A couple of days ago, I highlighted a worst of the worst NOAA climate monitoring station in Arizona with the help of a scientist from the University of Washington.
My friend Jim Goodridge, former California State Climatologist continues to be busy in his retirement, and sends this along today. He’s been tracking a group of weather stations in California, and has been doing so for over 20 years. In fact, it was Jim who first introduced me to that light bulb moment where I realized that global warming wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be when he made this short publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 1996.
I guess you could say it was the graph that launched a thousand blog posts, because as we all know, CO2 can’t heat differently based on county population.
So with that in mind, have a look at his current analysis:
What is most notable is the red dots, which cluster in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as the Los Angeles basin. You can also make out the I-80 corridor from San Francisco to Reno, traced in red.
Jim’s Excel spreadsheet is here, you can play with the data yourself: CA-Temp-map-100-Years
Of the stations showing the greatest 100 year warming rate, the one station right on the border of Arizona and California, Parker 6NE, has the greatest at 0.0625/year degrees Fahrenheit as this screen cap from his worksheet shows:
That’s a whopping 6.25 degrees Fahrenheit ( 3.47C) per century! That’s a bigger rate than some of the climate model predictions. Wow, the greenhouse effect must surely have gone into overdrive in Parker, right?
I decided to have a look at the Parker 6NE station, and started with the B91 forms of original data, boy was I surprised:
Look at all that missing data, which I’ve marked in yellow. 10 days in November 2015 and 16 days in December 2015. Of course NOAA/NCEI “corrects” this by infilling it with other data from surrounding stations so that no station record is incomplete in their database. In the case of December, 2015, over 50% of the readings aren’t actually real data from the station in Parker, they are “fabricated” from other data using NOAA/NCEI’s special FILNET sauce. No worries, all’s fair in love and climate science, right?
NASA GISS keeps a plot of Parker 6NE data, and it seems missing data has been a hallmark of this station for quite some time. Notice all the gaps:
Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=425000262500&dt=1&ds=14
With that many gaps in annual data, you’d think this station might not be suitable for climate science use, much less categorized as a “best of the best” USHCN station, right? No worries, all’s fair in love and climate science.
Steve Goddard had a look at Parker 6NE a few months ago, and plotted the infilled data from NOAA NCEI:
It seems pretty clear that the majority of the warming trend is all about the minimum temperature, which has a sharply higher trend than the daytime maximum temperature. This mirrors the temperature trend of nearby Las Vegas, NV which has had explosive growth. The UHI signal in the nighttime Tmin is very clear:
But, it turns out that most of that trend is in overnight temperatures, which are most affected by the explosive infrastructure growth of Las Vegas and the resultant UHI:
Inconveniently, there is no upward trend in maximum temperatures, in fact it appears there has been a slight downward trend since the late 1930’s and early 1940’s:
So surely, Parker 6NE must have had similar explosive growth contributing to UHI, making the Tmin trend grow large, right?
Nope. It’s a siting issue. According to the B91 form, the Parker 6NE USHCN climate monitoring station is located at radio station KLPZ in Parker, it is a volunteer observing site, which sort of explains why NOAA gets what it pays for when we have 16 days of missing data in December 2015.
A cursory look at the station in Google Earth shows the problem, can you spot the official climate monitoring temperature sensor in this aerial view?
I couldn’t either. But thanks to Google Earth street view, I found it. You may have to click the images to see better. Annotations are mine.
The junk piles and junk cars are certainly a nice touch for NOAA’s official climate observing station, don’t you think? Note also the big “swamp cooler” on the roof of the radio station about 20 feet to the right of the MMTS temperature sensor. That will put extra humidity into the nearby air, which will contribute to local warming due to moist enthalpy, in addition to the heat sink effects provided by the junk, cars, and nearby building. Those who live in the deep south understand how a how a humid summer night can stay at 80 degrees for a Tmin, while over in the desert of Arizona, away from the swamp cooler A/C units, the temperature can fall to 50 degrees at the same latitude on the same day, with an even higher Tmax.
And then there’s the nearby tree, which we know will limit LWIR going from the ground to the upper atmosphere at night, keeping the air near the ground warmer than it normally would be. That’s a factor too.
But I think the biggest factor is the solid metal fence that surrounds the compound, which can be clearly seen in the aerial view. Then there’s the building itself to the south. That essentially cuts off the temperature sensor from any wind flow near the ground in any direction, and as we know from basic meteorology, windless nights are the biggest problem for UHI. In this case, thanks to the fence, all nights are less windy at the sensor than they normally would be, resulting in less mixing of the boundary layer air, and warmer temperatures at night. This site mimics a big city UHI effect due to these factors I’ve noted.
But NOAA says they can “fix” garbage temperature station data like this.
If it were up to me, I’d remove this station from all climate databases rather than trying to fix this hodgepodge of inaccurate and highly biased data. But NOAA and their fanboys prefer keeping junk data like this.
This is why I’ve said before and will continue to say:
“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, therefore sidestepping that highly argumentative problem completely. Fortunately, there was enough in the USHCN, 410 out of 1218.”
But, they at NOAA keep these garbage climate stations anyway. No worries, all’s fair in love and climate science.
ADDENDUM: I hope Anthony won’t mind if I add this. I took Jim Goodrich’s Excel data from above, added county population density data, and that gave me the following graph:
Best to everyone,
w.
“Study: Urban backyards contribute almost as much CO2 as much as cars and buildings”
One too many “as much”-es.
Sorry, Mods: posted that last in the wrong topic. Mea Culpa