large, the true temperature anomaly does not change over very large distances – 100s to 1,000s of km.
That was why the NWS was so furious — they were actually running both stations simultaneously for a number of months in order to determine the correction factor — and then the FAA messed it up. Of course, since then the station has been moved again. Twice, I think. And the current location is in between the runways. So, from a parking lot, to open desert, to in between the runways. How do you mesh those records?
You cannot calculate an anomaly without accurately measuring the absolute temps over (typically) 30 years.
And even if the “true temperature anomaly” does not change over very large distances it does seem to change over time — as adjustments are made to the underlying assumptions used in the calculations.
steady at Kew … so very local burst with 1.5 to 2C UHI
British Railways are often afflicted with ‘the wrong kind of snow’.
Maybe their airports suffer from the ‘wrong kind of heat’?
I don’t think British Railways operate many airports.
With all this digital measuring equipment, we are able to measure and record temperature (and a lot of other data) with a high frequency. The MET office has decided to record data every one minute. If they would have decided to record data every ten minutes, they would not have gotten a peak of 36.7C, but something around 36.0C, depending on the start and end time (assuming the recorded value is an average over 10 minutes).
Back in the old days (before digital measurement devices) a person had to go to the thermometer and check. How often did this person check? I am sure it is not every one minute, not even every 10 minutes. Few times per day? How often did he get up at night?
My questions: how does the sampling frequency effect the value and frequency of these “record” highs and lows? Is it fair to compare values/trends/min/max which were collected using different sampling frequencies?
If the older min/max thermometers with a lower sampling frequency are working correctly, and have a time constant less than the time period between samples for the newer non-min/max thermometer, then, yes, it is valid to compare records between them.
Clearly there may be circumstances when it is not a valid comparison, but this will depend on the equipment present at the two record times being compared.
It is an interesting point. Increases in sampling frequency will increase the estimates of extreme values and this needs to be compensated for.
“What this seems to me to evidence quite clearly is not the thesis of CAGW but the thesis that with increasing anthropogenic activity in urban industrialised environments and those otherwise heavily modified and with significant thermodynamic events occurring ( such as aircraft jet engines say) the probability that some local spike in the temperatrure record will manifest is greatly increased.”
And, as air traffic increases, so does the temperature at the airport. CAGW. It’s not Global, but is Anthropogenic, and DOES bear some relation to CO2. 🙂
Peter July 19, 2015 at 4:29 pm
With digital equipment a 10 minute interval would still record 36.7 c, only difference is you wouldn’t know which minute the record occurred on some of them. Digital record temperature readings every 30 seconds or so, whatever the length of interval is.
Hourly observations use max and min instrumental thermometers.
“According to Clive Best’s analysis, a Boeing 747 landed on the runway just to the south of the temperature sensor at 14.13, just as the temperature peaked”
With all respect to Clive, I prefer Flightradar24 since it’s Euro-centric. There appears to be 2 747s landing in that time frame, and they both point their jet-blast at the Met station when exiting the runway.
http://i.imgur.com/PU2zXbV.png
Please send your flight log along to him, so that we (the internet rabble) can complete this story.
Please see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/18/heathrow-hijinks/#comment-1988316
Looks like the turnoff which BAW242 was on extends 1000-1600 feet from the weather station.
http://nycaviation.com/newspage/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/lhr_diagram_1.jpg
A 747-8 generates 35 MPH winds at 250 feet at breakaway thrust, and 2,052 feet at takeoff thrust. (chapter 6)
http://www.slideshare.net/Silver1982/747-8
“Is it really possible for a bit of sunshine to increase temperatures by 0.9C in two minutes?”
Look at Kew temperature from 12:27…
Said the max thermometer to the min thermometer, “I’m exhausted.”
Considering ever growing structures and traffic, the weather station on an active airport, has one single dedication: giving ATC and pilots information they need for take-off and landing.
People who use such data to describe climate are idiots, scharlatans or criminals.
In principle would it not be better for us to ignore odd fluctuations of temperature caused by tarmac, wind and jet planes.
We can’t possibly gain insights into what really occurred on that day, now nearly three weeks ago. Far too many factors are involved – and it was now so long ago.
I suggest that we should start again from scratch and generate a new global temperature data set for the last 150 years, which will largely rely on modelling the thermal characteristics of a variety of types of buckets on ropes, containing sea water extracted from the ocean by sailors in a variety of weather conditions in times long past.
We could get Phil Jones to do the work on imaginary, I mean theoretical, bucket behaviour. He seems like an altogether trustworthy fellow. And then with our sparse collection of guesstimates of what was happening in the first 100 years of our analysis we could homogenize the data over areas never visited and we could throw in some ridiculously small error bars and claim to have a good idea of past global average temps to within less than one degree.
And we could do all this whilst pretending to be objectively free of bias – even though we would be able to reveal hideous levels of bias in (temporarily) private emails to one another.
Only then, could we use all this to scare everyone into believing that the world is about to end, unless they give us all their money.
That’s my suggestion anyway.
How could any of this possibly go wrong?
(erm…partly satirical)
Have a look on ‘Wundermap’ and backtrack to July 1st,lots of Amature and so called Professional weather Station records.
As an operational meteorologist for a few decades, I believe it IS possible for a 1C rise in temperature in a minute, as on a hot summer day there are localized discontinuities which can have that range of effect. However, with the added information of the proximity of the jet activity, it seems more likely to me that the temperature increase was due to non-natural effects of the jet exhaust. This was well-known to occur frequently at Newark, NJ (KEWR), especially with the old HO83 temperature-measuring equipment.
from Australia: a caller driving around melbourne called in to a radio station last nite to say it was 2 degrees celcius in kew, brunswick & one other location in melbourne. the radio presenter checked the current BoM figures for melbourne and said: the Bureau says it is 3.8 degrees – i don’t know where they got that from – probably at the airport (paraphrasing).
***funny how UHI gets acknowledged these days!
20 July: The Age: Robyn Grace: Melbourne weather: City on track for coldest July in 20 years
The temperature plummeted to 1.9 degrees at 4.42am, marking only the third time in 20 years that there’s been two consecutive mornings under 2 degrees…
July has so far recorded an average maximum of only 12.6 degrees – a full degree under the 30-year average of 13.7.
Melbourne’s average July maximum hasn’t been less than 13 degrees since 1995.
The last time we recorded two consecutive mornings under 2 degrees was last August but before that, it was in August 1997.
Mr Williams said that was actually a pretty common occurrence in the 1930s (in 1937 there were eight consecutive days under 2 degrees).
“Compared to the historic record it pales into insignificance. ***Big cities with lots of cars and heating don’t get as cold,” he said…
Back to the present day, Mr Williams said Monday was an improvement on Sunday’s big chill, but it was still cold.
“It’s generally cold everywhere. There’s really no hiding from it,” he said…
The next significant cold snap is likely to arrive late on Saturday…
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/melbourne-weather-city-on-track-for-coldest-july-in-20-years-20150719-gifxwt.html
PICS: 18 July: Daily Telegraph Australia: NSW snow: Big freeze causes snowfalls from Goulburn to Katoomba
by:NEIL KEENE, IAN WALKER AND MARIE HOGG
A DEEP freeze not seen in NSW for at least 20 years has caused havoc on the roads, closed schools and services, and put Sydney commuters through one of their coldest mornings on record.
The apparent temperature in Sydney’s CBD dropped to -1C at 7am today, believed to be the coldest for the city since hourly wind chill readings began in the 1990s, with rain exacerbating the discomfort.
Further west it was snow causing most of the trouble.
More than 40 schools in the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands had to be closed because of snow.
An estimated 9500 homes in those regions were without electricity on Friday morning after snow-laden tree branches hit power lines.
Roads blocked by snow hampered efforts to fix the problem, but power had been restored to almost all homes by evening…
Major roads, including the Great Western Highway, Mitchell Highway and New England Highway, were closed due to snow and ice.
Meteorologist Don White from Weatherwatch said snowfalls from Bathurst to Queensland in recent days had been the most widespread for 20 years…
Trains from Sydney were packed yesterday with visitors keen to make the most of what Katoomba mayor Mark Greenhill described as “a winter wonderland”. “It’s absolutely gorgeous up here,” he said…
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/nsw-snow-big-freeze-causes-snowfalls-from-goulburn-to-katoomba/story-fni0cx12-1227445152839
That’s just weather. Australia is a very small part of the globe …
/sarc
“We find that the temperature at Heathrow jumped from 35.8C to 36.7C in the space of two minutes.”
The point is that the temperature spike rose from 14:09 when radiation increased sharply and peaked at 14:12 . The extra 0.5°C rise at 14:13 could very easily be a plume of hot air drifting in from the tarmac areas.
Can anyone tell me if electronic measurements incorporate thermal inertia to match the old mercury ones?
if not then no comparison between the two sets of data means a stuff.
A two minute four degree change then returning to the original one as electronically registered, when measured on my mercury certified tenth of a degree thermometer only registers less than half a degree.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1256/wea.81.03A/pdf
Temperature screens
Screens for PRTs can be much smaller than traditional Stevenson screens, allowing a swifter response and so a more accurate….
This article suggests they are knowingly comparing two different types of data which is a bit like bracketing Bramleys with golden delicious as both being apples knowing that they are not the same and not interchangeable and then saying the world has a problem because apples are now inedible unless cooked because of climate change.
For some reason the meteorological station has been disappeared from the YYZ 2013 AVOP map.
It was there when I drove by yesterday, located, as usual, north of South Service road and south of 06R-24L by D1-D2.
http://www.torontopearson.com/uploadedFiles/B2B/Content/Existing_Business/AVOP_Program/2013_AVOP%20Site%20Map%20Interactive%20Training%20Tool.pdf
Disregard. Seems to be back in the 2014 map with all the creeks, streams and assorted infrastructure included.
http://www.torontopearson.com/uploadedFiles/B2B/Content/Existing_Business/AVOP_Program/AVOPSiteMap_December2014.pdf
Planes with wheel tug electric motors, which can taxi without running their jet engines, will not cause jet-stream effects unless the weather station is close to one end of the main runway. Very few planes can do this right now.
These planes had just landed. The last one to come into Heathrow as a glider crashed (its fuel supply choked on paraffin wax formed in very cold flight conditions).
Tell me, Climate Pete, what sort of airplane designer would deliberately add weight to an airplane which isn’t needed for operation in the air or taking off or landing?
All airplane designers strive for minimum weight because carrying around unnecessary weight adds to operating costs.
Billy: http://vr-zone.com/articles/moving-towards-an-electric-airliner/40175.html
Well if THAT spike doesn’t indicate anything wrong, then all the little jiggles they use to justify rewriting past temperature raw data don’t mean anything wrong either. So give us our raw data back!
There are many ways a warm spike can occur and jet engine exhaust is a good example. There are far fewer ways a cold spike can occur.
I believe this is a very real bias applicable to today’s sensitive thermometers.
I dont recall there being a “sensitivity bias” downwards temperature correction applied to any datasets though.
Indeed. We should call it the temperature ratchet effect.
TimTheToolMan:
That notion would make for an interesting study. Something like a field of sensors to measure micro-scale temps, wind, pressure, etc. across a wide area surrounding an “offical” measuring station. Then record the fluctuations at the micro-local scale and determine whether the equipment setup favors capturing non-representative high temps (local spikes).
Wonder if something similar has been done?
TimTheToolMan asks Wonder if something similar has been done?
At Lyneham which is an RAF station where official measurements are made a group of private measurements by people from the base showed clearly that the measurements were about half a degree higher over a five year period until the base was closed down. The discrepancy disappeared after that in spite of the runways remaining in place.
The US did set up a network of properly assessed to the standards (the US Climate Reference Network) which showed just how bad the results from most of the stations really were. In even any pretty average engineering environment the results from the reference stations would be compared to the results from the bog standards one and adjustments made to that reference standard.
Climate scientists being academics not practical people think they know better and instead fiddled the others upwards or downwards to match their theories instead.
If the adjustments were made to engineering rather than climate science standards we are now in a clear cut cooling phase of the cycles. This was as predicted by signal analysts in the late sixties using methods more advanced than the linear projections of the climate fraternity but documented at least by 1750 so they really have little excuse for not using them as too new radical and advanced to be trusted, by their thinking.
Speaking of weird and mysterious changes of climate data, the Antarctic’s Ice Extent mysteriously lost about 600,000 KM^2 of ice in one day!:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
The global ice anomaly changed from -30 KM^2 to -630 KM^2 in one day…
I know there is a difference between ice extent and ice area, but I just feel that something strange is happening with the sea ice data.
It also seems strange that so much polar ice data went offline a few months ago, and hasn’t been restored…
It just seems convenient such sudden and mysterious climate data changes are occurring prior to the Paris doom fest–can’t have polar ice adding a chilling cloud to the doom and gloom narrative…
UPDATE – We believe that the airline times are BST, and not GMT, as the Met Office have used. Clive is rechecking this]
Aviation use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) which is a successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) for flight plans and air traffic control clearances. For most purposes, UTC is considered interchangeable with GMT, but GMT is no longer precisely defined by the scientific community.
To answer your question it would not be BST.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
Airlines usually like to advise passengers and those meeting them about the local time of arrival. If you look at the flightradar24 data linked up thread, you will see aircraft departure and arrivals noted in local time (with time difference explained).