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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and what a weird way of doing brickwork – why haven’t they overlapped the perpendiculars like builders normally do when building brick or block walls?
Those walls can have zero strength, I wouldn’t go in there even while a big truck was driving past, let alone on a windy day or if any chance of earth tremors. The thing would just crumble.
Peta, that’s called a stack bond. And they are not brick, they are block, big difference. Odds are they are cultured block, anyway.
Most likely because it’s “facade” bricking on the building. They manufacture “veneer” stones that weight hardly anything (and they can make them look exactly like any type and color of rock you can imagine) and apply them to the outsides of homes and buildings so they look as if they are actually constructed out of them when they aren’t.
It’s been a very, very long time since I actually saw a new building in which the exterior walls were actually constructed out of solid bricks/blocks and nothing else. And the ones I’ve seen in the past, have been drilled through and injected with re-bar for structural strength.
I think Peta is correct. They are blocks stacked in vertical columns instead of the usual overlapped. The low wall in front is definitely block work, and the lower 20 blocks of the building use alternating exposed block texture, some of which are the same as the low wall. This is no façade.
An errant vehicle only needs to bump that low wall and it would collapse. They are all solid blocks stacked vertically.
“”””I think Peta is correct. They are blocks stacked in vertical columns instead of the usual overlapped.””””
Yes, it’s called a ‘stacked bond’.
“””They manufacture “veneer” stones that weight hardly anything (and they can make them look exactly like any type and color of rock you can imagine)”””
Yep, it’s called Cultured Stone, or Cultured block. And they are heavy, no façade about them. They get laid up to the existing wall, which holds it in place. It’s like frosting a cake and sticking on sprinkles.
The Veneer products are usually sheets of your preferred ‘look’, weighing very little and attached to an existing wall.
There’s really quite a “Science” to it. Undoubtedly, which brings to thought the use of words that can totally change the outcome of any said discussion.
Which made me think precisely this…..
Anthony, as I read here quite often, one thing which I would like to point out about the simplicity of words and their meanings.
As you wrote about your photos, you stated that the building were brick, when actually they are not brick.
As I’ve pointed out, they are block. Of course ! this is not meant as criticism ( towards you) since we can’t all know everything!… But my point being, is that when simple mistakes are made, it can become such a different outcome.
It really is the same thing that is talked about here all the time.
There is quite a “Science” to laying brick, block, Cultured or otherwise, poured concrete walls verses laid block, re-bar re-enforced or not.
Different procedures for each application, different outcomes for each method, ect..
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
NOAA and NASA say UHI isn’t important. Therefore they do not make the obvious adjustments necessary to compensate for UHI affected sites such as this when calculating their “Hottest Year Ever”.
Satellites (UAH/RSS) don’t have asphalt car parks, AC exhausts or human development located next to them, which is probably why they show no global warming, at all, over the past 18+ years.
Point an IR thermometer at asphalt and then a grassy area on a sunny day and then tell me there’s no UHI.
Heck, you can do the same thing the morning after a sunny day in the summer before the Sun even comes up, and the asphalt is still warm, and the grass will be quite cool.
UAH / RSS measure the “upper air”. Part of the atmosphere well above Earth’s surface. And the precise point where AGW is supposed to be measured.
– far from car parks and asphalt.
I shouldn’t have included that part, but I also assumed people would realize that NOAA and NASA [produce] GAT based on surface stations, which are right next to asphalt parking lots.
Nasa has satellites measuring temperatures, but they don’t actually produce those GAT’s UAH/GSS does.
Not only is this station not in USHCN, or in GHCN-M, and so not used in the GISS or NOAA global indices, but it seems it is not currently used in the much larger setfor the new nClimDiv for the CONUS average. The complete inventory for that is in this 294 Mb file, and the most recent month in which station USC00026513 (PICACHO 8 SE) was used was Feb 2014.
Thanks for the fact checking Nick. That sure beats the froth posts.
It is indeed comforting to know that at least one poorly sited station is not being used by GISS or NOAA.
So this is a poorly sited station for which the data produced is not used for anything useful. That must mean our government has paid for the installation, operation and maintenance of what passes for a weather station. I am not surprised.
A friend purposely surrounded his swimming pool (in the cold UK) with a very similar brick wall, to keep the pool warm. And it did a brilliant job, storing and reradiating the midday heat well into the afternoon.
R
UHI effects on surface temp trends is a much better, Occams Razor explanation than the CO2 GHE hypothesis considering the lack of trend in TLT balloon & satellite data sets.
And, we you look at the difference between today’s warming and tonight’s cooling over a years time and many different stations, I would expect Co2 to reduce cooling, leading to an increase of temperature. What I find is over the period of 1940 to 2014 there is a slight cooling, it cools slightly more over night that the prior days warming.
The last part took me a while to figure out, how could it cool more than it warmed?
Then I realized air masses move, in particular the tropical oceans warm and evaporate tremendous amount of of water, that then blows inland where it cools.
But to your point, there is no sign of a loss of cooling at night in surface data (the actual station data, not the published trash that masquerades as temperature data).
Ok lets face it land based temperatures from 1922 cannot be compared to land based temperatures of today. There are too many variables and adjusting and re-adjusting back and forth through time to get the “real” temperatures might be fun and pull a good paycheck but is next to useless.
Satellite data also has variability to deal with, but much less volatile and much easier to measure. Satellite data currently is our only hope of measuring temperature over time. Just scrap the land based stuff, it is a waste of money and resources and is harmful when presented as authoritative.
all quoted temprture readings are done from termometers in the shade and called air tempreture
[Speal cheek is you’re fiend. .mod]
Some years ago we built a house that faces where the sun rises on the shortest day of the year.
I can still remember getting out in the field on that very cold winters day and waiting for the sun to rise just to see exactly where it rose over the surrounding hills, and stepping out the site of the house and hammering pegs into the ground to make sure we had it right.
Never had to use heating, or very little in the following winters, the house was lovely and warm by early morning, due to the heating effect of the winter sun hitting concrete floors from sunrise, and dark brown bricks, and later in the day and in summer when we didn’t need the heat, the wide eves and narrow end of house kept the sun/heat out.
We used the heat from the sun to achieve all the warming and cooling we needed. Today we power our house with solar panels on our roof, and contribute what we don’t use to the grid, again another house that faces the right way for the sun to heat in winter, and wide eves on the north and western sides.
Who is the dolt that placed that “weather” station in that location ? Why not just put it in front of a gas fireplace ? Is there no criteria for collecting accurate weather data ? At least satellite data isn’t subject to
human induced bias . That can’t seriously be considered a ” weather station ” . Any scientist who chose that as a valid weather station should be fired .