From the “global warming data looks better with heat-sinks and air conditioners” department.
Dr. Mark Albright, of the University of Washington writes:
Here is a great example of how NOT to measure the climate! On our way back to Tucson from Phoenix on Monday we stopped by to see the Picacho 8 SE coop site at Picacho Peak State Park. Note the white MMTS temperature monitor 1/3 of the way in from the left. The building is surrounded by the natural terrain of the Sonoran Desert, but instead the worst possible site adjacent to the paved road and SW facing brick wall was chosen in 2009 as the location to monitor temperature.
Here is a view looking Northeast:
For an aerial view in google maps:
The NCEI HOMR metadata repository tells us:
COMPATABLE EQUIPMENT MOVE 55 FEET DUE WEST. EQUIPMENT MOVED 05/06/2009. (that is when the new state park visitor center was built)
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/homr/#ncdcstnid=20001376&tab=MISC
Additional photos:
Note the air conditioner heat exchangers within a few feet of the MMTS sensor:
Picacho 8 SE has it all: brick building, parking lot, road, and air conditioner heat exchangers within a few feet of the MMTS sensor.
This one takes the cake, and I think it is worse than our former worst-case USHCN station (now closed) located in a parking lot in Tucson at the University of Arizona:
Picacho 8 SE is a COOP site, not part of USHCN, but it (along with others) is used as basis for the adjustments to the stations that have not been compromised. This is the crux of the problem, and why it is so important to seek out the good and unperturbed stations for their record, and discard the rest. No amount of general purpose algorithms and adjustments can fix garbage temperature data produced by stations like this, nor should we even try. This is a Class 5 station, the worst of the worst, and should be closed rather than continuing to pollute the climate dataset.
In our AGU 2015 poster and press release, it was stated:
“The majority of weather stations used by NOAA to detect climate change temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts. This study demonstrates conclusively that this issue affects temperature trend and that NOAA’s methods are not correcting for this problem, resulting in an inflated temperature trend. It suggests that the trend for U.S. temperature will need to be corrected.” He [Watts} added: “We also see evidence of this same sort of siting problem around the world at many other official weather stations, suggesting that the same upward bias on trend also manifests itself in the global temperature record”
“Our viewpoint is that trying to retain stations with dodgy records and adjusting the data is a pointless exercise. We chose simply to locate all the stations that DON”T need any adjustments and use those, therefor sidestepping that highly argumentative problem completely. Fortunately, there was enough in the USHCN, 410 out of 1218.”
1. Comprehensive and detailed evaluation of station metadata, on-site station photography, satellite and aerial imaging, street level Google Earth imagery, and curator interviews have yielded a well-distributed 410 station subset of the 1218 station USHCN network that is unperturbed by Time of Observation changes, station moves, or rating changes, and a complete or mostly complete 30-year dataset. It must be emphasized that the perturbed stations dropped from the USHCN set show significantly lower trends than those retained in the sample, both for well and poorly sited station sets.
2. Bias at the microsite level (the immediate environment of the sensor) in the unperturbed subset of USHCN stations has a significant effect on the mean temperature (Tmean) trend. Well sited stations show significantly less warming from 1979 – 2008. These differences are significant in Tmean, and most pronounced in the minimum temperature data (Tmin). (Figure 3 and Table 1)
3. Equipment bias (CRS v. MMTS stations) in the unperturbed subset of USHCN stations has a significant effect on the mean temperature (Tmean) trend when CRS stations are compared with MMTS stations. MMTS stations show significantly less warming than CRS stations from 1979 – 2008. (Table 1) These differences are significant in Tmean (even after upward adjustment for MMTS conversion) and most pronounced in the maximum temperature data (Tmax).
4. The 30-year Tmean temperature trend of unperturbed, well sited stations is significantly lower than the Tmean temperature trend of NOAA/NCDC official adjusted homogenized surface temperature record for all 1218 USHCN stations.
5. We believe the NOAA/NCDC homogenization adjustment causes well sited stations to be adjusted upwards to match the trends of poorly sited stations.
6. The data suggests that the divergence between well and poorly sited stations is gradual, not a result of spurious step change due to poor metadata.
The result speaks for itself:
Figure 3 – Tmean Comparisons of well sited (compliant Class 1&2) USHCN stations to poorly sited USHCN stations (non-compliant, Classes 3,4,&5) by CONUS and region to official NOAA adjusted USHCN data (V2.5) for the entire (compliant and non-compliant) USHCN dataset.
Figure 4 – Comparisons of 30 year trend for compliant Class 1,2 USHCN stations to non-compliant, Class 3,4,5 USHCN stations to NOAA final adjusted V2.5 USHCN data in the Continental United States
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Anthony, it was your “How not to measure temperature….” posts that got me hooked on WUWT all those years ago. I was incredulous then and still am.
..Me too !
Yes, me too, way back then. And it’s been must read stuff over all those years. Many thanks Anthony.
I’m wondering if I should try and replicate this study with the NIWA sites here in New Zealand…or does anyone know if it has already been done?
The only examples of worse siting that comes to mind is placement of mainstream media craniums. They are apparently kept in warm, dark, moist, odiferous places with atmospheres very rich in methane.
Tremendous work Anthony. I hope you get some enjoyment from this. I also really admire the work and messages from Patrick Moore but he always comes across as grumpy.
I wonder if there is a corralation with GAT and the number of airconditioners sold.
Anthony :
Huh?
Seems at odds with fig. 4
We reveal this, because otherwise we would be accused of cherry picking stations. That’s right, we rejected stations that would have improved our result because they failed other criteria.
Yes.
TOBS bias looms large. Also, one (obviously) cannot rate a station after a move unless one knows the previous location.
As a corollary to the land + sea temp averaging issue linked above: this arid site raises another issue.
In the same way that land will bias up the land+sea average because of it’s lower heat capacity, arid sites will ramp up the mean of land averages.
If we just want stats about average temperatures we live in the straight average is probably as good as anything. However, if this average is to be used to climate sensitivity calculations, arid sites will disproportionately increase the mean temperature.
The key point is that according to the laws of physics and thermodynamics, temperatures can not be added and averaged. To get a physically meaningful average it needs to be weighted by the climate sensitivity or heat capacity of the site. That gives an energy quantity which can be properly added and thus averaged.
See the update at end of article.
https://climategrog.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/are-land-sea-averages-meaningful-2/
“5. We believe the NOAA/NCDC homogenization adjustment causes well sited stations to be adjusted upwards to match the trends of poorly sited stations.”
Why would a well sited station need to be adjusted by anything other than possibly a near-by well sited station?
Because they did not give the readings that the warmists wanted !
These sort of auto-heating set-ups are ideal to promote the Warmistas’ programme of Global Warming caused by CO2. Thus they are never corrected.
They need to add a barbecue pit to complete the site.
How bout this one:
http://musthavemom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Danika-roasting-a-Smore-Must-Have-Mom.jpg
That’s a mighty big Marshmallow !
What marshmallow ?, that is a ground squirrel caught in a snare.
Gotta teach them to forage when they are young.
…OMG..You some tiny rodents !
…Any info on the rocks around the her ? Glacier drops ?
That’s a mighty big Marshmallow !
It’s an MMTS.
” GOT ” got lost where ??
I was thinking metal boat. There has to be a temperature sensor in there somewhere.
http://www.scrapmetalforum.com/scrap-metal-questions-answers/27510-24-starcraft-aluminum-boat-too-good-scrap.html
I agree that there isn’t a way to properly adjust the temperature readings at that station. Sometimes it may be 2 degrees F or more higher than it should, sometimes only 1 degree higher and sometimes it may actually be correct. Without knowing when the AC was running, how long the station was cloud covered, the wind direction, precipitation times and amounts, and more; readings at other somewhat “neighboring” stations, including properly sited ones, may have absolutely no knowable relationship to that station’s readings.
Can’t ever be correct except twice a day as the temperature curve of this arid site possibly intersects with the real temperature, Look at the surface below the station, if I was trying to heat an area by thermal intertia this is how I would do it.
“issue affects temperature trend and that NOAA’s methods are not correcting for this problem, resulting in an inflated temperature trend.”
Nearly right. How about
“… NOAA’s methods CANNOT corre ct the problem – and that is the real problem.”
And nor can BEST’s nor anyone else’s ‘methods’.
There is an unquantifieable upward bias going forward in time with pretty much the entire data set due to UHI effect and a comparacble bias, for quite different reaosns, in the sea data set. The only reliable data is from the modern balloon and satellite sets and the Argo buoys and they do not have the length of data to base some obsession on.
+1
And of course, shortly after ARGO was rolled out, it showed that the ocean temperatures were cooling. It was assumed that this must be due to some error without ever taking a random sample of buoys back to the laboratory for instrument testing calibration evaluation etc. Instead, they merely deleted from the data set those buoys showing the greatest cooling. That is science in action for you, and demonstrates how seriously they take quality control into consideration.
There might have been a problem with the ARGO data, but not testing to actually verify that the buoys showing the greatest trend in cooling were actually faulty forever tarnished the record, and the ARGO data must always be viewed with that caveat in mind.
They probably did test it and didn’t like the answer they got, sooooooo,…… in the trash bin it goes !
I find it interesting that at the same time this poorly cited coop site was being installed in Arizona in 2009 an effort was underway to produce a first-rate Regional Climate Reference Network of 72 sites throughout the SW states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. This network was indeed opened in 2010 but then was shut down in June 2014 with little fanfare or notice:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/usrcrn/
-mark albright
Hmm. Somehow the existence of the Regional Climate Reference Network escaped my notice here in NH. The Climate Reference Network is a nationwide project and has been running since 2005 or so and I guess is NCEI’s second best kept secret.
…Things that make you go Hmmmmmmmm………
Might as well place it on the AC unit or in it if there is no more concern than this. That way it can be serviced together.
It’s ok, we have MODELS that tell us what the temperature should be, so we can save all the money associated with maintaining real temperature sensors. Or perhaps we begin to crowdsource temperature measurements – we have temperature sensors in millions of cars. /sarc.
Don’t underestimate how much heat comes off the block wall. I live in Tucson and the wall of my house is too hot to touch in summer after the sun’s been on it (i.e. 50-60C). Lots of mass that will re-radiate that heat back at night as well.
How to force and exploit people. The modern scientific orthodoxy has the same goals as the old orthodoxy covered with a variable sheen of legitimacy.
Oh, well. We’ll learn how well their models, let alone their axioms, stand up to Nature’s chaos under man and machine’s limited perception, and the inevitable feedback to traditional pursuit of capital and control.
From what I can tell, the Australian temperature siting is no better. If wuwt data is anything to go by, maybe a third is worth using..?
Less than a tenth. And only after correction for equipment bias and jumps.
As third of stations are unperturbed. But only a quarter of those are adequately sited.
If we can gin up a correction for microsite (not as easy as it sounds), we may be able to largely redeem the remainder.
They’re clearly not serious about science, data, observations or forecasting. No monitoring and a wild-@ss guess would be better than this perversion, pretending to be objective and disinterested data.
They’re stacking the deck, and they know it.
And if they don’t know it (which is inconceivable), then excise their records as corrupt and useless data. It’s even more corrupt to know about this behavior, and not do so, and keep presenting trend-lines as ‘climate change science’, rather than just corrupt weather-record logging, by people stacking the deck, or too apathetic to give a stuff. this topic has been around too long now to accept excuses for inaction ad removal of sites. Do you keep using a broken out of calibration thermometer, like there’s nothing wrong with doing that?
Apparently that would be a yes.
…As I have always said, it is intentional, deliberate and has an agenda to fulfill !
They’re stacking the deck, and they know it.
From what I can tell, they are stacking the deck and they do not know it.
It’s worse than a crime. It’s a blunder.
Evan,
I respect that you speak in “good faith” terms about them, but how many times does a “blunder” have to be pointed out, and go uncorrected, before it qualifies as deliberate? Crimes of stupidity are still crimes. No criminal intent does not negate a criminal act.
If the pointing out comes from people they are biased against and with whom they have harsh word (if any words at all), then they are going to blow it all off. OTOH, one can get some reasonable discussion if it is kept on a civil, professional level.
Many if not most of the corrections to our 2012 pre-release are a direct (and extremely valuable) result of such discussions, and I am grateful to those who participated.
Our efforts are an ongoing process.
Whatever the obvious raw problems pointed out here in the lower 48, for the GLOBE, the adjustments made over the last 50 years are quite small, and overall, the adjusted data shows LESS warming than the raw data:
Figure 2 (second panel) in Karl et al shows global land/ocean raw vs. adjusted: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/06/noaa-temperature-record-updates-and-the-hiatus/
You also can find all the land and ocean data with and without corrections on the NOAA ftp site: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/scpub201506/
…ROTFLMAO…I have no words to excuse your stupidity….!
The paper by Karl (but not yet showing 2015’s temperature) is at
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full
“The NCEI HOMR metadata repository tells us:
COMPATABLE EQUIPMENT MOVE 55 FEET DUE WEST. EQUIPMENT MOVED 05/06/2009.” The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if anyone has ever searched through that repository to find and analyze all the equipment moves….
The google satellite image shows that the pathway has since been concreted over. I’m guessing the site photos are older than the satellite photos.
I’m simply sunned that they went to the effort of moving the thermometers into the worst possible location. The site from the satellite image shows they could have moved it in any other direction and all would have been well. But no, they placed the thermometer against the west facing wall where the most tarmac was and were the air conditions were situated. It’s worse than amateurish.
Steven Mosher posted this over at Judith’s, last week. It speaks volumes about the temperature record, and about “Climate Scientists'” approach to the media. If any “Climate Scientist” ever said the word “Kludgy” to anyone in the Main Stream Media, and admitted that reporting temperatures to the hundredth of a degree was completely meaningless considering the data, many many heads would explode.
Engineers such as myself are taught many important rules regarding data, and it continues to amaze me to see an entire so-called scientific field completely ignoring these well-established policies.
Steven Mosher | February 11, 2016 at 5:39 pm | Reply
Daryl
What you are missing is that we have a complex system. If we lived in a perfectly instrumented world, a lab beaker, we could probably define one metric collect it with precision and do experiments.
But the earth system is not a lab beaker. We don’t have perfect measurement systems. There is no repeating experiments in a controlled fashion.
If we were forced by some dictator to choose on metric we might choose energy balance at TOA. But we don’t have long or accurate measures of that.
So we are left with making do. Making do with metrics that only capture the ocean heat content, or land air temps or night time mat, or sst, or surface skin estimates or sea level rise or the brightness temperature from 0-8km, or tree rings, or the size of glaciers or ice sheets, or a metric where we combine sst and sat. We call the last one global temperature.. It’s really an index. One sliver one slice of this complex system. Think of it as judging the performance of a car by averaging it’s top speed and speed in the corner.. It’s an indicator, nothing more.
Lacking the perfect we make do with a whole collection of imperfect, sometimes kludgy, metrics.
Here is the rub. All of those metrics tell the story.
The earth is warmer. The best current explanation for that warming is that forcing has increased.
There are two types of forcing. Human and natural.
The best imperfect explanation says that humans account for more than half of the increase in forcing.
Now you can, as OJ’s defense lawyers did, throw all sorts of doubt at each separate piece of evidence. And you could win a case if the decision required knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt. But that’s really quite different from trying to provide the best understanding. Science tries to provide the best understanding.
“There are two types of forcing. Human and natural.”
Better, and more intellectual accurate IMHO, would be “There are two types of forcing. Natural and Unnatural.”
Followed by: “The best imperfect explanation says we don’t know enough about the Natural forcings to determine how much effect the Unnatural forcings may have.”
That would require an honest scientist to admit he/she doesn’t know everything and some scientists posting here have actually said that.
If I’m understanding kludginess correctly, it’s that defendants are all guilty but if they can throw enough doubt around, they can unjustly win cases.
Many an experienced gardener will explain that the best way to grow tropical plants such as frangipani in the cool temperate climates found south of Sydney is to replicate the temperature of a tropical climate and one of the best ways to do that is to plant near a brick wall that receives plenty of sunshine.
Maybe NOAA also understands this trick?
OK, are you going to make google for ” frangipan ” or are you going to tell me whether it is edible or not ?
I’ve never eaten them but as with many plants Marcus yes I believe the flowers of the frangipani are edible.
All flowers are edible. But some of them are poisonous. 🙂
“All flowers are edible. But some of them are poisonous. :)”
You’ll be eating crow-flowers. Edible is fit to eat, safe to eat etc. Not just possible to swallow.
Are “crow flowers” edible? 🙂 (teasing)
I’ll be sure to try to include the word “teasing” in my silly posts because obviously the smiley face at the end of my previous comment wasn’t enough of an indicator for you personally.
Frangipani or Plumeria is an ornamental tree known for its showy and highly scented flowers which are often featured in Hawaiian leis.
Fragipanni
A useful contribution would be a nice change when you decide to hit the “post comment” button Marcus.
“A useful contribution would be a nice change when you decide to hit the “post comment” button Marcus.”
It’s always amusing when someone attempts to make the behavior of another look a certain way, while behaving in the exact manner they are condemning. Or what that a shining example of what you consider to be a “useful contribution”?
Why can our government afford to buy and put up barriers to open parks and road pull outs during a government shutdown, yet cannot buy a few hundred feet of wire and that property calibrate said weather station for the extra wire, my guess is either they are lazy are dishonest in what they are measuring. I am really tired of educated morons who are moron and lazy constantly getting the soap box to push their loony ideas on us all.
I can safely say that politics is all soap box all the time.
Oh, and I’m sure you can figure out where “morons” fits too.
Official Climate Change Science on display. Hillaryarious!