There is a group going around to survey stations used by the National Climate Data Center to determine if they are to code. From what they have found so far 90% of them are out of code, as they do not follow the "100 foot" rule. These survey stations must sit at least 100 feet away from potential heat sources that could affect the data.
/quote ""So far we've surveyed 1,062 of them," said Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who began the tracking effort in 2007. "We found that 90 percent of them don't meet [the government's] old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule' for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we've got documentation." /quote
The article says opponents say that even scaling back the possible temperature rises from these locations, it still shows a rise in the global temperature of 1.2 degrees over the last century.
I don't know what to think. If it were 20% of the stations I could understand saying it would have no effect. Ninety percent though? I don't know who to believe.
posted
This was discussed at length in a recent climate thread. It actually turned out that when they did a more in depth peer reviewed study the world turned out to be slightly warmer instead of cooler. (It was a little more complicated, I can't remember the link offhand).
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posted
This is the first I've heard of it. My first observation is that since we are talking about the change in the temperature, these problems are only important if the number of sites located near a heat source has increased over the last century.
I would also note, that the surface temperature rise over the past 30 years is corroborated by satellite measurements that would not be subject to the same problems.
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posted
Here is the most relevant quote from the article.
quote:And surface station data is only a small subset of information confirming the warming of the climate, Lawrimore said.
Changes in air temperature, water temperature, glacier melt, plant flowering, tree growth and species migration, among many others, show the same worldwide trend -- a 0.7 degree Celsius jump (1.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century.
What the deniers seem to miss is how truly massive the scientific efforts in this field are. Throw out the surface data all together and it changes nothing at all, we have 7 or eight different types of data that show the same thing.
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posted
An analysis of the data from surfacestations.org showed that the trends of the poorly-rated and well-rated sites were very similar, and that the poorly-rated sites actually showed a cooling bias when compared to the well-rated sites.
posted
This is RE: Urban Heat Island and related data review concerns. There's an entire string of articles in publications that are cited and sort of 'transposed' into a digestible informative format such as Scientific American articles. I can't go hunt them down right now (or hardly ever, it seems like i'm only ever posting on work breaks) but I am pretty sure that there are people with EBSCO access or who are otherwise acclimatized to the pertinent issues who can probably fill you in.
That said, I have to mention a few things.
- In a number of important ways, that article drifts into a too heavily editorialized non-NPOV tone. If you have a better article from a different source, it would be useful for discussing this.
- surfacestations.org isn't rendering a good case for methodological data collection bias if they don't publish anything. It has been a number of years now since surfacestations.org presented data they collected in an informal/amateur format that allowed others to confirm that they were at best not being very methodologically careful (or at worst cherrypicking data) and since then there has not been much in the way of actual publication supporting this, and this critical organization is not being helpful in that regard. While they've been quiet, Menne et al published peer reviewed papers that analyzed a much more complete survey of data stations and found, conversely, that if anything it indicated a cooling bias.
Here is a much more blunt analysis by someone who has devoted more studious scrutiny to the critics in question:
quote:To be blunt, I think it's fair to characterize Watts as an amateur hack. Basically he takes photos of temperature stations that look like they're in bad spots, and he does some piss-poor analysis of the data, and that's about it. Tamino takes Watts' amateurish data analysis to town in many entries on Open Mind, most of them entitled "How Not to Analyze Data, parts 1-4".
This is really a moot point. We've shown here that the surface station data is accurate countless times. NASA takes urban heat island effects into account by various methods, such as comparing urban station data to nearby rural station data.
All you have to do is look at the data to realize that this is a total non-issue. Look at the supposed 'good' stations (red) vs. 'bad' stations (green):
I think anyone who cites Watts or surfacestations.org needs to do some research of their own instead of being mesmerized by some pretty pictures that really don't tell you anything.
SO, on the surface, if you're openly wondering who to believe, you need to keep in context the potential empirical validity of the 'establishment' claim versus the 'skeptic' claim — which is pretty much how this is being delineated.
In this case, the skeptic claim is at present a non-starter since they're not really publishing and they're playing it fast and loose with the data, and NOAA et. al. have published much more comprehensive review with very well-researched data sets showing trends which are very distinctly the opposite of what Anthony Watts et. al. have claimed, showing a pattern of being very distinctly wrong. In addition, his site is something that deserves critique simply due to the fact that the 'methodology' present to critique surface data claims is not really very scientific. It's overuse of the visceral. It's not like he can't have valid points, especially in the case of if he can point to individual cases that show clear compromise, but he's vastly overextending his analysis.
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posted
The fact that individual measurement facilities aren't in compliance with the codes still wouldn't account for any particular measurement increasing over a period of time. Now if you could show individual measurement stations showed no increase over that time, but that the average temperature data increased as more non-compliant stations were built, that might have some meaning.
Actually, it would be worth looking into whether there were step changes (as opposed to gradual changes) in reported temperatures if, (say) a building was built nearby at some point in the history of the measurement station. I suspect that this was studied by the people who came up with the codes, and/or who developed models of the urban heat island effect. Scientists are always recalibrating their measurement methods.
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