Guest essay by Tom Barr Central England Temperature stations, long considered a benchmark, have been affected by land use change and urbanisation The answer is blindingly obvious, from above: they are all subject to considerable modern local urbanisation immediately to the North, including heated greenhouses designed to replicate a Mediterranean climate. The Met Office relies…
Today, there’s all sorts of caterwauling over the NYT headline by Justin Gillis that made it above the fold in all caps, no less: FOR THIRD YEAR, THE EARTH IN 2016 HIT RECORD HEAT. I’m truly surprised they didn’t add an exclamation point too. (h/t to Ken Caldiera for the photo) Much of that “record…
A new study from USGS by Keven Gallo and George Xian verifies what we’ve already learned and published on via the Surface Stations project; that concrete and asphalt (aka impervious surfaces) have increased near weather stations that are used to monitor climate. In this case, it is the much studied USHCN, that climate network I presented…
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…
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…
I had to share this “laugh out loud” moment from Bishop Hill and the photo of this weather station. Andrew Montford writes: Settled science Much amusement is to be had from a posting at a blog called Sudden Oak Life. The author has recorded images of the Radcliffe surface temperature station in Oxford, part…
Older records may be fragile but was diligence any better in recent decades? Guest essay by Bob Fernley Jones Background: Out of over 20,000 Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) weather stations on record [1], 112 have had their data “corrected” under a process known as homogenisation, (the acronym for it in full is ACORN-SAT). Oddly though,…
An analysis of the U.S. Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) shows that only about 8%-1% (depending on the stage of processing) of the data survives in the climate record as unaltered/estimated data. Guest essay by John Goetz A previous post showed that the adjustment models applied to the GHCN data produce estimated values for approximately 66% of…
Guest essay by John Goetz As noted in an earlier post here, approximately 66% of the GHCN record is estimated after processing by the GHCN adjustment models. In the current GHCN data set, there are 226 unique country codes represented. Following are the top and bottom stewards of temperature data, by country, based on the…
Summary of GHCN Adjustment-Model Effects on Temperature Data Guest essay by John Goetz As the debate over whether or not this year will be the hottest year ever burns on, it is worth revisiting a large part of the data used to make this determination: GHCN v3. The charts in this post use the dataset…