How not to measure temperature, part 20

Pictures have been coming in to www.surfacestations.org from many places. This one is from Fort Morgan, Colorado’s USHCN climate station of record. Fort Morgan is in the eastern plains of Colorado, about 100 miles northeast of Denver.

In such a place, with all that open space, you’d think it would be an easy matter to place something as important as an official NOAA temperature sensor used to contribute measurements to the national climatic database in some of that open space.

No such luck. In fact, the sensor recording the wide open plains has four air conditioners near it!

But lets not forget, in keeping with current observed trends, that any weather station with air conditioning also needs close-by parking.

It’s not like there’s no other open space to put the sensor in Fort Morgan.

The pictures above, courtesy of the Pielke Research Group shows an electronic Min/Max Temperature Sensor placed near a grain elevator office. Cable length limitations on this sensor have caused hundreds of similar placements in the USHCN network where Stevenson Screens used before could be placed a good distance away from such influences.