Watts Up With That?

Anthony, congratulations! You have made an important contribution to climate science by launching this wikiclimatology project. The collaboration of a few dedicated volunteers will have a major impact on the public view of global climate change, especially if the reported change is measured by a broken data collection system.

Russ, as the very first volunteer for the project, you deserve special recognition and thanks.

Russ has surveyed a number of important stations in California, such as Lake Spaulding, and will soon be adding Nevada and Idaho stations to the list.

Thank you Russ, for your generous contribution of time and expertise.

Would it be too much to ask to have daily/weekly updates of counts of well sited stations, somewhat poorly sited stations, and poorly sited stations?

I have held off drawing any conclusions on the study until we got a significantly large and well distributed sample. Now that we are nearly at 20% of all 1221 stations, we will start keeping a running total.

Look for it in about a week.

Great! Are you going to use them newfangled 1a-5c ratings?

(I assume you already have Central Park in NYC. If not, maybe I can run it down for you. Mon general informs me she's seen it; it is located on a roof enclosure atop Belvedere Csstle.)

We'll be using the CRN (Climate Reference Network)guidelines as written about here:

http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/07/standards_for_weather_station.html

These are NOAA's own published standards.

We do have NYC central park already in the database:

http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=3139

When I began studying engineering, a professor once said that you can become very precise in your imprecision (i.e., calculating a number to 6 decimal places when the number itself is way off from reality). It seems that the (assumed) highly precise MMTS equipment used here, even if technically of high quality, is producing grossly imprecise results due to their placement. GIGO.

Great! And thanks. I look forward to it.

Anthony, you've done great work leading the charge on pointing out possible legitimate siting issues without pushing an agenda one way or the other. However, do you know of anyone taking the next step of finding out just what the magnitude of these siting biases may actually be? I'm talking about putting stations within yards of each other, siting one over asphalt, one near asphalt, one over grass, one near external A/C units, etc. and just tracking them over time to see if their temperature changes are the same. An actual experiment of this type may not answer all the questions about siting but it would greatly reduce the uncertainty.

And maybe somebody has already pointed this out, but an overall siting bias that causes a higher temperature reading than the actual doesn't necessarily spell the end of global warming. Let's say we are measuring an overall 1 degF increase in mean temperature here in the mainland US from these stations. And let's suppose we discover that siting issues have caused this average to be 0.2 degF higher than it should be. Then measurements such as the melting of glaciers here in the US (which are done independent of temperature readings) have been happening at a mean temperature increase of only 0.8 degF, not 1 degF! Wouldn't that mean we should be even more concerned about global warming effects? On the other hand, a siting bias of (say) 1.2 degF higher would mean something else besides global warming is causing changes in our environment.

There are few issues in climate change that can be easily resolved by observation, starting with what the climate would be like without us around. That's a big reason why the issue is so heated. We are lucky, however, that much of the uncertainty over the siting issue can be removed by experiment. It seems to me that all any *honest* person on either side of the argument should care about is just getting the facts.

Sounds reasonable to me, although it would involve a certain degree of work and expense. (Approve of the last sentence.)

BTW, any word on the latex paint vs. whitewash experiment?

Congratulations and add to that two more congratulations. Occupying the #1 slot in an Anthony Watts search of Google News --

Watts rattles warming theologians

...and a global warming watts search reveals a new Paradise Post column in the #1 slot --

Cause of global warming is still undecided

I've really got to get on this. I'm in north Alabama and am planning on visiting several stations within a couple hours drive in AL, TN, MS and possibly GA.

This auditing of stations used to create the purported "surface temperature record" is going very well.

One of the other articles of faith of the "Killer AGW" lobby is the notion of a steep decline in Arctic sea ice extent. How real is it, or, is it another case of suspect data fed into a "data muncher" algorithm and out comes the "expected" result?

Here is something to whet your appetite:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19920015007_1992015007.pdf