Well, when you get a chance to get to Tucson (sadly I no longer live within an hour), take your IR photos with the current level, none, half as much, double, quadruple, and with the box around the fence holding in gravel to within a foot of the sensor, of the same size and type of gravel as is there now. What’s the bet?

Oh, I forget, photos tell you nothing. Nevermind.

At least try and be somewhat consistent on this issue with your obfuscation and misdirection. Either seem clueless all the time or knowlegeable all the time, and make your statements and beliefs match from day to day and issue to the same issue.

I’ll bet you money that adding a thicker layer of gravel would have no noticeable effect on an IR photograph of the area.

TCO, you are sounding like some of the people I used to deal with in solving quality problems — from my company and vendors’ companies: lawyerly approach in arguing the minute details of an issue when all the customers wanted to know is what is being done to assure us that you have a quality control process in place that will give us some assurance that these errors will not reoccur. I believe you at one time brought up the issue of determining whether the temperature measuring sites where in compliance with the measuring organizations own specifications, but now it appears you are more interested in defending the lack of quality control by rationalizing a minimum effect on temperatures measured. What is being tested is not what the ultimate effect a particular noncompliance has on the temperature record, but whether or not a quality control process is in place to assure the users that they are obtaining reliable data most of the time and making the correct assumptions when they have to correct for what must be assumed are relatively infrequent non-compliances.

It seems immaterial to have to qualify it by saying the 8×8 square around the sensor it has pea gravel 1/4 inch deep covering the asphalt to get the point across in a sentence.

I think your 5 point summary is exactly correct. I would also add that I’m quite certain that during the day, it’s not completely dark in the box, therefore, there is some direct radiation. I’m sure you all have noticed that during the day, the sun manages to light up just about everything, from deep in the forest, to deep underwater, to every nook and cranny of our houses, there is light, enough to see by.

I know what you’re thinking, “oh my gosh, that effect is negligible”. Oh really? It’s comparable to many of the other effects that have been mentioned on this blog with a straight face. For example, radiation from C02, at .035% of the atmosphere, while we pretend that conduction and convection don’t exist. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Someone more familiar with the devices might be able to shine some light on what’s what. The stuff on the left is just electrical plumbing. The stuff on the right, it’s hard to tell. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are some engineering flaws, though.

90, I’m sure that there are a lot of variants, but the standard Stevenson screen is supposed to contain the temperature sensor.

Yes. That is standard. As I understand, the Tuscon site has its temperature sensor attached to a pole bolted onto the bottom of the Stevenson screen http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=12986

And I meant say weasely instead of Clintonian. Sorry if I offended the liberals.

84: There may well be some heating from the near adjacent asphalt surface. My kvetch is not with that, but with Steve saying the sensor was OVER asphalt. He needs to stop exaggerating flaws. It’s not fair or scientific. It’s lawyerly and Clintonian.