Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?

By Anthony Watts

Hardcopies may be purchased through the Heartland Institute.

FAQs (150,000 copies were distributed)

{Editor: In light of the Cap and Trade and Climate Change™ political agendas, this article is relevant and timely regarding data fidelity and cognitive disonance. Please let the "law" makers know they are being led down the wrong path based on manipulated data. A gallery of "misplaced" weather stations can be seen at http://www.surfacestations.org/online_database.htmand and may be viewed in 3D using theCooliris plugin for Safari. Those in charge at NOAA, National Weather Service, GISS and National Climatic Data Center have obviously been compromised by the Environmentalist religionists.}

"The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations."

Your help is needed to document the measuring environment and equipment condition of weather and climate monitoring stations worldwide.

Anyone with a digital camera, handheld GPS and basic observation and reporting skills can contribute to this database.

To get started, signup then view and/or download the instructions and site survey form from here of from the online image database at gallery.surfacestations.org Then familiarize yourself with them, and then choose what stations you want to survey and contribute to this database.

Full credit is given to all contributors of photos and survey forms, or if you wish, you can submit a survey anonymously.

All submissions will be checked for accuracy.

{Editor: To access the live Google Map, Google Earth has to be installed and free registration needs to occur on the Surfacestations.org Database page. The KML file is located at http://www.surfacestations.org/downloads/surfacestations%20ratings%20-%2020080912.kml and besides GoogleMaps, the file also opens in - EarthBrowser. The grey balloons in the map below are unsurveyed surface stations.}

Class 1 (CRN1) - Flat and horizontal ground surrounded by a clear surface with a slope below 1/3 (<19deg). Grass/low vegetation ground cover <10 centimeters high. Sensors located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces, and parking lots. Far from large bodies of water, except if it is representative of the area, and then located at least 100 meters away. No shading when the sun elevation >3 degrees.  

Class 2 (CRN2) - Same as Class 1 with the following differences. Surrounding Vegetation <25 centimeters. No artificial heating sources within 30m. No shading for a sun elevation >5deg.  

Class 3 (CRN3) (error >=1C) - Same as Class 2, except no artificial heating sources within 10 meters.  

Class 4 (CRN4) (error >= 2C) - Artificial heating sources <10 meters.  

Class 5 (CRN5) (error >= 5C) - Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface."

"89 percent of the stations--nearly 9 of every 10--fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements."

"With only 11% of surveyed stations being of acceptable quality, the raw temperature data produced by the USHCN stations are not sufficiently accurate to use in scientific studies or as a basis for public policy decisions."

The Orland USHCN station is located behind the Orland Water Users Association off of 8th Street in Orland CA. It has the distinction of being well sited, and having been in the same location for over 100 years. It also has not been badly encroached upon by UHI as the community has not grown significantly during the period.

This site in Marysville, CA has been around for about the same amount of time, but has been encroached upon by growth in a most serious way by micro-site effects.

I keep telling myself that there probably aren’t many surprises left. We’ve seen climate monitoring stations in parking lots, next to parked cars, next to burn barrels, near air conditioners, at airports, at sewage treatment plants, at industrial facilities, in people’s front yards, back yards, side yards, near BBQ grills, on top of telephone poles, on main street, next to houses, attached to houses, next to buildings, and yes even on the rooftops. One was painted blue, one brown, some hardly at all. Some were even found out of compliance in the Alaskan white north. We’ve seen them in the desert, on the DEW line and down under.

The stakes in the debate over global warming are high. If human activities are causing a major warming of the earth’s atmosphere, then actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions costing hundreds of billions of dollars would be necessary.

But how do we know if global warming is a problem if we can’t trust the temperature record?

This report, by meteorologist Anthony Watts, presents the results of the first-ever comprehensive review of the quality of data coming from the National Weather Service’s network of stations. Watts and a team of volunteers visually inspected and took pictures of more than 850 of these temperature stations. What they found will shock you:

“We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

“In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations--nearly 9 of every 10--fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements ...”

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable. And since the U.S. record is thought to be “the best in the world,” it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.

Anthony Watts

IntelliWeather 

3008 Cohasset Road 

Chico, CA 95973

Phone 530.899.8434

Fax 530.899.3333

Anthony Watts is a 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran and currently chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio. He got his start as on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette, Indiana and at KHSL-TV in Chico, California. In 1987, he founded ItWorks - http://www.itworks.com/, which supplies broadcast graphics systems to hundreds of cable television, television, and radio stations nationwide. ItWorks supplies custom weather stations, Internet servers, weather graphics content, and broadcast video equipment. In 2007, Watts founded SurfaceStations.org, a Web site devoted to photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations across the U.S.

Digging Deeper

Cycle Climates Change

Climate Reference Network Site Handbook (Taken offline?)

Global Warming, the Cult of Gaia and "Edidence"

How not to measure temperature, part 82, Friday the 13th: the Temperature Shelter

NOAA Duck and Cover

Resources

Watts Up With That? Weather Stations

WBZ Video Report

{Editor: Besides the cooler temperatures overall in my location (Richland, WA) in 2009, I had to wear a sweater in June, where back in the '60's, it used to be 120 F. in the shade during the Summer. It boggles the mind that they don't calibrate before they take readings either, but would rather marginalize the readings by taking an average of nearby stations and then fudging the results (applying an adjustment) to match their preconceived notions of "the world is warming". That is not science. That is "playing with statistics to fit the model". Whoever allowed them to use "UHI" and get away with it?

BTW, when we hear the radio station announcing the temperature, we always factor in that the radio station is next to the river here in the Great American Desert and it is consistently 5 degrees off true temp., even if it is the "official" temperature during the winter.}