The global warming rate at the stations used in the analysis, using all days’ data, is the same as that reported using all available stations by Jones, P.D. and A. Moberg

Suspicious mind that I have, I just have to wonder how much time Phil Jones et al took to find met stations that could give a UHI of 0.05-0.06C higher than their overall met station population gave. They couldn’t come up with a mix that showed a negative UHI, but they sure as hell couldn’t go with a delta as high as anecdotal says it should be. They HAD to show a positive UHI, or all hell would have broken loose.

This may be the reason for eliminating all the rural 75% of the met stations used, just to keep the average UHI in any subsequent studies within a certain range, so that the average could be seen as somehow plausible.

I’m just sayin’…

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2007/11/28/terminating-warming-a-look-at-california/

HAving said that, if the NCEP gridcell model resulted in a classification that was full of errors, one would expect negligible difference between the two results. IMO this is so fraught with possible problems that IPCC can hardly conclude that anything was “very likely” or even “likely” based on this. “Possible” perhaps – but not much above that.

Also I think that the Peterson 2003 analysis has a knock-on effect for Parker 2005,2006. PArker considers raw data more or less equivalent to the “raw” Peterson data which I graphed. Empirically there is trend difference between major city and even a very broad “urban” classification and PEterson-”rural” in the raw data. So PArker should have picked this up. His failure to do indicates that NCEP calm-windy is probably useless as way to measure UHI trends.

PArker also leaned heavily on Oke’s canyon model of UHI which affects nighttime minima, while there seems to be evidence that asphalt UHI is material under some urban conditions and nighttime minima are not where this evidences itself most strongly.

It would be interesting to see what Parker’s method would reveal if it were applied to properly classified (i.e. into Rural (= substantially unaffected by local human activity during the period of record) and Urban (= urbanizing, or subject to increasing levels of development during the period of record) station data.

Given that a significant and agreed upon UHI effect exists and there seem to be objective methods of determining where it would be most and least prevalent, why would not a rather simple study be available whereby contrasting locations of UHI are measured for temperatures and wind in order to better test Parker’s hypothesis?

What I find most curious about this and other studies involving important global warming issues is that some rather indirect methods are used to measure trends with little attention being paid to better understanding the underlying basics principles and processes involved. It is like “well, we did that and it confirms what we had already assumed so let us move on (without taking a deeper look into the situation).”

What I did was bin the Wind Direction into two groups.
1. W and NW
2. All others.

Thne looked at Tmax and Tmin in these two groups. Basically the W&NW winds could not blow UHI
away because they look like warmer winds. If the air temp above the boundary layer is warmer
that the boudary layer I would think that would impair heat transfer to the sky right?

First off I like to work bottom up, So I picked Fresno as an example.It’s from Parkers
List. And yes, has some issues.

I’ve been stuggling with this Parker definition of Windy/Calm.

Parker defines “Windy” as the top 1/3 of wind speeds for the GRID. Calm is bottom Third.

He did a correlation of grid to station for 26 sites. To ascertain if you can use grid data
to “represent” the site. He thinks you can.

I don’t think it gets windy in Fresno.

What does windy mean? You feel cooler when the wind blows over your skin. Why, because that boundary
layer of air created by those little tiny hairs, get disturbed, gets mixed and heat exchange happens.

Now I AM HAIRY, I don’t chill so easily. I have a nice fat boundary layer of air. So a smooth fellow
will get chilly quicker than me. Put another way, I require higher wind velocities to mix the air
around my body. You get goosebumps ( in creasing your boundary layer) before I do. I am hairy like an animal.

How hairy is Fresno? Simply, what velocity of wind does it take to create turbulant vertical mixing
and heat exchange? The Top 1/3 of the wind speed distribution? Top 1/6? top 1/20th?

It’s site specific. It’s wind direction specific. In Fresno when the wind blows in a W or NW direction
( from death valley I suppose)its a heater box. These winds look to happen well over 70% of the time
(Oh, I think the runway at the airport might be aligned on the NW axis, something to check.)

First a look at velocity. Average wind speed. measured at Fresno state from 1982- 2006
2 Meters above the surface.

( fresno state is