From the “we told you so years ago” department comes this interesting study that might explain the 8 °C red spot in the Russian Arctic that NASA GISS always seems to have:
From Science News:
A novel form of the “urban heat island” effect might contribute to why the far north is warming faster than the rest of the globe, a study of five Arctic cities finds.
Sunlight can heat dense building materials. When night falls, buildings will release some of their solar energy into the air. This helps explain why urban centers tend to be a few degrees warmer than nearby rural areas.
“We decided that our Russian Arctic cities should also show this phenomenon,” says Mikhail Varentsov, a climatologist at Lomonosov Moscow State University. But indoor heating — not the sun — would be the major heat source, at least in winter, when the sun shines little if at all. To test that idea, he and colleagues set up weather stations to collect data in the five cities north of the Arctic Circle for about a week during the polar night (with 24 hours of darkness). Apatity, with a population of about 59,000, showed the strongest effect. Its city center was up to 10 degrees Celsius warmer than outlying areas. Murmansk, with more than 300,000 residents, showed a similar, but smaller, in-town increase of about 3 degrees Celsius. Varentsov shared his team’s findings January 28 at the international Arctic Frontiers conference.
They used a vehicle mounted weather station and drove transects through the city, much like I’ve done in the past with my own research. A similar technique done in Svalbard shows UHI is present there too.
Here is the paper:
M. Varentsov et al. Experimental research of urban heat island effect for the biggest Arctic cities. Arctic Frontiers conference, Tromsø, Norway, January 28, 2016.
P.I. Konstantinov, M.Y. Grishchenko and M.I. Varentsov. Mapping urban heat islands of Arctic cities using combined data on field measurements and satellite images based on the example of the city of Apatity (Murmansk Oblast). Izvestiya, Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics. Vol. 51, December 2015, p. 992. doi:10.1134/S000143381509011X.
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That Warmists say “duh, we’ve known this all along, that’s why we’ve adjusted rural stations up to match these UHI measurements, it’s basically climatstrology 101.”
So it’s heat radiation from buildings when the outside temperature is 40 below. Makes sense because it is a huge heat differential.
Combination of radiation and convection.
All energy consumed in cities, building heating, ventilation, cooling, lighting and even vehicle exhaust, ends up as waste heat, except perhaps for visible light escaping to space, and even in this instance some of that visible light leaving a window may fall on the screen for the weather instruments or nearby and be absorbed. This amounts to a very substantial fraction of the so-called greenhouse warming within the area of cities. I worked on this with a dutch physicist some sixteen years ago. I suppose I should have published it, but most likely i’d still be revising the work and fighting the “peer review”.
Even within the area of a community college campus, located a mile or so outside city limits I could observe a warmer environment than the surrounding countryside from the concentration of heated buildings and campus traffic.
Maybe this is a little off topic; maybe not. But, it makes me wonder if we’re seeing an UHI effect just from the heat that leaks out from merely heating these buildings to livable temperatures how dramatic the effect must be from the Ivanpah power plant. Instead of Urban Heat Island could that be; UII: Urban Incineration Island?
UHI is a ubiquitous feature of urban temperature fields, ESPECIALLY in the Arctic, where significantly less energy is required to heat the cold air by, say, one degree.
The same amount of energy is required to raise a thing by the same delta T, providing that there is no state change, whether it’s from cold to less cold, or hot to hotter.
for example, “Calorie is defined as an amount of heat required to change temperature of one gram of liquid water by one degree Celsius (or one degree Kelvin).”
BUT – in the artic, the temp differential between building heated for human comfort – and the outside at sub-freezer temps – is huge. Hence heat pours out of these buildings, according to Newtons Law of Cooling.
Which basically explains that the rate of heat transfer is proportional to the temp differential.
It’s the reason why heatsinks are rated in degrees/watt.
Quote from: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/heat-work-energy-d_292.html
I’m sure that you knew all this. But, for the sake of clarification – it’s the differential between inside and outside the human habitation that increases the energy/heat flow from buildings to the environment.
The same applies in reverse for losses of air-con cooled building in hot climes.
Further to, “The same applies in reverse for losses of air-con cooled building in hot climes.”
Except that this is not really analogous. Since the air-con exchanger unit dumps heat from the building into the environment, as heat flows back from the environment into the building which is being cooled.
It’s not analogous with a stove in a hut in Siberia. Which is a one way flow.
So, I shouldn’t have made that comparison, because it just confuses the issue.
Actually, I had in mind not liquid water, but a surface graybody, transferring heat to the atmosphere.
Urban-heat-island is associated with the urban area growth in terms of concrete roads & buildings, vertical buildings rise, destruction of greenery & water bodies, pollution. In urban areas with such condition, forms the temperature inversions — reverse of lapse rate. Under this, the pollution forms a layer and heats up below it — wind effect under vertical structures will be minimum at ground level. As a result the night temperature at higher layer below the pollution layer is warmer than the ground level. During the day ground temperature is higher. Thus, minimum temperature rise is associated with the urban heat island effect in urban areas. This results, more power consumption to cool the buildings in the night. Indian annual march of temperature show a higher rise in minimum temperature over the maximum temperature. Well planned cities, the urban heat island effect is felt less. In unplanned cities it is more.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
cont —
Similar to heat-island effect in urban areas,cold-island effect in rural areas is common. In the former areas more met network and in the later sparce met network. With the population growth, to meet the food needs governments built dams or water resources were developed. This resulted increased areas changed from dry-land agriculture [rainfed] to irrigated agriculture with more time of the year the greenery on the land. Irrigated area in 1800 across the world was 8 Mha changed to 40 Mha by 1900 to 100 ha by 1950 to 255 Mha by 1995 to 278.8 Mha by 2000. To rise this developed irrigation infrastructure. That means water spread and greenery spread has increased in non-linear form. This not only cools the cropped area and water resources area but also through cool breeze advection it cools the surrounding areas.
Heat-island effect is over emphasized and cold-island effect is under emphasized in the global average temperature anomaly.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
cont—
Let me give an example of change in Orography impact on local rainfall – this I presented in a book of mine in 2000 “Agriculture Scenario of Andhra Pradesh: During the last four decades”.
Orography plays a major role on Indian rainfall. For example, Western Ghats help in producing wet areas on wind ward direction [from Arabian Sea moisture] [Western parts of Ghats] and dry areas on leeward direction [Eastern parts of Ghats] during the Southwest Monsoon season. The opposite pattern is producing during the Northeast Monsoon Season – which gets copious rains with cyclonic activity in Bay of Bengal. The box effect of Himalayan Mountain ranges of the northeastern zone provides copious rains – the highest rainfall in the World is received at Chirapunji of this zone.
Thus, the destruction of Orography plays the major role in changing the rainfall around that zone. In Mumbai/India [on the banks of Arabian Sea] met stations are located in Colaba and Santacruz [airport]. Historical average rainfall at Santacruz is higher than Colaba by about 300 mm.
For the purpose of expanding Santacruz airport for a separate international airport [I was a trainee on weather forecasting, staying inside the airport for a month] cut a hillock in the windward direction of the Southwest Monsoon on the Eastern and Northeastern side of the Santacruz met observatory on the runway. This results a decreasing trend in Santacruz rainfall relative to Colaba rainfall trend. With the international terminal in operation, high rise buildings have come up that acted as hillock and then reversed the decreasing trend in Santacruz rainfall now. Few years back Mumbai receive unusually very high rainfall in one day. This is mainly associated with the change in vertical structures that have come up acted like Western Ghats.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Here’s an interesting analysis of how UHI is being treated by climatologists:
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/02/extreme-uhi-fraud-at-noaa/
If they built a dome over the city, they could confine that excess heat and have a REAL ‘dark greenhouse’ effect.