BerkeleyEarth: release July 30

You may be a bit of a psychic then.
Christy is part of a study that blows the BEST study out of the water .It shows how much the USA temps from NOAA have been exaggerated.The distortion is partly UHI effect .
PRESS RELEASE | Watts Up With That?
"The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward."

 

OT: a 1371-foot tower (btw the 2 airports) was taken down before the second map. Not such a common thing

The notion that urbanization could either warm or cool a thermometer may have been first in the Menne paper? Based on local evapotranspiration. Grassland and desert (ish) cites can become cooler, from new plantings. If your city looks greener than its environs from the air, you are a candidate.

Many will have read that warmer nights are regarded as a fingerprint of global warming. By the same logic as above, if your city got 'greened' it would not be a good place to test this hypothesis.

 

As Watts is now in discussion here as well, I'll also ask here if anyone could send me both of these (unpublished) manuscripts and their ancillary data.

I cannot access either from the internet here w/o resorting to virtual proxy networks.

 

PM me your email and I'll give it a try.

 

certainly the urban heat island effect is real. BEST seems to make all of their adjustments open and public. I don't know how you blow one study out of the water. You can find errors to correct.

Best is open for full peer review. If Christy actually finds real errors they will be reviewed. Not seeing a response, I would not assume christy is right, but muller is wrong.

we located the thermometers to minimize uhi in austin. Dallas is qute bad, but they try to statistically remove the problems. Best has tried to adjust for UHI, and has shared this information with other scientists.

 

The study is actually headed by Anthony Watts.Christy is part of the et al.
It deals with heat island but mainly it calls into question the temp data adjustments applied by NOAA.
The inaccurate data used by Best makes their conclusions garbage in garbage out.
The Watts study is the information Muller enlisted Watts for on the Best project,then chose to entirely ignore.

 

You need to remember that the BEST study, looked at all of the worst thermometers that Watts had pointed out, to do there analysis. Instead of finding a systemic warming bias to the data compared to the good thermometers and satellite readings, it found that these actually read slightly cooler.

Now the BEST information is preminary and needs to go through a full formal peer review session, but the data is all out there to be reviewed. BEST data seems to also compare well to the other temperature reconstructions. This watts study may indeed show a few things are off on BEST methodology, but Watts did get very early copies of the BEST data and muller gave him a large amount of time to propose problems. Watts does site the muller reconstructions. That is why I would say this press release on a very preliminary study is likely the garbage input if it shows a large divergence from BEST, and not the best reconstruction. Time and peer review should tell. Remember the US has not recieved as much warming as the world, but both BEST and this new Watts study show warming.

 

The peer review of Best has already begun.
Two Best team members, Judith Curry and Anthony Watts, are both critical of the data and conclusions.
Kind of ironic being that they are the climatologist and the meteorologist of the team.

 

As I said they put the information out in public even before anything was formally published

Curry is on the team. Her complaint was not at all with the temperature reconstruction, it was with the conclusion that warming is currently going on. By proposing different trend lines you either see continuing warming or a plateau. I go with the longer reconstructions that show warming, but Curry chooses a shorter time period that shows the warming ending. More years will definitely show which approach is correct Just like Jones and mann decided warming was accelerating at an unbelievably higher rate by choosing a short period when it was, IMHO Curry will also be shown wrong when more more data comes in also. This is what curry said on her blog

Watts is not part of the team. Since he had the hypothesis he was brought in early to see if he agreed with the methodology. He does run a political blog, and seems to ignore any data contrary to its pov. Ofcourse he objected when the data said something different. Unlike Curry, where we need to wait to see if her criticism is correct, peer review of methodologies can show if Watts is correct, or just blowing some more hot air.

 

Muller is getting more and more bizarre.

"Ross McKitrick, who was a peer review referee for the BEST papers with the Journal of Geophysical Research"
"but I have reason to believe Muller et al.’s analysis does not support the conclusions he is now asserting in the press."
Why the BEST papers failed to pass peer review | Watts Up With That?

 

I would have enjoyed reading McKitrick's review,but that web site will also not open for me at the moment. Will try later.

Gotta say that the topic of where you put a thermometer is much more interesting to me that any of the 'personality' stuff. BobW mentions still air at night: you get capping temperature inversions at night, valley fog, and even up 1000 ppm CO2 under the cap! It is the reality of biophysics, and can easilty trump urbanization. But not always...

Question is, how to undo it? When N is large homogenization is the simplest. Individual stations can be done elegantly/exhaustively, but this has not been done to the surface T record (I think). Watts' appears to take an intermediate, 'paved footprint' approach which will correct for some things but not for others.

'Swhy I want to read it.

AGreen reminds that US thermometers have not been increasing as fast as some others. This makes me want a table of global groundwater withdrawals, by country/continent, per unit surface area. Can't quickly find on the cranky internet.

Evaporating a lot of water can make a lot of 'T' disappear It's still there as latent heat, humidity went up. Very sciency. Less than suitable for bloggy I guess.

We (should) seek to know the energy content of 'the system'. In some cases (see the sea) the system is not easy to define. So many juicy science questions. But instead we look for juicy quotes as gotchas. Spock would be 'fascinated'.

 

Bob, as much as we all appreciate your go-getter attitude, I'd say...don't bother. First, measurements from any single site will not push the paradigm. Second, the 'Fluxnet' people are way better instrumented (at tax payer expense) and pushed by 'urban interface' people like Nanvy Grimm, may begin to poke into these things. There may even be more push from the curent Muller/Watt thing.

While we really do want to know the value/conversion factors for urban vs rural T records, the opportunity for lone wolves to solve the problems would seem limited. UR engineer, so you won't be overwhelmed when I suggest that these things are going to be settled with small-bead thermistors, Lyman apha spectrometers, and 3-D sonic anemometers that can do way more than what we usta do resolving sigma theta in the horizontal wind plane. Ah for the olden days.

Absent all this great stuff, some sort of rough N ready corrections will be used. Muller went one way and Watt went another. Neither is obviously yet the better way to go. The best way to go is way more complicated than either.

Money. Not neccesarily warranted because we are already sure that T is increasing, ice is downgrading, species are voting with their ... appendages such are are available. Climate is changing; why do we argue?

As God I would first throw funding at the (obvious) ongoing human problems, then look at the likely next set. If hoomanz cannot recognize the value of not changing planetary energy balance, fark 'em. Just fix what is broken now and what is ovious to break soon. No raz-ma-taz climate projecting models are required for that.

 

Hell, it has been a recent development on PC to not have denialists loudly proclaim that in fact the Earth is *not* warming up.

 

Another interesting anecdote similar to Bob's.

I retired as an operational meteorologist from the National Weather Service at the beginning of this year (2012). During my tenure at the NWS Morristown (TN) office (almost 11 years), the temperature difference between the office and my house (about 3 miles as the crow flies) was routinely at least 5 degrees F in quiet weather regimes at around midnight. The greatest I noted was 17 degrees F difference (my house is always colder).

There were also quite often differences between our office and the Morristown AWOS about 1 mile away. Since the siting policy for ASOS and AWOS units is that anything within a 5 mile radius can be considered the same site if relocation is necessary, there could be significant differences if the units are moved around that 5-mile radius here. This is in an area where urban heat island effects are minimal, but microclimates prevail anyway.

 

Eastern Tennessee is a fine example of 'complicated' land that develops strong temperature patterns absent a nice 'mixing' wind. You can find any T you are looking for, somewhere in those ridges and valleys.

Also anyone who has flown over in the mornings will have seen all the valleys fogged and all the ridges clear. another clue...

 

SFO has over 580 flights daily.Say that a 747 uses roughly 4-500 gallons of fuel to takeoff.Thats over 200,000 gallons of fuel burned.Add to that the fuel burned while planes are taxiing .Add to that tens of thousands of ground transportation vehicles.
Its probably enough fuel to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Burn that fuel and take a temperature reading in the vicinity.