Do Surface Stations Located Near Airports Give Corrupt Temperature Readings?

AGW Denialists like Anthony Watts are always complaining about how the Urban Heat Island Effect screws up measurements from weather stations located near airports by injecting non-climatic sources of warming into their temperature records. For example here. Now the lads from Clear Climate Code, who have been attempting to reproduce software used by climate scientists in a more user-friendly programming language, have found a means of comparing airport to non-airport sites so as to see whether or not the concerns of people like Mr. Watts are justified. Their answer?

Nah.

Anthony Watts Panics

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Anthony Watts Surfacestations.org

...is all you see when you try to access the "Watts Up With Watts" video ridiculing his Surface Stations project. This from a guy that's constantly bitching about how government agencies handle climate data.

Anthony Watts And Surface Stations: The Wait Is Still On

AGW Denier Anthony Watts releases his report (.pdf here) on American Surface stations before attempting to analyse his own data. As one of his readers writes:

It seems there now 11% of the stations is considered “good” or “best”, and an additional 20% is considered “fair”. The question that now arises is: When you only take temperatures measured by these stations, how would the average temp graph of the twentieth century look? Does it differ, and how much? Is a warming trend still visible?

Damn good question. And one that you would think Anthony would attempt to answer in the report itself. So why not? Why wait? Because Anthony already knows the answer, and he doesn't like it.

97 Stations To Go

...before Anthony Watts starts analysing his data from Surface Stations.

He's got 819 done now (67% of network), and will begin work when he hits 916 or 75% of the total. Not that we don't know what an honest assessment of the station data will reveal. An analysis has already been done on the 1st 1/4 or so of the stations back in 2007, and it basically validated the GISSTEMP data. Its significant that Steve McIntyre seems to have given up on the project:

surfacestations.org has made a concerted effort to identify high-quality stations within the USHCN network (CRN1-2 stations) and preliminary indications are that the GISS U.S. estimate will not differ greatly from results from the "best" stations (though there will probably be a little bias.)

Analyze That Data, Anthony Watts!

Anthony Watt's Surface Stations Project has analysed about 600 stations now, roughly half of the 1221 USHCN climate network.

If you remember, the goal of this project was to rank these stations according to new CRN siting guidelines, and then re-plot the historical temperature graphs with information from those stations that did not come up to snuff removed from the dataset. His hypothesis was that, once this was done, the temperature rise noted in the GISSTEMP data would largely disappear, an artifact of warming caused by microsite issues at the poorly sited stations.

Well, 50% of existing stations is a more than large enough sample to crunch numbers from. Why hasn't Anthony made an attempt, or farmed it out to his cohorts at Climate Audit?

Well, here's one hypothesis: Anthony already knows the answer that such an analysis would produce, and he doesn't like it.

And he knows the answer because such an analysis was already attempted back when about 400 stations were listed in the Surface Stations database. It was performed by one JohnV, a Climate Audit regular. His conclusion:

I think these plots speak for themselves, but here are my conclusions:- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN12 (the good stations)- There is good agreement between GISS and CRN5 (the bad stations)- On the 20yr trend, CRN12 shows a larger warming trend CRN5 in recent years.

To be honest, this is starting to look like a great validation of GISTEMP.

And here's another hypothesis: once the GISSTEMP data is analysed and, once again, validated, the jig will be up for Anthony. "Denier Confirms Global Warming!" is not a headline he is prepared to see.

Hence the endless delay, the tut-tutting over "poorly sited stations". Anthony is ragging the puck while all the time denying the existence of the hockey stick.

For Me?

Anthony Watts, whose important work at Surface Stations has confirmed the accuracy of GISSTEMP's U.S. temperature record, has got me a little Xmas present:

He has also pointed out this rather funny website, which satirizes the whole carbon offset business.

Merry Xmas, Anthony, and in my opinion your work confirming Mann's hockey stick graph is worth at least half the Nobel Prize dough McIntyre got for being an IPCC expert reviewer. If you're in New York in March, make him buy you a drink.

PS. What happened to all the kerfuffle about the code Hansen freed up? I guess that amounted to a whole lotta nothing, denial-wise.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

The Denialist cult is coming to Canada, and getting into the whole Surface Stations shtick. From the comments at Climate Audit:

"I have purchased http://www.surfacestations.ca/ and am willing to host and donate the name to the investigation of stations in Canada. If anyone want to help identify and catalog Canadian Stations give me a holler at callonjim@gmail.com . I’ll be setting up the website in the next few days"

Good luck, but getting face-time with Coren or Adler is hardly the same as appearing on Rush. There is also an interesting side issue: that, if I remember correctly, the whole network was shut down for a time during the Mulroney years.

H/t to Grey Canada.

Have Climate Change Deniers Discovered Marijuana?

During a discussion of the inadequate climate records in China, the boyz from Surface Stations reference some weird plants growing behind a station in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma:

Mater,

Correct me if I'm wrong... but is that a row of pot plants growing behind the MMTS?

Here are a couple of shots:





























Well, I wouldn't smoke the stuff, though I might try and sell it to kids.

So, anyway, have the boyz at Surface Stations refuted global warming YET AGAIN? Have they proven that any temperature increases have emanated from the stoned-out heads of WARMongering NOAA volunteer Greenshirts lollygagging about in the dope fields of Oklahoma?

I doubt it, because smoking marijauna...they say...makes everything coooool.

The State Of Surface Stations

Surface Stations is a project initiated by retired weatherman Anthony Watts. Its purpose is to refute Global Warming by snapping pictures of NOAA weather stations with siting issues and posting them to Conservative websites, where folks who, in general, wouldn't know a surface station from a hole in the ground then cry out "shame! shame!" in unison in the hopes of attracting the attention of Talk Radio.

As of today, the gang at Surface Stations are within a hair of having surveyed one quarter of the USHCN stations--281 to be precise--in the lower 48 states of the U.S.A. Their locations are given in the graphic above. What is fairly clear from this graphic is that SS's efforts have been concentrated 1) on the West Coast (Anthony Watts home state is California), and 2) wherever else their volunteers hail from. For example, surveys from Maine are (I am guessing) largely the work of Kristen Byrnes, the famous denying munchkin. There is a further clear trend towards surveying urban areas, also probably due to the demographics of the people making up Watt's volunteers.

Given that urban stations are more likely to be subject to siting compromises (fewer wide open fields, more asphalt), it is I think significant that only 10 per cent of the sites having been noted as not being in compliance with NOAA . Or at least, Mr. Watts has only felt obliged to scream outrage on 28 occasions.

The Surface Stations Project: Science Auditers or Enviro Vigilantes?

Anthony Watts is a climate change skeptic and member of what I would call the "Climate Audit" movement, in which citizens with some small grounding in the relevant fields attempt to bring mainstream scientists in the debate over Global Warming "to account". For example, Mr. Watts has launched Surface Stations, a website created to document deficiencies in the sites used by the United States Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) and Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN), which record changes in surface temperatures around the U.S. His goal is to call into question "the whole surface temperature record ", a project which would, if successful, put a good part of the foundation behind contemporary AGW science into question. To contribute to this project, you surf over Surface Stations, download the appropriate reporting forms, and traipse off to visit your local station, where you are expected to provide a photographic and written report.

Except that the NOAA/NCDC (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and National Climatic Data Center) have been "throwing up road-blocks"-- essentially banning Watts' volunteers from their stations, and pulling information on these stations from their website:

It sounds as though you’ve used the system enough that once you’ve located a station using the search, you’re clicking on the station name hyperlink and opening a separate station details window. The managing party for a station has always been visible by clicking on the “Other Parties” tab. In the case of NWS Coop stations (the USHCN research network relies upon a subset of stations in the NWS Coop program), this is usually the NWS office that administers the site. This information was previously included at the bottom of the Identity tab’s “form view,” but was removed from that view early this week because in some cases it also revealed the name of the Cooperative observer.

Cooperative observers are volunteers who donate their time in the interests of the public good with a reasonable expectation that their personal information will remain private. It is the NCDC’s policy to protect observer details, based upon Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Update, Vol.X, No. 2, 1989, which exempts the application of FOIA in certain cases and establishes privacy protection decisions in accordance with the Privacy Actof 1974 (2004 edition). This exemption applies when the personal privacy interest is greater than any qualifying public interest for disclosure.

Naturally Mr. Watts is "shocked, shocked" by this, and suspects a conspiracy.

However, if you look at past actions by the various participants in the Climate Audit movement, they have often crossed the line into the downright assholish. For instance, there's Steve Mcintyre's now famous inadvertant DOS attack on NASA, which was launched in an attempt to access GISS information that (it turns out) he could have just asked for, and which got him booted from NASA computers. Furthermore, both McIntyre and Pielke sling the term "cover-up" at pretty much any piece of research they don't like, and the wilder among their readers seem to think that Al Gore is ferried around in a black helicopter, and that the weather stations under investigation are likely to harbour a basement full of U.N. soldiers.

It is from this pool of readers that Mr. Watt's is drawing his volunteers.

So I for one take the NOAA/NCDC comments noted above at face value: they are simply attempting to protect their volunteers from harassment by the kind of fruit-loops that might come out of the woodwork to join Mr. Watt's project.


And I would make the following suggestion that might help Mr. Watts weed possible kooks from his pool of volunteers. Sir, while there is data on the various surface stations at your site, there is no information at all on your volunteers. It therefore does not seem possible for the operator of one of these stations to check names and contact information against a master list to determine (perhaps by a return call) whether or not the voice at the other end of the phone line is a member of your team or not. There also seems to be no process by which station operators can lodge complaints against your volunteers.

I don't know that making such changes will get your people onto the sites they wish to investigate. I do, however, think that will remove some of the stench of wingnuttery from your project, and will increase its credibility in the eyes of legitimate media sources (ie folks beyond Rush Limbaugh and Fox)