Surface Stations Update

[AEGeneral]

Surfacestations Update Watts Up With That?

534 of the USHCN surface stations have now been surveyed, leaving 684 left to go. Yours truly just signed up to do a few surveys in my own region. I'll be venturing out over the next few weeks.

If you'd like to volunteer in your area, you can read more about this project at:

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[AEGeneral]

Day 2 at NCDC and Press Release: NOAA to modernize USHCN Watts Up With That?

But the big news came with Dr. Baker providing me with a press release (new today) to post here for you all to see. CRN is getting completed and USHCN modernization is starting:

NOAA today announced it will install the last nine of the 114 stations as part of its new, high-tech climate monitoring network. The stations track national average changes in temperature and precipitation trends. The U.S. Climate Reference Network (CRN) is on schedule to activate these final stationsby the end of the summer.

NOAA also is modernizing 1,000 stations in the Historical Climatology Network (HCN), a regional system of ground-based observing sites that collect climate, weather and water measurements. NOAA’s goal is to have both networks work in tandem to feed consistently accurate, high-quality data to scientists studying climate trends.

This is excellent news. And in the comments, several peer-reviewed papers I was previously unaware of came to my attention (PDF reader required):

http://climatesci.colorado.edu/publi.../pdf/R-318.pdf

An excerpt:

Davey and Pielke (2005) presented photographic
documentation of poor observation sites within
the U.S. Historical Climate Reference Network
(USHCN) with respect to monitoring long-term surface
air temperature trends. [These photographs were
first shown to the community at the 2002 Asheville,
North Carolina, meeting of the American Association
of State Climatologists (see information online at www.
stateclimate.org/meetings/minutes/2002minutes).]
Peterson (2006) compared the adjusted climate records
of many of these stations and concluded that

. . . the similarity between the homogeneityadjusted
time series from the good and poorly
sited stations supports the view that even stations
that do not, upon visual inspection, appear to be
spatially representative can, with proper homogeneity
adjustments, produce time series that are
indeed representative of the climate variability and
change in the region.

One of the objectives of the USHCN, however, as
stated in Easterling et al. (1996), . . . was to detect
temporal changes in regional rather than local climate.
Therefore, only stations not
influenced to any substantial degree by artificial
changes in their local environments were included
in the network.

Peterson’s claim relaxes this requirement with the
implication that data from stations with siting
inhomogeneities, after adjustment, may be used to
represent regional changes. There remain significant
issues, however, with the methodology applied and
the conclusions reached in the Peterson article.

And further...

http://climatesci.colorado.edu/publi.../pdf/R-321.pdf

This paper documents various unresolved issues in using surface temperature trends as a metric for assessing global and regional climate change. A series of examples ranging from errors caused by temperature measurements at a monitoring station to the undocumented biases in the regionally and globally averaged time series are provided. The issues are poorly understood or documented and relate to micrometeorological impacts
due to warm bias in nighttime minimum temperatures, poor siting of the instrumentation, effect of winds as well as surface atmospheric water vapor content on temperature trends, the quantification of uncertainties in the homogenization of surface temperature data, and the influence of land use/land cover (LULC) change on surface temperature trends.

Because of the issues presented in this paper related to the analysis of multidecadal surface temperature we recommend that greater, more complete documentation and quantification of these issues be required for all observation stations that are intended to be used in such assessments. This is necessary for confidence in the actual observations of surface
temperature variability and long-term trends.

In layman's terms, if the temperature stations at the surface are biased, and, as has been documented at surfacestations.org, the USHCN has fallen into a state of disarray due to lack of funding, then why are we relying on debatable adjustments to temperature records? Politicians are basing their (errant, IMHO) viewpoints on this data.

Thankfully, a new network is about to come online that will supposedly require no adjustments as long as the network is maintained properly.

And we're all curious as to what will happen with the temperature record from here, as well as if the prior records will be subsequently adjusted (likely downward, if such adjustments are ultimately deemed necessary).

But herein lies the problem that has, eh...."surfaced." Politicians have been basing their viewpoints on anthropogenic global warming based on data that, in all likelihood, was biased due to man-made changes surrounding these thermometers. It goes without saying that laying down a concrete parking lot next to a thermometer just might artificially inflate temperature measurements.

While I'm encouraged that necessary changes are being implemented, I'm also discouraged that something so basic has been negligently overlooked for so many years.

The implications of climate change legislation are enormous. And much of that legislation, both enacted and proposed, unnecessarily increases the cost of living for all of us. We're being forced to change rather than let technology take its proper course over time.

The one thing I've gained from all of this: nothing can be assumed, nor should it be, when it comes to the topic of global warming. We've errantly skipped the debate and ventured into the territory of "foregone conclusion" without thorough examination of the data at the most basic levels. And it's sad to me.

But as I've stated before, the truth will inevitably come out. And we will ultimately find out who was right & who was wrong. After all I've seen over the last five years, it's clear to me that the evidence is shifting my direction. And I can only hope that it continues before more people throughout the world -- especially the third world -- needlessly suffer as a result of the irresponsible road that has been traveled thus far on the part of world politicians.