Pictures have been coming in to www.surfacestations.org from many places. This one is from Fort Morgan, Colorado’s USHCN climate station of record. Fort Morgan is in the eastern plains of Colorado, about 100 miles northeast of Denver.
The sensor recording the wide open plains has four air conditioners near it!
In keeping with current observed trends, any weather station with air conditioning also needs close-by parking.
It’s not like there’s no other open space to put the sensor in Fort Morgan.
The pictures above, courtesy of the Pielke Research Group shows an electronic Min/Max Temperature Sensor placed near the Western Sugar Company office. It appears that cable length limitations on the MMTS sensor have caused hundreds of similar placements in the USHCN network where Stevenson Screens used before could be placed a good distance away from such influences.
Sitings like this aren’t truly representative of the surrounding area. These pictures are a few years old, and according to MMS metadata, apparently the sensor has since been moved in 2002 to a new location
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55 Comments
Any silage products in there? Beyond that …. even with standard grains, even with heavy sparging, some level of fermentation cannot be avoided.
Oooops, read too fast, sugar beats, not grain. Still, same commentary would apply.
Steve, I just found out its a sugar company, not a grain silo and I corrected the post.
Here is the company website showing the facility: http://www.westernsugar.com/loc_manf.asp
Which way is south?
And somehow, all recent records are adjusted upwards? Is this logic _ever_ explained by Jones/Hansen/The rest of the Team?
Mark
If that red brick is anything like the red brick on my house, it soaks up the heat during the day and is still noticeably warm to the touch hours after sunset. My front porch is totally enclosed in it and is typically 5-10 degrees F warmer than the outside air for hours after sunset.
RE4 The view with the vehicles is looking northeast, the wide open picture is west.
More pictures here: http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=1727
Anthony, you now have a significant (about 15%) of total stations photographed. If you toss out the ones that are poorly sited, can you make any statements about how the warming may or may not have changed over the last 10 or 50 years?
It’d be interesting to understand:
With class 5 sites removed, warming was X/decade
With class 4 & 5 sits removed, warming was X/decade
With class 3, 4 and 5 sites removed, warming was X/decade
(assuming class 5 was the worst; it might be the other way around I can’t remember).
RE8, I’m waiting to get a few more, as the geographic distribution is still west coast lopsided. I need more in the plains and in the southeast. Anybody care to help?
I really need some in the Carolinas, Florida, the Dakotas and in Texas to get the geo distribution more balanced. Before I do any analysis, I want to be more certain that the problems seen are not simply based on management or staffing issues, such as NWS Western Region HQ’s -vs- Southern Region HQ’s
Class 5 is worst, class 1 is best
This scheme, described by Michel Leroy (1998), is being used by Meteo-France to classify their network of approximately 550 stations. The classification ranges from 1 to 5 for each measured parameter. The errors for the different classes are estimated values.
Class 1 – Flat and horizontal ground surrounded by a clear surface with a slope below 1/3 (3 degrees.
Class 2 – Same as Class 1 with the following differences. Surrounding Vegetation 5deg.
Class 3 (error 1C) – Same as Class 2, except no artificial heating sources within 10 meters.
Class 4 (error >= 2C) – Artificial heating sources = 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.
Class 5 (error >= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”
Hi,
Thank you very much Anthony for your efforts. I hope you eventually receive some form of appreciation from NOAA for the work you are doing on their behalf.
Here’s a thought – we can see many examples such as this of poor station siting in the US at your web site. I wondering, then, what meteorological stations in other parts of the world look like. And who has been responsible for obtaining the temperature, pressure, and precipitation data over the past century? I can imagine that many sites in developed and developing countries are less than ideal. For example, having recently visited India, I know for a fact that a site in downtown Mumbai (Bombay) would be contaminated with all sorts of UHI effects (not to mention the smog that permeates everything there).
Frank K.
I cannot imagine the three second-story AC units affect readings from the MMTS, but the lower one sure appears close enough to be influenced by its exhaust. And from what Anthony says in #7, the brick siding sheltering the MMTS gets a healthy dose of sun exposure during the day and should heat up quite nicely, dissipating that heat back out at night (per #6).
RE 12 You could be right about the a/c’s on 2nd story, I would imagine though that there is a lot of wind eddies around that cove of the building, so its hard to say for sure how the mixing would play out.
The bricks though, yes quite the heatsink.
Anthony,
I have looked at at least one of the lists and haven’t seen the station present, but do you know if the station at the Army’s Camp Stanley, northwest of San Antonio, Texas is included in any of the large networks? I have driven by what appears to be a MMTS housing that is right on the side of a main road in front of Camp Stanley recently and wondered if it was part of any network. I would be glad to go take photos of it next time I am out there if the data is included in a relevent network.
#7,
So the sensor is on the south side of the building, and to the west of that entrance vestibule. So the south facing side of the building is in direct sunlight all day long. Also the west side of the vestibule is also soaking up afternoon sun.
During the day this unit will be picking up the temperature of the air, the radiated heat from brick in two directions, plus reflected sunlight.
At night, all those toasty warm bricks are going to be keeping the air in that spot warm, well into the wee hours of the morning. Add to this the tall silos which, along with the two story building itself, are going to be protecting the sensor from any cold north winds.
You’d have to work real hard to make a worse location for a sensor. At least they don’t have it next to an incinerator.
One of the things I’ve found very frustrating in judging temperature data quality is the large number of station moves. As Anthony mentions in the post, this is no longer the station of record. If one were to visit the present site, it may look like a class 1 location. Without these historical pictures, it would be doubtful that a reviewer would know that highly suspect data was embedded in that from a seemingly high quality site.
Unless the history is very well documented, it seems like those stations with frequent moves need to be weeded out prior to establishing the station class.
I agree with #16. Any aberrant heat sources will add noise to the data – but aren’t we really interested in the change in noise over time, since all the data is presented as anomalies. Aren’t site changes to or from locations that have distinctly different micro-climates the real target? Adding an air conditioner is more of an issue than the fact that one has been there for 50, 30, 20 years. The lousy practices are worth a chuckle, but can easily be deflected.
Can someone explain why there is a cable length limitation on these sensors?
No Mark. What happens is that the 1930s get cooler as a consequence.
Just to clarify my point, I’m not arguing against the importance of documenting these sites. I think the photo documentation is extremely valuable and have contributed to the surface stations database. My point is that a station that has been at only one or two locations over the past hundred years is a much more valuable data resource than one that has moved around frequently. If a site has remained in the same location, and can be shown through photo documentation to be presently free from asphalt slabs, air conditioners, etc, it is probably a high quality site. It is doubtful that the local heat sources were there in the past and then removed. However, if a station moves around frequently, photo documentation of the present site is probably not a good indicator of the data quality from past site locations.
The photo documentation is important for for a couple of reasons. First, it can be used (along with station location records) to identify true high-quality sites for use in determining real temperature trends in the US. Second, the photo documentation is hard evidence refuting the scientific robustness of those claiming our current climate situation is a crisis.
It was sweet of the Western Sugar people to host the station, that is, sweet while it lasted.
One final point on the air conditioner photos. An AC next to a temperature sensor is something that will resonate with the public as being just not right. It will go a long ways toward counter-balancing “An Inconvenient Truth” or rock stars urging us to jump up and down to save the planet. Those of us with technical backgrounds follow and enjoy discussions on proxies or hockey-stick deconstructions. They have limited appeal to someone without a technical background. But everyone gets to vote for those who determine public policy.
This is the heart of the issue at hand. Everything, not just models, but reconstructions and all other analysis depends upon these records, which are intentionally distorted, adjusted, obfuscated and whatever. Take the rise (read: adjustments) out of the record and none of the other matters really, well, matter. Who cares if tree rings or GCMs proclaim doom and gloom if the temperature record does not?
Mark
R #20
Joe Ellebracht,
I was going to make that comment but you beet me to it.
Raises really serious questions. If it turns out, as it increasingly appears, that you cannot trust the station numbers or the station descriptions in the US, a country with continuity of civil service and government, and a reasonably efficient administration, how on earth can you rely on the Chinese measurements? Or those from Europe? Where we have had wars, civil unrest, famine etc. Need to throw out all the terrestrial series so far and start over, this is how its starting to look.
Be interesting to do a similar exercise in the British Midlands, and verify Jones’ stations…. Do we have a list yet?
Beet, hehe.
Mark
#9 Anothony says “RE8, I’m waiting to get a few more, as the geographic distribution is still west coast lopsided. I need more in the plains and in the southeast. Anybody care to help?”
The greatest warming has been shown to be west coast, and since you’ll need to get the code working anyway, getting some early hints about the impact on the west coast would be very interesting.
Re 22: someone was talking about a collection of lighthouse temps. Did this get off the… err… ground? Lighthouse temps should calibrate the SST record which is, IMHO, the best unbiased record we have, give or take a few dubious corrections.
JF
RE: #25 – Uh yeer uhgow I culdent evin spel engunear nau I r wun. LOL …. 🙂
It would be interesting to see if the raw data from the 2001 move declined substantially. Any bets on such a decline being corrected back up?
Anthony,
If you find one next to a chocolate factory… I”M THERE!!!
Hi All,
Good ideas all around, I’m going to muse them over. I like the idea of a quality rating based on station moves. Perhaps a quotient that is #moves/years of record…does anybody have any other ideas for a formula that might be a good quality indicator for station moves?
I’m on the road right now, chasing down more stations. Will post as they become available. Tomorrow I’ll post my CRS test setup pictures.
In no way do I seek to discount the importance of documenting these weather sites, but it leaves a couple of residual problems. First, it places even more uncertainty on the past temperature record, which is now reaching the stage of having to be either scrapped or worked over so substantially that it cannot be truthfully linked to the real events of the time. One problem with public acceptance is that you can show graph after graph, but the public is losing confidence that any one is correct. I suspect that even the Met people are wondering what can be believed.
This raises matter two, namely, what can be done? Although it would be handy to have temp data going back 100 years, it might be better to have temperatures taken every few minutes at a number of sites, over the last decade or two, thus helping overcome repositioning problems. I have a nagging suspicion that issues like UHI can be solved with data from the last 20 years and do not need 100 years of record.
Matter three is to ditch max or min or the average of these, or midday – or whatever spot temps – with integrated temps which more closely reflect radiation reaching the surface. If indeed, the surface is the place where we should be paying most attention. Oceanographers looking for sea level rise are certainly looking well past the surface, several hundered metres below not being uncommon. They tend to use a continuous temperature profile rather than 2 spot readings a day. Reasons are obvious.
Matter 4 is whether one can really use lighthouse data while rejecting inland. Inland in one region might be precipitous snowy mountains, while another site might be desert plain. The lighthouse records would be affected accordingly, with a quite different interior and a relatively similar (sea) externally, e.g. in terms of heat inertia and wind effects.
Last matter is a payer by now. Why can’t micro experiments determine matters like UHI effects in under a year? Is there no impetus to do micro experiments, or would this mean that someone would have to be absent from a keyboard for more than an hour sometimes?
Geoff,
Excellent observations.
I think the solution is to identify surface sites that meet these criteria:
1. Have few to no siting changes over the last 100 years
2. Have no appreciable encroachment within 20 kilometers by development or growth
3. Have no appreciable local land use changes, such as conversion of farmland to mixed use
4. Have no micro-site effects, such as a/c, asphalt, close-by parking, buildings springing up nearby, etc.
5. Meet class 1 or class 2 site criteria, as defined by the USCRN criteria listed above.
As Gavin has pointed out, you only need 60 good sites. Combined with lighthouse temperature data, I believe it will be possible to identify, and to photographically and qualitatively document the existence of such sites.
Then run the the most basic corrections, such as TOB, and corrections for instrumentation/shelter changes such as from mercury max min to MMTS, and examine the results. These two corrections have a high confidence level, IMHO.
Then I think a land based record with high confidence will exist. But its also possible that the types of micro-site problems seen in the 142 stations surveyed thus far may not hold for the majority of the USHCN set. The GHCN set remains mostly unexplored.
While I know there are many whom believe useful data can be derived from all stations, given what has been seen so far with micro-site, UHI, and the entire list of station effects, mostly of positive bias, I don’t believe it possible to fully disentangle the signal from the entropy (noise) over time, especially since few records exist to document and quantify micro-site changes.
Until such time that full disclosure exists for the variety of other adjustments that have been applied, so that strange artifacts such as have been seen in the NYC Central Park USHCN adjustment can be fully explained, I have no reason to accept such adjustments as being statistically valid, or homogeneous in application.
Finding and fully documenting quality benchmark surface stations would be the best solution I can envision to the problem. Lighthouses may very well be one source of such benchmark stations. Being unfamiliar with the nearby land use changes, instrument exposure, and measurement techniques at lighthouses, I can’t say if they would meet such benchmark criteria.
But that’s just my opinion.
Geoff (#32) and Anthony (#33), I agree! Identifying a set of “good” stations would, at least, allow us to go forward in a rational manner.
I don’t know what can be done to fix existing data; any decisions about which stations to discard would be viewed (justifiably, IMHO) as cherry picking. Trying to “fix” the problematic stations with “adjustments” — which already occurs far too often — is even worse.
The only way I can see that the temp change due to site moves is to have an overlap between the two sites so you could “quantify” a correction anything else seems to me to be a SWAG or maybe just a WAG. Unless you can calibrate the new site to the old or the new equipment to the old how can you say you’ve properly adjusted the data especially to fractions of a degree accuracy? Same holds true for all of the “corrections”.
Re: post #9 – I’ve been itching to help out since I’m in the upstate of SC.
Glancing at some of the sitings on Google Earth, it appears that Rock Hill and Laurens may be poorly sited, among others, including Clemson.
If I get some time, I’ll pick up the appropriate model GPS and apply to do some of these, if they still lack surveys at the time.
Please, folks, don’t worry about the ACs and brick. Parker assures us that the wind fixes everything.
#36 Chris: Help is certainly appreciated. Please try to get all sites in your vicinity, not just the poorly sited ones. The goal is to get a 100% inventory, so anything you can do will help!
Anthony, fantastic work!
Considering the ever-increasing complexity in both regional and large-scale models, it’s just so ironic that something as simple as measuring the temperature – the very foundation on which we all judge our numerical results on – never seemed to get the attention it deserved. Seems like everybody took this aspect of science for granted.
FWIW, I believe a regional analysis over a region would be very interesting and may provide additional clues as to the workings of the entire network.
jae,
Not only that, but Parker assures us that the amount of wind necessary to fix everything varies from site to site.
Despite Parker’s study, I see a potential for these lousy sites to create an anomoly trend. Say you have a day that is 1 degree hotter than the average. These sites will not only register the one degree, but also a couple more degrees because of “UHI.” Thus, the reported anomoly is 3 degrees, instead of one degree. And if the actual anomoly is, say 2 degrees, the air conditioners run even more, the brick absorbs more, and the reported anomoly could be easily be 5 degrees. I don’t see how Parker’s study resolves this kind of problem. There just HAS to be a trend when UHI is an issue.
I applaud those who seek to visit and document various stations. Or to select a good station set by various other means.
Perhaps reversing the approach would be interesting. Extract a set of stations, perhaps 60, showing the greatest increases in raw data over a century. And a set of those showing the least. Then determine what characteristics seem more common in each set.
#32.
I don’t know how to look for a heat signal, from looking at temperature changes. What you would need is to know the overall energy flux and the measured temperature. High heat input (midday) will increase temperature and low heat input (midnight) will lower temperature. However, these is not going to be a simple relationship between heat and temperature. The relationship will be affected by the heat capacity of the ground, the albedo of the ground (at all wavelengths including the visible and IR), the amount of water and finally, changes in air pressure as well as temperature.
#33 – This looks like a very clean approach. Start with data that has been verified to be free of outside influences (as best as possible at least), then make only corrections that are shown to be reliable. It will be difficult to argue with the results. The only potential shortfall may the sample size becomes too small with such strict entrance criteria. The MOE could swamp the signal size. The only way to find out is to complete the station survey.
Compare this approach with the latest USHCN (v2). As best as I can tell, the idea is to use potentially suspect data of 30 adjacent stations and perform a “homogenity correction” to the station of interest. In the meantime, data from this station is used in the homogenity correction of stations adjacent to it. Seems a bit circular to me. Instead of trying to water down the bad data, why not eliminate it?
#43 humidity is gonna play a wee role also ….
#43 sorry about that. that is what you meant by: “the amount of water”
The latest Scientific American has a nicely written article, “The Physical Science behind Climate Change,” by William Collins, Robert Colman, James Haywood, Martin R. Manning and Philip Mote, which mostly summarizes the IPCC AGW perspective. However, in light of what Anthony Watts and the rest of you have uncovered about the USHCN stations, the opening paragraph is hilarious [emphasis mine]:
Given the importance they apparently attach to data and data quality assurance, it is surprising no one noticed the disgraceful neglect that the USHCN seems to have received. Go figure!
Scientific American could do us all a service by publishing an editorial deploring the condition of the USHCN, noting the importance of the USHCN for climate science, and calling for higher standards in the future.
Those A/C units may be extremely useful. When searching for systematic errors, one nice trick is to enhance their value to make the signal visible. As the purpose of the exercise to detect the tiny AGW warming signal inside the temperature history of the site, let’s see if the A/C signal can be detected in the data. If not then it sets an upper lower on the sensitivity of the apparatus.
Showing that picture to people. It is a real classic. That could serve as an icon – 4 A/Cs, red brick 2 story, parking lot, silos. Thanks
re: #51
That paper should be a bit careful about what they publish. Of course this Sherri person just shows here total ignorance of anything scientific She’s either confused between CO and CO2 or thinks she can fool others. And I’m not sure even the nuttiest enviros claim GW will/can kill all life on earth.
I might add that this sort of thing shows the necessity of rebutting the best rather than the worst arguments of one’s adversaries. I wouldn’t go to the trouble of trying to claim this person’s rambling nonsense proves AGW is false. But I’m afraid that many AGW supporters seem to think that “discrediting” a wrong or misleading skeptic position somehow reflects on the entire skeptic edifice. Use your opponents best arguments, give them a chance to reply and quote directly and in context whenever possible. It’s not that much harder than being cleverly misleading. I know, when skeptics see bad arguments from their opponents, it’s tempting to respond in kind. But it’s not useful in the long run.
The original poster of this comment (originally #51) below used a somewhat inflammatory psuedo-name that I didn’t think was appropriate for this forum, so I deleted the post. But seeing that Mr. Dardinger responded before I could delete it, I’m restoring the content of it.
IMHO lets just ignore these sorts of things as being errant, and continue with constructive dialog.
[from: anonymous poster]
For his trouble Mr. Watts gets to read a letter to the editor in his local paper from a nutjob telling him to kill himself.
http://www.chicoer.com/ci_6278695
On the bright side, other Chicoans support Mr. Watts.
http://www.chicoer.com/ci_6318730
Something I think should be pointed out, even if obvious. The Western Sugar Company and/or the station-tenders aren’t really at “fault” here, just that such situations aren’t useful from a climatic-studies viewpoint & shouldn’t be used (unless somehow accounted for) in such. The same for all such situations. But USHCN is knowingly, and incorrectly IMO, including many such situations in its database that subsequently get used for such climatic studies. That’s the problem.
I don’t remember who it was, but some guy in the British Climate office keeps saying that in a century the only humans left alive will be living on Antarctic.
Re #54, MarkW
I think that is James Lovelock. No doubt it helped his book sales.
#15, #50 — the fact that the sensor is in front of a south-facing brick wall should not be lost in the noise.
I had to laugh yesterday… an ad in the local paper was touting the thermal mass of a brick wall for keeping greenhouses nice and toasty — winter nights at 35F instead of -17F (yes, this in an enclosed space… yet the Ft Morgan sensor is also kept “safe from the elements” in its nicely protected spot.
Perhaps that’s part of the thinking — after all, those nasty old Stevenson boxes were always in need of painting or repair. Now we can use these low-maintenance plastic-coated sensors, and put them up close to a building where they won’t be affected by the nasty weather outside. Then they’ll last a long time and not need so much maintenance and repair!
An improvement we all can agree on. Right?
Not.
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