It sure seems that way. Yesterday, NWS Anchorage trumpeted these headlines:
Here is the official report. [language removed – I accidentally conflated the all-time record high with daily high -Anthony]
The stage was set by a weather event: a large high-pressure dome centered squarely over Anchorage:
Despite what climate alarmists say, it was a weather event, not a climate event.
But did the location of the temperature reading have anything to do with the new “all-time” record high in Anchorage? Quite possibly.
First, there were other records set in the area, and all of them were smack-dab under the center of that high pressure dome. It is a well-known meteorological fact that sinking air heats up:
Note that those other records are all at airport locations.
Here’s the location of the ASOS (Aviation weather station) that made the Anchorage record in Google Earth. Note the black streaks on the runway just south, that’s where the majority of planes land and put on reverse thrust and take off. Winds coming from the south will push hot jet exhaust towards the ASOS temperature sensor.
The yellow marker is the location of the ASOS weather station via Google Earth:
NW winds will be warming downslope winds from Mt. Sustina (Foehn winds). Yesterday the prevailing winds were WEST at the time of the records, but NW either side of that hour. Winds from N, NW, W, SW, and S will all transport heat from the taxiway and runway asphalt towards the temperature sensor.
Closeup view:
This image from Bing Maps via Digital Globe shows that there is construction going at the airport for that runway. Note all the construction equipment parked around the ASOS station (circled in red):
One wonders if the construction equipment might have been adding to the temperature record, like our famous Scottish Ice Cream Truck added to an “all-time” temperature record.
Here is the hourly data from July 4th:
The Government Hill station in Anchorage , about 5.6 miles away to the NE, only hit 79 about the same time on July 4th
Source: https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/KAKANCHO105/graph/2019-07-4/2019-07-4/daily
In 1969, the airport station was not sandwiched between two ashpalt heatsinks and the ASOS didn’t exist. The ASOS system didn’t come into use until the 1990s.
I think the location at the airport could have easily added a couple of degrees to the record. Same for the other airport locations of Kenai, Palmer, and King Salmon.
Airport history, note the growth:
http://www.dot.state.ak.us/anc/about/history.shtml
It sure looked a lot different before 1970. Small tower, and only one runway, as this historical photo from the FAA shows, looking west.
UPDATE: Merrill Field was the Anchorage airport in the early days of the temperature record, and now serves as a general aviation airport.. The current Anchorage airport Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport was built in 1951.
Note the airport (Merrill field) today – a lot of asphalt and concrete:
UPDATED: {added from Wikipedia} Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport covers an area of 4,608 acres (1,865 ha) at an elevation of 151 feet (46 m) above mean sea level. It has three runways: 7L/25R is 10,600 by 150 feet (3,231 x 46 m) with an asphalt surface; 7R/25L is 12,400 by 200 feet (3,780 x 61 m) with an asphalt/concrete surface; 15/33 is 10,960 by 150 feet (3,341 x 46 m) with an asphalt surface. For the 12-month period ending December 1, 2017, the airport had 261,961 aircraft operations, an average of 718 per day.
The Anchorage International Airport was renamed in 2000 by the Alaska Legislature to honor then long-standing U.S. Senator Ted Stevens.
UPDATED: Here is a postcard from around 1960 of the Anchorage International Airport:
Here is the airport today:
And in 1964, according to NOAA’s HOMR database, the station was moved about a mile west, probably from the tower location. Back then most small airport towers had the temperature sensor on the tower so they could computer and report the very important density altitude information.
| 1964-04-02 | 1.06 mi W |
Source: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/homr/#ncdcstnid=20022040&tab=LOCATIONS
This was probably due to the airport reconstruction due to the great Alaska Earthquake. Maybe the Earthquake had a hand in the 1969 record due to the location change and the construction.
In my view, the Anchorage airport is a false record, aided and abetted by the location of the thermometer, and a terrible place to measure for climatic records. In my view, this record reflects the growth of the airport, not climate change.
Don’t believe me? Read this recently released peer-reviewed paper which says simple things like “openness” due to obstructions contribute as much as 1 degree C: (h/t to Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.)
Microscale Warming due to Poor Ventilation at Surface Observation Stations
Abstract
Screen-level air temperature measurements at surface observation stations are influenced by local-site-scale factors. These local influences may affect global-scale climate change studies. This study investigated the influence of surface obstacles on air temperature measurements at the screen level at climate observation stations in Japan. Screen-level air temperature was measured simultaneously at two neighboring sites (<100 m apart) that differed in terms of their openness. Daytime air temperature was 0°–1°C higher at the narrower site, and theoretical analysis revealed that this warming was caused by poor ventilation. At night, poor ventilation at the narrower site caused the air temperature to be 0°–0.2°C lower, which was demonstrated experimentally and by theoretical analysis. The range of temperature changes due to site narrowing shown in this study is not negligible in climate change studies. Guidelines for site maintenance and metadata recoding were consequently proposed in terms of site openness.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JTECH-D-18-0176.1
It makes me wonder if that construction machinery (see above in the Bing Maps photo) was still parked around the ASOS for the July 4th holiday.
UPDATE 7/6/19 9AM PDT:
From the Anchorage Daily News: (bold mine)
Anchorage hits an official 90 degrees for the first time on record – with an asterisk
The weather service first reported that a record of 89 degrees had been reached in an hourly sampling of airport weather. The actual temperature was 89.1, but it is the weather service’s practice to round to the nearest whole number.
But because the temperature of record is collected at an airport, it is sampled more frequently than on the hour, an NWS official in Anchorage said. Upon evaluation of minute-to-minute temperatures, the weather service said, meteorologists saw that at exactly 5 p.m. the temperature spiked to 89.6 degrees before cooling back down to 87.8 five minutes later.
That my friends is either jet exhaust impacting the sensor, or wind carrying heat off the tarmac, taxiway, or runway.
Do we know that the Kenai reading is at an airport? There is a CWOP station here in an ordinary suburban environment that seems to have recorded 89°F.
Kenai has a CRN site which recorded 87.5F
I live near Homer, which is 180 miles or so south of Anchorage. My house is next to Kachemak Bay, and from my living room I see 4 major glaciers that are only a few miles away. This is the warmest I have experienced in South Central Alaska in 30 years, although much further north Fairbanks routinely exceeds 90 degrees in Summer. There is an unusual (for this area) large dome of high pressure over the entire South Central Alaska area, and it was a given that if the high pressure area lasted long enough, records would be broken. Everyone who has a small interest in weather (including the local NWS office) knows that such domes of high pressure tend to be persistent and long-lasting features once they become established. Further remember that at this latitude there is no real darkness, and only 3-4 hours of non-heating at “night”, so just by persisting more than a few days the high pressure dome would ensure that temperatures would continue going up and up. However, considering that the previous record (only 3 degrees lower) was set in 1969 (at the highest extent of pack ice in the 20th century), it’s hard to see this occurrence as anything but weather. And considering that we only have records going back 60 years for Alaska, it seems ridiculous to draw any other conclusion. No one is enjoying this situation here, since any weather above 70 seems like the furnace of hell to us locals, but I was pleased to see that my fellow Alaskans took it in stride and didn’t jump to any global warming conclusions.
Time for this exercise to be done. The airport at Anchorage seems suited. This is an orders of magnitude exercise to start to assess whether burned fuel has the capacity to change the conventional measured temperature.
1. Outline a volume of air using the area within the airport perimeter and 100 m above it.
2. Using info on aircraft movements, calculate the number of takeoffs and landings on an average 24 hours.
3. Use estimates of fuel consumption per aircraft to each movement.
4. Convert fuel burned into a measure of heat.
5. Distribute that heat through the test volume and estimate the change in temperature that it is capable of causing each day.
6. Do rudimentary sensitivity analysis by altering the main inputs, like altering test volume from 100 m high.
7. See if we are in the ballpark for the assumption that burning fuel makes enough heat to be significant. Geoff S
Spoke too fast. Apparently they found some idiot “specialist” at the University of Alaska who was very happy to tell the MSM news that the Anchorage record was due to climate change. Thankfully the Governor of Alaska just halved the state’s funding for the University of Alaska system, so maybe some of these “specialists” can go bother some other state.
No argument with Anthony’s observations, BUT. This is the longest and hottest stretch I have seen in 50 years. Went to Kenai about 2:30 today, it was 67 on the car thermometer, Soldotna was 74 and Sterling was 83. Kenai is on the coast, Soldotna maybe 10 miles inland, and Sterling maybe 35 miles inland. Wind has been W to NW all day. We saw 89 on our thermometer yesterday. Overnight lows are around 60 right now. “Normal” weather for this time of year is drizzle and 62, with 47 overnight.
I was also in Kenai today, stopped by the Home Depot at around 1230, then went to Soldotna for a sandwich before driving back south to Homer. There was a weak but effective onshore flow in Kenai, which kept the temp pleasant. It was obviously missing in Soldotna, 10 miles further inland. Absolutely no wind or even breeze tonight on the Homer Bluff, even at 2000 feet up temps are about 78 with clear although hazy skies (from swan lake fire) – clearly unusual weather for here, last year at this time I was using my fireplace. But this is probably a once in a half-century event., if not even rarer. Ridge will start shifting north over the next couple of days, allowing some clouds and breezes to reach us, as well as restoring potential for convection by removing cap. But such large features are slow to set up and slow to dissipate, so we will likely have above average temps for at least another week.
“This is the longest and hottest stretch I have seen in 50 years. “
Back in the nineties my liberal friend used to base his global warming arguments on how it even feels a lot hotter to him than when he grew up.
Case closed. Temperatures have never been higher since the industrial revolution. We are doomed.
The RAWS site (CBKA2, 61.15859, -149.796654) in Anchorage is reasonably well sited away from concrete and they recorded 4 hours of 91 F, but then we also know the RAWS sites have a maximum temperature warm bias of 2 to 3 F. But you can’t rule out a high of 90 F at that location nearly 200 ft south of Science Center Dr. Also Lake Hood (PALH) just to the NE of the airport also reported a high temperature of 90 F. I could not find the exact location of PALH.
04 CBKA2 rw 2156 89 56 116 3 10 0
04 CBKA2 rw 2256 90 57 291 4 9 0
04 CBKA2 rw 2356 91 56 288 4 10 0
05 CBKA2 rw 0056 91 56 283 4 10 0
05 CBKA2 rw 0156 91 56 296 3 7 0
05 CBKA2 rw 0256 91 56 285 3 8 0
05 CBKA2 rw 0356 89 57 301 3 6 0
The Merrill Field ASOS (PAMR, 61.21630, -149.85726) is located at the west end of the runway and is surrounded by pavement. They also recorded a maximum temperature of 90 F. Elmendorf AFB (PAED, 61.25055, -149.83786), another 2.5 miles to the north in a less developed area, reported a high temperature of 87 F on 4 July 2019.
Go to the Merrill Field climate record:
https://wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?ak0285
and on the left scroll down and select “Daily Summary Stats”. This daily summary shows a temperature of 92 in June 1931 and several 90+ temperatures in 1915.
And under the Max extreme temps it list 100 deg. in June of 1915.
And in mid July 1915 the temperature reached 90 F at Juneau AK:
https://www.newspapers.com/image/171525020/?terms=heat%2Brecord%2Balaska
This was reported by Tony Heller in this post:
https://realclimatescience.com/2019/07/1934-100-degrees-in-alaska/
All continental airports temperatures are positively biased with respect to bord instruments. Stuttgart was quite a laugh story with up to +6C, progressively fixed to the usual +2 to +4C over 2015.
Fleet liners provide a worldwide daily haul of more than 150’000 automated temperature readings with precise timing, location, altitude information, even on ground.
I m not sure if any of those automated (AMDAR/ACARS) reports were ever used to detect record breaking high values. This privilege being reserved to fixed ground sensors.
I’m in Anchorage and was several miles away to the east. A 4th of July party in a church parking lot with some peripheral tress was sun glaring and bright mostly blue sky, hot at 330 pm. Went in and saw movie, came out at 530, slightly cooler.
Various news sources reported Ted Stevens AP high as 89 degrees and then 90 F. It looks like even 88F might be more representative data, see below. I think data selection vs averaging is a big deal here.
I would look at the airport’s records minute by minute interval for biased reporting:
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/weather/2019/07/05/with-a-high-of-89-anchorage-sets-an-all-time-high-temperature-record/
from Anchorage Daily News:
“International Airport.
The weather service first reported that a record of 89 degrees had been reached in an hourly sampling of airport weather. The actual temperature was 89.1, but it is the weather service’s practice to round to the nearest whole number.
But because the temperature of record is collected at an airport, it is sampled more frequently than on the hour, an NWS official in Anchorage said. Upon evaluation of minute-to-minute temperatures, the weather service said, meteorologists saw that at exactly 5 p.m. the temperature spiked to 89.6 degrees before cooling back down to 87.8 five minutes later.”
ASOS appears to have a +1 F inherent warm bias on sunny days. Before the newly established Regional Climate Reference Network (RCRN) over AZ, NM, UT, and CO was shut down in 2014 I was able to compare several co-located ASOS and RCRN maximum temperatures from 2010 – 2014. I found the ASOS was consistently too warm by +1 F on sunny days.
Back when I was a kid and I’l lived in the Washington area I remember hearing General Jack Kelly on CSPAN radio. He was head of NWS at the time. The Mid-Atlantic was going through a similar anomalous high pressure dome that had suppressed all rain, and drought conditions were high. NWS had not yet bought into the GOrebal Warming crap, at least not officially, but it was already part of the Washington consciousness. A caller asked General Kelly if such features were part of global warming. I distinctly remember his well though out answer, where he explained that such large ridges are persistent features, and by their very nature hard to dislodge. I’m sure if the same happened today and the asked the same of Uccellini, he would be screaming Climate Change into the microphones.
The Anchorage NWS right from the start knew that such an anomalous ridge would lead to broken records, considering the long period of insolation at this latitude this time of year. Reading the forecast discussion every day you could see the excitement in the words of the forecasters. But no one said it was due to AGW.
The Anchorage NWS Forecast office is honest enough to routinely admit that they do not have nearly enough sounders or local observations to correctly initiatlize the models. In fact, right from the start of this high pressure features, the models have been insisting on breaking it down, which hasn’t happened yet.
The Anchorage forecasters seldom have any confidence in the models past 24 hours, 48 at most. They use blends of ECMWF, GFS and CAN, but they almost always diverge very quickly, and they are almost never able to use high resolution models. There is not enough data up here, not at the surface, and certainly not for upper air. Anyone who blames such conditions on AGW has no idea what they’re talking about.
True enough for local weather folk and broadcasters, however their stations carry all the network crap on CNN, NBC and CBS that most people watch every day and many suck it up. Our one major paper carries Associated Press stories and many stories from the Washington Post, New York Times and other sources supporting AGW and little or none from the other side. Given the heat wave we are experiencing, the average person at the very least is conflicted as to what to think.
Fergie
Completely agree Fergie. NOAA and NWS management are bought into AGW hoax beyond any hope of coming back. And academia makes sure that the AGW message is also loud and clear in case the government doesn’t do it. I just heard on national news about the Anchorage record, and the next sentence was a quote from a university of Alaska professor who blamed the heat on global warming. Two sentences, one for the record, one for AGW, and zero context. I’m not sure we will be able to convince the average person of anything else, the repetition and attribution to AGW is automatic now, unfortunately. It’s beyond depressing.
For me this looks a bit like what we call in French “une tempête dans un verre d’eau”.
I downloaded yesterday evening the GHCN daily data for
USW00026451 61.1689 -150.0278 36.6 AK ANCHORAGE INTL AP 70273
and
USW00026563 60.7236 -150.4483 86.0 AK KENAI 29 ENE CRN 70342
The data for July 4 wasn’t there yet, but at least I managed to compare, for their common period 2011-2019, the anomalies of the two stations, and obtained this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14aS2UEkD0_Uw2rC05ywbQNdIURBVW-GW/view
It seems clear that if the Anchorage AP station would show a warming bias, this would be visible when comparing its data to that of the pristine USCRN station Kenai.
Kenai shows temperatures about 2 °C lower than those of Anchorage AP (no wonder when you look in Google Maps at the place it is located), but their trends are nearly identical for 2012-2018 (hum: over 3 °C / decade – no, not per century).
Rgds
J.-P. D.
There’s no sense whatsoever in comparing monthly-average ANOMALIES when the issue is record-level daily Tmax. Nor is it a question of dissimilar short-term “trends.” It’s entirely a matter of greatly warmer INSTANTANEOUS temperatures at locations greatly affected by various UHI factors, versus those relatively free of such non-climatic effects.
That stark difference in LEVELS can come into play even at the SAME location when it urbanizes gradually over time. That’s how most “all-time record highs” are produced in sites settled only for a few generations, which continue to grow.
Stop playing teacher 1sky1, you are completely OT here.
I could of course have created diaily TMAX time series for the two stations, but that requests to generate a daily climatology and daily anomalies, and for that there is for me no reason excepted head posts like this one. Useless work!
Manifestly, you do not seem to read what you reply on, you merely scan it for keys not matching your narrative.
All the usual hallmarks of inept sermonizing: not only irrelevant to the technical issue at hand, but blind to that very fact.
The earth has been warming for over a hundred years. The trend is upward. Record highs occur at various places at various times depending upon certain weather conditions.
Maybe it was the hottest in the last 70 or so years. Maybe not. It was, unquestionably, unusually hot.
We just do not have the accuracy in the current data and certainly the past data to say so for sure.
For me, I say, a warmer, greener, Alaska is a good thing.
Airports are often built in rural or semi rural locations so that over decades they usually have there own urban heat island developing with further development built around them. The UHI promotes energy retention slowly released especially overnight resulting in higher minimums than without its presence.
I don’t see the temperature records being any big deal with the above happening plus the state-wide record of 37.8C (100F), was set at Fort Yukon in the state’s north east region over a century ago. The length of timeline too short for records to be anything other than meaningless as records should be regular with similar weather conditions promoting them.
One location reached 37.8C (100F) in the past before, so it’s not impossible that something like this could be reached again in a different location within the same region.
Anthony,
I think some of your points challenging this record are weak:
1) The wind being generally from the NW would minimize any artificial warming impact from dark surfaces, jet exhaust etc. on the ASOS sensors. The air only passes over a taxiway. BTW don’t assume air traffic at PANC has increased steadily over the years and use that as an assumption for tainted temperature records. Refueling stops from transpacific and transpolar flights went away years as longer range jets made them unneeded. It was a huge hit to the airport when they lost all that traffic.
2) The Government Hill station you pick to compare with looks like a home weather station so who knows of its accuracy? It is also closer to Knik Arm so would also tend to be cooler.
3) The high temperatures of other official stations in the area are remarkably similar: Lake Hood sea plane base is very close in proximity and on a lake (obviously): 90. Merrill Field (much smaller airport with mostly small plane traffic: 90. Campbell Creek Science Center (farther inland, in the woods, and usually a fair bit warmer): 91. A little farther out Elmendorf AFB: 87, Birchwood: 88. Someone with more time than me can look up some of the coop stations nearby. Regionally Kenai (89), Palmer (88), and King Salmon (89) also were in all-time record status. (Yes they are all at airports. Yes, I realize that airports are not the best climate stations, but what I’m saying is that these three are not busy, built up airports and have undergone dramatic development around them. Even Anchorage dose not fit that description very well, frankly.)
Yes, I concede that there is probably some effect of the pavement around PANC and perhaps some of the other record setters, but now it would need to be compared to the amount of pavement present over years past where you are asserting the records were more reliable. I claim that without evidence to the contrary the changes have not been significant for many years. Remember, to the NW of the PANC ASOS is a park, then the water. To my knowledge the park was created when military use of the land ceased (read more development and activity, though I don’t know about that particular stretch). Perhaps someone can elaborate.
Another factor to look at is the temperature sensors. Mark Albright pointed out studies that showed a 1F warm bias to the ASOS for sunny day high temperatures. Now it would be needed to show that the temperature sensors used in past records you take as more accurate did not have some sort of issue, as is possible with previous electronic sensors such as the HO83 series, and even liquid in glass thermometers (not necessarily the actual thermometers but the screens, the mechanical ventilation for them which often used electric fans inside the shelters, light bulbs, etc) the siting etc.
So it’s not a to-the-degree system for sure, so I’ll give you a degree, but to avoid a new record at Anchorage you have to find 5 degrees of error and that is huge stretch in this case.
Jim
Kenai and King Salmon also had records of 89 degrees and they are not next to an airport but the water. I guess you forgot to mention that.