Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
On Wednesday, July 25, ABC13 in Houston reported on the city’s temperatures from new data that accounted for the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) within the city and its surrounding suburbs. The results from the data show that Houston experiences a UHI impact of six degrees Fahrenheit or greater on any given day.
In the article, ABC13 News acknowledges what The Heartland Institute has long pointed out, the urban heat island effect impacts measured temperatures and people’s lives. They cite an example, saying:
Say the forecast high temperature is 90 degrees. Factor in the additional warmth from the urban heat island, and it could feel like 95 degrees in Rosenberg, 97 in Humble, 98 downtown, or even 99 in Baytown.
The story also notes that the UHI is greater with a broad reach than previously acknowledged, even effecting less densely populated areas.
This finding parallels what was revealed in the 2022 Heartland Institute report Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed which found approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and uncorrupted placement by the agency’s own published standards. The UHI effect, which grows along with the size of cities, creates artificial warming at many long-term temperature stations.
As was found in Houston, weather stations within the UHI effect read higher temperatures, meaning temperatures recorded at these stations are warmer than they would be absent the presence of artifacts of development, like buildings, parking lots, and machinery that have been built up or are in use around them which trap and/or generate heat. From that report, for example, Figure 1 shows a station in rural Dillon, MT that is biased warmer due to its proximity to a sunlit brick wall.
The chart below, found on page 17 of the report, shows 30 years of data from NOAA temperature stations in the Continental United States (CONUS). The blue lines show recorded temperatures and the trend from stations that comply with NOAA’s published standards. The yellow lines are temperatures taken from stations that are not compliant with those standards (i.e. near artificial hot spots). The red lines are the “official” adjusted temperature released by NOAA.
If you look at the blue line in Figure 2 of unperturbed stations that adhere to NOAA’s published standard – ones that are correctly located and free of localized urban heat biases – they display about half the rate of warming compared to perturbed stations that have UHI biases. Extrapolating from the U.S. data, on average, urban heat islands increase the global surface temperature trend by almost 50 percent.
Like the Houston UHI finding, the issue of localized heat-bias was proven in a real-world experiment conducted by NOAA’s laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and published in a peer reviewed science journal.
The UHI has long been either ignored and/or its impact on temperatures downplayed in the climate debate, despite the fact that it clearly significantly influences daily temperature measurements, as well as long-term climate trends. Kudos to ABC13 in Houston for reporting honestly on how the UHI affects Houston’s temperatures.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
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UHI isn’t a problem, neither is CO2. The problem is the big Climate Change lie that has been promoted by left-wing agitators for the last 40+ years.
The climate changers wouldn’t tell porkies would they?
July 2023 was likely the hottest month in 120,000 years (msn.com)
How hot is it in Houston? Well, it’s like an oven….it’s boiling….it’s frying…it’s like a sauna….like a microwave….it’s HOT baby!
From Roy Spencer
The Urban Heat Island Effect in GHCN Station Temperatures: Urban Locations show Large Spurious Warming Effects – Roy Spencer, PhD. (drroyspencer.com)
“Say the forecast high temperature is 90 degrees. Factor in the additional warmth from the urban heat island, and it could feel like 95 degrees in Rosenberg, 97 in Humble, 98 downtown, or even 99 in Baytown.”
I lived in Baytown from June ’78 through September ’80. Yup. The fact that the “largest full-conversion refinery in the world” (at that time) is located there might have something to do with it. Lots of hot process equipment, boilers, cooling towers, etc. And the Houston Ship Channel was/is lined with similar refineries and chemical processing plants.
So even if you could meet the siting standards, a weather station in this area might not be a good indicator of “climate” conditions.
It’s no different than mixing temperatures from different terrain, geography, elevation, and even hemispheres in order to create a “global average temperature”. Each individual station exists in a unique microclimate and the temperatures at each station have different variances. Winter temps have a different variance than summer temps. Temps at 10,000ft have different variances than those at 0ft. Trying to combine all these into one single data set without considering the variances gives you a garbage output. And anomalies don’t help. If the variance at Station A is different than at Station B then the individual anomalies will inherit those variances from the components used to create the anomaly. Combining the anomalies into one data set without regard to the different variances gives you a garbage output.
100% right. 👍👍👍👍👍
And this GAT anomaly “garbage output” has been the basis for four decades of the CACC hoax, costing uncountable billions in economic waist and misdirected effort.
You are so right. I have been confused in the past because the temperature difference between my property on top of a mountain ridge is double the temperature difference you would expect because of altitude. I have four temperature sensors scattered across the property. They rarely vary more than 0.5 degrees F from each other, but are consistently 3 degrees lower than a neighbor’s sensor 300 feet lower, and 10 degrees lower than Reno 1200 feet lower. I believe the difference is largely terrain.
The higher the altitude, the lower the temperature reads at night due to less atmosphere thickness. The temperature can also read higher on a clear summer day because there’s less atmosphere thickness shielding against solar heat.
It seems to me that UHI is almost everything.
In 1998 the Hansen paper had two graphs on the front page, usa and the world.
USA showed temps up and down, cooler in late 90s than in 30s (since “corrected” by NOAA to show “correct” hotter in 1998), but the world graph of course showed a more linear warming trend, unambiguous.
But the majority of the world has poor historical records, almost always from cities and so it’s very biased by uhi, it’s basically a graph of 100 years increase in human city size.
The best long term unadjusted records, like in USA and England don’t show a ton of warming.
Am I reading that wrong?
Has anyone performed an analysis of the temperature record with only rural stations? I recall a study that only included rural stations in California that showed little or no warming.
The problem is that most stations whether it be rural or urban are corrupted with heat biases, even in the middle of nowhere. There’s very few good stations left out there. You would find mostly junk data with the past 10 or so years as the warmest. When I find that, I already know there’s a huge artificial bias affecting the data, because I know that’s not how natural variability works.
You took the words right out of my mouth! “Rural” stations even 20 miles downwind from UHI generators will see an impact on the temperatures they read – and when you are trying to identify differences in the hundredths digit (i.e. a measurement uncertainty in the thousandths of a degree) even small impacts bias the results.
Absolutely, see my comment about the cold store.
Just one building/edifice is knocking ‘temperature holes’ of 2, 3, and 4 Celsius out of thermometer reading as far as 5 miles away – I have data AND pictures.
And it’s no more than an aircraft hangar or contemporary distribution centre.
They must trap immense amounts of solar heat and when the doors and loading bays are opened/closed, immense wafts of heat can carry for miles.
YES!
Eskdalemuir in Scotland is pretty rural in the UK. I would think there’s been warming in recent years.
As airports go there’s not a lot of action Wick Airport whether the data shows this I don’t know
MSG,
I have spent hour after ahour trying to create a data set of Australian station temperatures from stations plausibly labelled as “pristine”. Please believe me, it would be hard to find stations less affected by the Hand of Man than the 50 that I finally selected. I looked at Tmax and Tmin from both the “raw” data from our BOM and their adjusted “ACORN-SAT” files.
It emerged in general that the more pristine a station was, the lower the data quality was.
With Tom Berger, I gave some examples of how noisy these data were in an article on WUWT a year ago. Search the article for Palmerville, which for decades had a populatioon of one, the lady who read the instruments. That showed not even a sign of the Hand of Woman.
The quality was so low that I could not derive a common trend of temperature with time over similar multi-decade terms at each of the 50 stations using the customary (but questionable) linear least squares fit with derived mathematical trend and R factor.Some of these stations, all plausibly without UHI, showed cooling and some showed warming. All were quite dependent on the period chosen.
Some of the stations have been analysed in great detail and diligence by colleague Dr Bill Johnston on his blog Bomwatch. They have been shown to have essentially no warmoing over the last century once corrections for known and other plausible effects are included. Try Learmonth and Meekatharra in West Aust for examples of that of which I write.
There was so little sought information in the noisy “pristine” data. It is an exercise in the futility of chasing predictions. I plotted the trend of temperature over time at each station against its World Meteorological Organization WMO number and derived significant trends. What means that, besides noise?
My first poke at this type of UHI-free analysis gave one set of “answers”. That was 9 years ago. When I updated the data recently to include years to 2022, the trends were quite different.
These are typical problems of data too noisy to be of use.
Practical trumps theoretical. Geoff S
That’s a problem with all the data before automatic instrument reading. A person might not always read the instruments at precisely the same time each day. Visual parallax can make instruments with needles and scales or liquid thermometers difficult to read correctly. Breathing on the instruments or holding them can affect the readings. Reading in the winter morning or evening, might have to turn on an incandescent light to see.
The Warmistas claiming they can tease out 0.1 degree or better accuracy from such inconsistently acquired data is laughable. The readings were never meant for anything but daily weather reports and as input for short term forecasting.
Gregg,
The p[roblem did not stop with automated instruments. They are calibrated less often, typically, so drift is a bigger problem. They have various time responses to a temperature change, depending on design of the probe and its electronics. They have different properties in different screens or housings. They are subject to electrical noise.
Here in Australia, we have just about come to grips with liquid in glass, with the error studies of Pat Frank just about completing the picture for that era. Uncertainty envelope of about +/- 2 deg C for 2 sigma if you use those maths for a normal distribution.
However, moving to automated probes has been a nightmare, with signs of large errors from unidentified sources. The system was never invented for the purposes to which it is being put, like global averages.
Geoff S
It’s a sad commentary that most of the scientists involved in climate science use the data being put forth from the worldwide measurement system with absolutely no understanding or knowledge of the physical limitations associated with the devices creating that data. It leads them to believe they can reduce any measurement error to zero merely through averaging the data thus allowing them to create infinite resolution from the data with 100% accuracy. Thus the “teasing out of 0.1 degree or better accuracy”.
I bet you are talking about this chart:
Good for Houston this has needed saying for a long while; UHI is a problem for the temperature record and cannot be simply ‘handwaved’ by ‘adjustments’ – it will change in different areas of the urban area and, often, at different times of day in the same area. The climate enthusiasts fascination with temperatures is a measure of increases of urban activity, not climate change.
Perhaps now that Houston has taken this first step, we might see honest studies looking at what a massive column of hot air over an urban area will do to the regional weather patterns in and around that area?
What we need is an actual good surface data in the U.S. and the world. PHA doesn’t solve the problem at all. It just spreads around all of the bad data. You’d be lucky to find a perfect neighboring station given that 96% of weather stations in the US are corrupted. They also should plant more trees and implant coral roofs.
Search up news of the removal of four dams in the Klamath River Basin, Oregon. Follow-up will include planting of 17 billion native seeds and hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs. 🙂
How long until the next big winter followed by an early spring thaw washes it all away?
The people living downstream from the Oroville dam in California are happy its there, even poorly managed to the point where it was a close thing whether it’d be overtopped and possibly fail.
It would be fun to (literally) conduct a dry run for about 10 years.
Open the all gates and let the water flow as nature deems appropriate. The dry summer river beds (and suffocating fish) & the increased winter/spring flooding, can then be assessed by the dam removal advocates … they can then conduct local town hall meetings with real world data and explain to the locals why it is all such a good thing.
Other studies have correlated percentage of tree cover to UHI effects in local neighborhoods.
“Perhaps now that Houston has taken this first step, we might see honest studies looking at what a massive column of hot air over an urban area will do to the regional weather patterns in and around that area?”
There is no doubt in my mind that weather patterns are impacted. Topeka, Kansas is situated in the Kansas River valley. The valley extends as far north from the city center as 20 miles and the same for the south. You can see the impact the city has on the weather by merely watching the rain/snow/etc being pushed to the north part of the river valley or to the south part of the river valley. The old timers called it the “heat dome” effect from the city.
It’s one of the main reasons why “homogenizing” temperatures data to create “in-filling” for areas that aren’t monitored is such a joke, especially when you extend the area out to 100 miles or more.
I swear much of climate science is done by those who have never lived outdoors for extended periods – such as farmers and ranchers. They have absolutely no real experience or understanding of what a “micro-climate” actually is!
Anthony’s original surface station project, if I remember correctly, identified over 500 class 1 compliant stations (thus needing NO adjustments). The actual thermometer readings trends for those were about 30% lower than the country’s official trends. The “official” temperature readings for those class 1 stations were ‘adjusted’ up to comply with the rest of the stations.
“You can see the impact the city has on the weather by merely watching the rain/snow/etc being pushed to the north part of the river valley or to the south part of the river valley. The old timers called it the “heat dome” effect from the city. ”
I think Tulsa does the same thing to the surrounding area.
The UHI is so blatantly obvious in so many ways but especially biasing the temp record. Another phenomenon similar to the EV issue that should also have been “blatantly obvious”. But once you start the bleeds it leads, group think herd mentality apocalypse panic crisis chickens spinning in circles with no head- then bring in the graft. And there you have it . A perfect storm of stupidity.
And even people that be “real real smart “like Elon are susceptible to all of the above and can’t get out of it.
Story Tip
Houston may recognize that they have a problem, but new IPCC head says going past 1.5°C is not the end of the world –
https://www.dw.com/en/dont-overstate-15-degrees-c-threat-new-ipcc-head-says/a-66386523
That’s a pretty extraordinary slow-down in the rhetoric……
+1.5 degrees Celsius over THE LITTLE ICE AGE is 100% GOOD NEWS. It’s not a ” crisis” and it’s not the end of the world.
Yeah, it’s been a little toasty here in Houston lately.
Give that plant some water, It’s thirsty
NOAA and NASA have been recognizing UHI of late as it bows to their political message how the “climate crisis “ disproportionately impacts marginalized communities typically in inner cities that lack trees, yada, yada…….
They just ignore it as to it’s impact on on temperature records because they solve the problem by “smudging” all that heat out into rural areas with their homogenizing algorithms.
They talk about impacts to marginalized communities but their proposed solutions do nothing to help and just serve to tax people more and force them to buy speculative tech, like EVs and so-called renewable energy.
It’s basically a con.
None of any carbon tax is going to anything to make inner cites more livable.
Perhaps cities will be more livable as the cost of gasoline increases. The state of Washington now has the highest gas tax in the US. Folks, well at least me, buy extra groceries and freeze more so I do not have to go to town — except for beer and lottery tickets.
I recall a post from 10 or so years ago where Anthony showed the UHI by using a temperature data logger on his auto. I’ve forgotten the city.
I also recall making a comment about the weather effects downwind from large cities. The issue was rainfall increase because of the particles introduced into the air. The report, in the 1950s, was about Chicago-metro and was published (or edited?) by geographer Chauncy Harris. In 1950: Houston <600,000 people – – – Chicago >3,600,000
70 years later we have another great leap forward in understanding cities.
Las Vegas
So, let me get this straight. “Scientists” need to put temperature sensors close to heat sources so the resultant data fits their models and supports their foregone conclusions. Ok, got it.
Or take advantage of the ones they know to be running hot. If they can ‘prove’ more heating, they’ll get more grant money and publicity for them, ahem, the cause of course.
The concept, at least, of UHI can be seen at my rural home. I have two thermometers about 100′ apart, one at the tree line, one at my porch. Both in shade. They always read a couple degrees apart at least. Last week or so they’ve been 10. Not exactly true UHI but I would think it’s the same effect.
It’s called “micro-climate”. The humidity at each site is probably different, the wind is probably different, the surface below the measuring device is probably different. When you are trying to identify differences in the hundredths digit for temperatures (implying a measurement uncertainty in the thousandths digit) even small differences can loom large!
A very similar set up to what I have but…
My dataloggers (4 minute intervals) are twins and agree with each other to within 0.1°C
They are as far from my house (no air con and no heating switched on for the last 4 months) as I can get them and both 6 feet above a grassy lawn and totally identical in their solar shielding, ventilations and rain protections.
One is hanging under a large ‘specimen’ coniferous tree and the other from the washing line out in the open – about 30 metres apart.
OK, the one under the tree reads about 2°C cooler than the one out in the sun
But, only during daytime.
At night, the one under the tree reads 2°C warmer
That is the puzzle.
Epic innit – it explains soooooooo much once you start thinking about it
Groan – I forgot the picture:
Vertical axis is in degrees Celsius and horizontal is Time – divided up at 09:00hrs and 21:00 hours covering a whole week.
What is shows is a graph of the temperature recorded on the washing line (wide open in the sun) with the temps that were recorded under the tree subtracted.
So you see how from 09 > 21 is negative meaning the tree was cold and where 21 > 09 is night-time when the tree was warmer
Nine o’clock seemed to be the changeover time, morning and evening????
and the night-time spikiness was caused by operation of a 4 acre cold-store 3 miles away
Day-time spikiness is caused by passing clouds – despite the thermometers having 3 layers of solar shield and the outermost layer being painted with Aluminium (anti-solar) paint
Just eyeballing that – how does anyone propose, or not propose, that the arrival or disappearance of ‘a few trees‘ might affect ‘Global Temperatures’
Large trees do behave like the “blanket” of CO2 is supposed to. When the dark trunk of the tree is in sunlight, put a hand on both the lit and the dark side. The entire tree is taking in energy during the sun time. Some is used, but much is given back at night.
But don’t let anyone take your picture while you’re doing this, ’cause you might get tagged as a “tree-hugger” 🙂
Hey, there’s nothing wrong giving a tree a hug. I like trees.
And talking to them brings nourishment in the form of extra CO2.
It’s the people that want to starve them that are the problem.
A solid row of tall bushes, shrubs can also act as a heat trap, causing a build-up of heat on either side depending on the direction of any breeze.
Also act as a heat trap in still weather if the shrubs are at the top or bottom of a slope.
There are things in this world that are sometimes ‘Just So Very Big‘ you cannot see them
So it is with me at my new very ruralified home. That beside the main road linking Peterborough with Norwich (and beyond) is a huuuuuge ‘building’
Having seen many such things before, I took it to be one of Amazon’s best = one mahoooosive distribution centre, chock full of metal racks and cardboard boxes full of tat.
I didn’t think much more about it’
Meanwhile I’d been wondering what was upsetting my little dataloggers out in the garden, esp noticeable through the night and if temps were dipping close to 0°C
The temperature graphs they were producing was just crazy, something was knocking full of holes.
But vastly worse, The Same Thing was happening, on the same nights and to about the same extent, at the Wunderground stations dotted all around me.
I visited the stations and they were in very suburban settings – there was No Big Industry anywhere near
OK, any particular one might be upset by a neighbour’s air-con or heating system firing up but NOT for 4 or five stations literally miles apart and including mine and all at the same time of day/night
Totally by accident, I found it and was gobsmacked on every aspect of the thing.
See attached
What you see is a temperature graph recorded in my garden, data points at 4 minute interval and covering the time from Mid-day of 28Feb until mid day on 3rd March
Vertical scale is about minus 2°C to about +12°C
See the highlighted holes. Wundergrounds for miles around were similar.
The lower half of the image, the 2-tone grey box is a ‘Cold Store‘ and that is Google’s view of it looking North East from the main road
It is in fact just shy of 4 acres in floor area and at a guess, about 25 to 30 metres tall
As the crow flies, it is 3.02 miles from the thermometer that drew that graph
And just folks operating the thing, putting vegetables etc in and back out again through the night is upsetting thermometers that are 3, 4 and 5 miles away ##
And you thought you understood the UHI…………
## At the other end, the whole width of it to the height of the dark grey bit is the loading area but also where the fans are that exhaust the heat from its refrigeration system
Esp note how rural it is – my thermometer is as equally ‘rural’
It is is actually on the very edge of town.
Basically it one huuuuge aircraft hangar…
Oooooo now then, is THAT why airports get so hot = the (solar) heat that gets trapped inside the hangars and NOT malevolent pilots deliberatly frazzling thermometers with jet-engine exhaust?
Or perhaps both?
Speaking of ignorance of local variables and microclimate, my property is 2500 feet long. When I’m driving down my grass strip in my gator, I often notice a very noticeable temp change from one end to the other, 5 degrees F or so, and there are no environmental variables at all. It’s all rural, trees on all sides, the only differences are cloud cover. How do they account for that kind of stuff in their models, when the models are based on 100 kilometer squares? Of course, the answer is, they don’t. So their model data is useless, as we all know, but the “experts” don’t. We are manipulated by bullshit.
It’s been my contention for many years that UHI is greater and spreads further than any official Metrological Bureau admits. This includes affecting areas downwind. I based this on personal experience as a teuchter who regularly travelled to Edinburgh for getting on for a decade passing through large towns like Stirling and Falkirk on the way
Not only that, but those often-urban-affected thermometers give the temperature for miles around them. so the urban warming is spread to huge areas where doesn’t belong.
eg a 10km² urban area reading might be applied to an area of a couple of thousand km²
Hey, I know, let’s use the Clinton mantra of LEED certified buildings made of glass and lots of natural light. That should fix it. /sarc
Nothing from Nick Stokes to say this is nonsense?
He probably believes that you counter urban warming by adjusting the past downwards.
That is what seems to happen in all the surface data fabrications.
No one should expect the mainstream media to point out that urban heat islands distort actual temperature reading> After all, they’re accepting hefty donations from governments and environmental groups to downplay such factors, particularly if they tend to undermine their commitment to alarmism.
Nice report.
I live in Austin which is another rapidly growing metro. The weather service is over forecasting temperatures every single day by 2 to 5 degrees F, presumably to raise alarm.
My biggest fear right now is that the green wackos are going after AC next, realizing that it is the principle mitigant for high temperatures. Restricting AC would greatly increase concerns about warming.
More UHI cities, info, background in this Dec 2020 WUWT article.
The result reported for Houston is high compared to some other cities in the literature, but I am not doubting its reality,
Geoff S
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/20/the-science-of-the-urban-heat-island-effect-is-pathetic-and-misleading/
In 1977-78 I moved from SE Virginia to the Philadelphia area, long before Global Warming/Climate Change/Atmospheric Boiling was a thang. Actually, we moved to Chester County, about 30-35 miles west of Philly. One of the news channels, Action News, had a weatherman named Jim O’Brian. I remember him talking about the HI effect way back then, and how much warmer it was between center city Philly and the suburbs, especially at night and in the winter. Not sure if they still have the HI effect in Philly now that climate change is all the rage.
Who has known about urban heat for a very long time? Glider and sailplane pilots who take advantage of the warm updrafts over urban areas.