Toasted - but encouraged

I just finished a 150+ mile round trip from Boulder to get Dillon, CO and Cheesman Reservoir USHCN sites in addition to the Boulder NIST/NOAA site.

Cheesman had recently been flooded due to heavy runof from forest fire, the roads were mudpits, and even with 4WD I rented couldn’t get there before sunset. So gave up and returned to hotel at DIA for flight out tomorrow.

Had Vietnamese food with Pielke’s group last night, and that didn’t help my day either. I’m pretty toasted. But it was a heckofa good day even so.

So I’m signing off for a couple days for travel back home and some R&R.

The good news; While driving back on US285 I had another citizen science project idea to disprove Parker’s 2004 and 2006 papers essentially saying “UHI is minimal or doesn’t exist”, which I believe is unsupportable. I think it will work. Got to mull it over. Check back in a day or two. Pictures and presentation coming when I get back to normal schedule.

Anthony out

I have Boulder NIST/NOAA site

Boulder is home to National Institute of Standards and NOAA’s research lab…big government facility and probably the most secure weather station in the USA, I had to go through metal detectors, have mirrors run under my vehicle, be photographed, and my drivers license verified.

Took 2 hours…on the road at the moment to get another station in Colorado, blogging via WiFi from Starbucks

Will post new pix soon.

Conference Day 3 - suggestions

This mornig s session is all about drafting a set of suggestions to forward to other key members of the climate research community using the group knowledge gained from this conference. I have submitted my suggestion, and it has been accepted for inclusion in the publication. It reads:

It has become clear that many surface weather stations, possibly a
significant number, may have undocumented biases that may or may not
be correctable using data analysis and data adjustment techniques.
After completion of weather station surveys for USHCN and other
networks, Why not identify the known good stations that have long term
records, few station moves, and no obvious microsite biases and
separate their data into a subset. Study the data and trends the known
good station subsets produce separately to see what can be learned.

Live at the conference, Day2 - Success

You know your presentation was successful when:

1) Nobody threw rotten fruit

2) People came up to me afterwards and said “I have photos I can get to you”

3) A high level official at NCDC requests a copy of my presentation “as soon as you can get it to me”

Live from the conference, Day 2 - Down to the wire

Ok the next session is starting in a few minutes, less than 2 hours from now I’m going to know if the work I and all of the volunteers at www.surfacestations.org has been scientifically fruitful, or if I’m going to get pelted on the stage with rotten fruit.

My presentation is updated with some late breaking photos Russ Steele got yesterday from St. George, UT, loaded into the presentation laptop, and my remote control has been tested. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

At the very least, after sitting through a bunch of Powerpoint presentations, my use of the same software I use for doing TV weather presentations should break the mold.

Live at the confrence, day 2 - coming up today

This afternoon there will be several presentations that embrace the measurement systems used for the near surface temperature and precipitation records.

Of great interest to me is a presentation outlining the new US CRN (Climate Reference Network) by Bruce Baker of NCDC. Another is by Glenn Conner, former Kentucky State Climatologist whose talk will be about the role of station histories in identifying biases in climate records.

My presentation follows those two - it should be a lively afternoon.

Live from the Conference, day 2 - land cover and GCM’s

I just watched a presentation Elsi Sertel from a university in Turkey showing how easy it is to introduce true land cover data into a climate model. Her study area was around the Black Sea near Istanbul, and used LANDSAT imagery along with a pixel by pixel truthing technique to determine the type of land cover, sea, forest, urban, etc and apply it to use in a GCM.

Her premise was that current GCM’s use land surface info that isn’t fully representative, out of date, and in some cases just plain wrong.

Her study showed a technique that allowed for a significant amount of automation to the process, to allow improved and current land surface types to be easily integrated into the grid cells of a GCM. Unfortunately, some GCM gridding schemes are too coarse to handle such data.

From what I’ve seen in this conference so far, and I’ve seen presentations now from Europe, Turkey, China, Australia and the USA, it is becoming more clear that land use is a major driver of climate change, and perhaps dwarfs even GHG effects. That’s just a hunch. One study from Australia showed the effects of removing a woody type bush over a large area over the past century, and the results on rainfall and temperature were profound.

LIve from the conference, Day2

I’m sitting in a presentation by William R. Cotton, of Colorado State University where he’s talking about the effect of Urban Heat Islands (UHI) on precipitation. He’s making a convincing pitch showing how the UHI factors into downwind delayed convection initiated by the city UHI along with a significant contribution of aerosols and ice nuclei that seed the precipitation. He’s been able to demonstrate that in St. Louis, downwind from the city (typically NE to SE based on prevailing winds) there are increased precipitation from thunderstorms by as much as 160% during the life cycle of the storm.

Yesterday, I saw a very similar study done by Indiana State Climatologist, Dev Nyogi, where he studied Indianapolis, IN and came to similar conclusions. The midwestern cities make good case studies because they are singular islands of urbanization (as opposed to sprawling cities like Los Angeles and Chicago) that essentially become point heat sources at the mesoscale level.

The summary is this: Urban and-use has the biggest control on locations and amounts of precipitation and that condensation nuclei added by the city also have a significant effect. Heat and particles contributed by the city can make bigger, more precipitating thunderstorms.

Of course studies by Parker tells us there is no significant UHI effect, so this presents yet another challenge to what is looking ore and more like a flawed study by Parker.

How not to measure temperature - part 30

Russ Steele is out on vacation and doing several surveys while traveling. This one below is from St. George, UT. Here we see an MMTS measuring the temperature near the surface of an elevated parking lot. The effect of the asphalt and vehicles that park near it, engine forward, probably dwarfs the effect of the nearby a/c unit. The shading may help daytime temps some, but the asphalt likely biases Tmin the most. The complete photo survey is available on surfacestations.org

Conference Day1 - van rides and jitters

Well I just finished Day1 at the conference at UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research) put together by Dr. Roger Pielke, and sponsored by the National Science Foundation titled: Detecting the Atmospheric Response to the Changing Face of the Earth: A Focus on Human-Caused Regional Climate Forcings, Land-Cover/Land-Use Change, and Data Monitoring.

The day started off bright and early with the shuttle to the NCAR headquarters, shown above. It’s a unique place, at over 6000 feet up right next to the “flatirons“. Once there, we learned that the conference had been moved to downtown Boulder (somebody forgot to tell the shuttle driver). So we had to wait for the shuttle to return. A new one arrived, and we piled in. Then we sat there and waited because others were coming. As we waited in the sun, someone remarked, “It’s getting hot in the van, open your window” to which I remarked “well, with all these windows, it’s a simple greenhouse experiment”. That brought a chuckle, then “no, really, open he window”. So 10 minutes later, we were on our way in a van that holds 12, we had 7.

The driver informed us he had two stops to make to pickup additional people. We added three at the first stop, and at the second stop, at the invitation of the driver (I don’t mind if you don’t ) we added 6 more people, for a total of 16, all crammed into a van that holds 12. After that exercise I quipped: “well in addition to our earlier greenhouse experiment, now we are adding population growth in an urban setting” which drew a big laugh - inside joke for climate science, you had to be there.

At the conference we had a busy day, lots of papers on land use changes, urbanization studies, rainfall studies, and one statistical study which really caught my eye because I had lunch with the presenter and he gave me the real inside scoop on the “adjustments” process used to turn raw temperature data into “usable” data. More on that later.

I felt a bit out of place at first, because I’d been away from the scientific community for awhile, and this was the first presentation of this type (mine comes tomorrow) in about 25 years. So I was a bit nervous. That soon faded, as people whom I’ve never met saw my name tag, came up and introduced themselves, and said things like “I’ve been following your work, I’m really looking forward to seeing what you’ve found” “after what I’ve seen on your website, I’m beginning to think the surface temperature record is hopeless, and we should focus elsewhere”. So I started feeling a bit more confident. I didn’t see anybody packing rotten tomatoes, and everyone was very nice today, so I’m hoping for the best tomorrow.

Of course Roger Pelke Sr. was a most gracious host, as was his assistant, Dallas, and it was a comfortable and easy day thanks to their efforts.

Later I’ll have a short summary of some of the papers presented today.