How not to measure temperature, part 58 - Sacramento’s rooftop weather stations

While looking all over the USA at weather stations, I overlooked an interesting station very nearly in my own backyard. Sacramento. This official climate station, COOP ID #047633 is much like the one in Eureka, CA which also spent much of it’s life on the rooftop of the Post Office downtown. Among other places, the Sacramento station was recently (1999 or 2002 depending on how you interpret the record) moved to a ground level location which I will touch on later. While this is not a USHCN station, it is used by GISS.

The NWS WSFO in Sacramento has a climate summary (see it here) which includes the history of the many station moves, they write:

Through the years, the Sacramento Weather Office has changed locations several times. In succession, the office has been located at the following addresses:

1. 4th and J Streets (St. George Building), July 1, 1877 to November 27, 1879.

2. 2nd and K Streets (Fratts Building), November 28, 1879 to May 31, 1882.

3. 1006 2nd Street (Arcade Building), June 1, 1882 to January 31, 1884.

4. 117 J Street (Lyon and Curtis Building), February 1, 1884 to April 30, 1894

5. 7th and K Streets (Old Post Office Building), May 1, 1894 to October 31, 1933.

6. 9th and I Streets (New Post Office and Courthouse Building), November 1, 1933 to November 19, 1958.

7. 1725 23rd Street (State of California Building), November 20, 1958 to September 28, 1964.*

8. 1416 9th Street (Resources Building), September 29, 1964 to August 14, 1995.

9. 3310 El Camino Avenue, August 15, 1995 to present.

Note the asterisk on item 7. They have a separate paragraph to cover that:

On September 28, 1964, the observation site was returned to the post office building at 9th and I streets. On April 1, 1999, the sensors were moved to the Sacramento Water Treatment Plant, east of California State University-Sacramento. Temperature and precipitation data has been transmitted from these locations to the National Weather Service Office since September 28, 1964.

There’s an interesting story in all of this, and I’m going to tell you about it, complete with pictures. While I don’t have pictures of some of the older locations, the post office/courthouse at 9th and I Streets is still there:

Sacramento Post office as seen from 9th and “I” street

Monday Funny #2

Remember, only you can prevent Gorest fires.

Curiosities: Mixed Signals in Land and Ocean Temps

A guest post by David Smith (author of “Tiny Tim Storms” on Climate Audit)

The oceans have great capacity to store heat, much greater than the soil and rock of land. We see this often. For instance, daily sea breezes are the result of the different warming rates of the ocean and land. On a seasonal scale, oceans cool more slowly than land in winter and warm more slowly than land in summer - that’s one reason why beaches are popular getaways in July and August.

It seems reasonable that the same principles should apply in a world which is warming due to the greenhouse effect. Land should respond quickly to greenhouse warming while the seas should lag. It also seems reasonable that, on decadal scales, this difference in warming rates should be visible in the global temperature record by now if AGW is driving the climate.

If, on the other hand, the recent warming involves other significant factors, such as changes in ocean behavior in combination with greenhouse warming, then the differential warming pattern might be murky and mixed.

So, what does the record show? Below is RSS satellite-derived data for the lower troposphere, broken into three regions: the tropics, northern extratropical and southern extratropical. The lines represent the spread between land and ocean temperature anomaly in each region - the smaller the spread, the lower the point on the line. (The three lines are scaled so as to separate them on the graph.)

The small scale may make examination difficult so I’ll summarize. The tropics have shown a decrease (tropical land is warming more slowly than the tropical ocean). That surprises me and is not consistent with my understanding of AGW behavior. The southern extratropics is about breakeven and is, in any case, probably hard to measure due to the limited Southern Hemisphere land. 

What about the north? Well, over the three decades of the record the differential trend is upwards. Northern Hemisphere (20N-82.5N) land has warmed faster than the Northern hemisphere oceans. Here is a closeup:

What catches my eye is the odd pattern of flat/ quick increase/flat in the Northern extratropics.

Breaking the graph into two subsets gives this for 1979-1997:

This shows basically flat behavior for 19 years.

And here is 1998-to-today:

This suggests that the Northern extratropical differential is flat-to-declining over the last decade.

Before any howls begin let me state that I clearly am playing with start and end points. I make no claim (or suggestion) that greenhouse warming isn’t the driver behind global warming over the last three decades. I simply don’t know. (Also, I am a “lukewarmer” who thinks that the world is warmer than it would otherwise be due to anthropogenic gases (but doubts that the impact will be extreme)).

What I do suggest is that the patterns are curious. They are not what I expected to find. The patterns open the door wider for the idea that warming since the 1970s has included both natural and anthropogenic factors.

What I’d like is to learn how these patterns fit into the AGW hypothesis. Also, do the GCMs (which reportedly do a good job of replicating recent climate change) show these patterns. The ideal outcome would be to learn what happened in the Northern atmosphere to create these patterns.

As always, I may be making fundamental errors in my simple analysis. If you see such mistakes then please post.

Monday Funny

We all need a laugh now and then:

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