Talk:Instrumental temperature record
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I've (William M. Connolley 20:03 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)) moved 2 paras to the end. These are:
the intro that someone copied in, viz:
"The historical temperature record shows the fluctuations of the temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans throughout history. Climate scientists generally agree that Earth has undergone several cycles of global warming and global cooling in the last 20,000 years, with the average air temparature fluctuating within a range of about 3 Celsius degrees (5 Fahrenheit degrees), over this time period."
This is mangled info. Someone can straighten it out if they like. If you look over the last 20 kyr, the biggest signal you see is the end of the last ice age - so the stuff about little cycles is then in the noise.
There are various sub-cycles/sub-signals, of ??1500 year ish?? periodicity; and their are the D-O events etc etc. But the above para mangles that. *Also* it fits rather poorly with the emphasis of this subsection-now-a-page, ie on the last 150 or 1000 years - so it shouldn't be up there in the intro.
I've also pushed
"In January 2002, scientists released data showing that Antarctica had grown about 25% (???). Some editorial writers claimed that this contradicts the expectation that rising temperatures should cause the ice cap to shrink. However, the scientists studying the situation in the Antarctic who released this data point out that local cooling in some areas is consistent with an overall trend of global warming and say that "the ice-sheet growth that we have documented in our study area has absolutely nothing to do with any recent climate trends."[9]"
into the misc section. The first sentence is junk. If its to stay, someone has to find a decent ref to what its supposed to mean. Mind you, ref [9] is nice and its a pity I've misc'd it too...
The IPCC says that it has corrected the land station data to account for the urban heat island effect. To do: find and summarize their correction technique.
The comment above has been around for about a year, and still no one has shown me where in any IPCC report they have explained how they "account for" urban heat islands. So I'm inclined to say rather:
- Critics of the IPCC report note that it fails to explain how it accounts for the urban heat islands. These critics argue that the heat island effect correlates with land-based thermometer readings better than the global warming theory espoused by the IPCC.
... or something along those lines. Work with me here, folks. Let's make an informative and neutral article. --Uncle Ed
That looks fairly reasonable - I'd modify slightly:
- The IPCC report does not explain how it accounts for the urban heat island effect - increased warming due to proximity to major cities. The heat island effect, if not properly accounted for, would tend to increase the amount of apparant warming.
(William M. Connolley 09:46 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)) There is at least a problem in the wording here. IPCC doesn't do research, it reports other peoples. But apart from that... see section 2.2.2.1 [1]. In particular:
- These results confirm the conclusions of Jones et al. (1990) and Easterling et al. (1997) that urban effects on 20th century globally and hemispherically averaged land air temperature time-series do not exceed about 0.05°C over the period 1900 to 1990 (assumed here to represent one standard error in the assessed non-urban trends). However, greater urbanisation influences in future cannot be discounted. Note that changes in borehole temperatures (Section 2.3.2), the recession of the glaciers (Section 2.2.5.4), and changes in marine temperature (Section 2.2.2.2), which are not subject to urbanisation, agree well with the instrumental estimates of surface warming over the last century. Reviews of the homogeneity and construction of current surface air temperature databases appear in Peterson et al. (1998b) and Jones et al. (1999a). The latter shows that global temperature anomalies can be converted into absolute temperature values with only a small extra uncertainty.
Errr... shouldn't all this go into the UHI page?
- Yep. And then summarised here. :) It all seems rather a lot of work... :-/ Martin
- William, the large quote above (0.05°C over the period 1900 to 1990) seems at first reading to answer Martin's other question: are heat islands causing global warming. My question is different: are temperature readings taken within heat islands giving a false impression of global warming. That is, (1) if a city gets 0.8°C warmer, and this warming is averaged in with all other temperature differences, I think this would be a statistical error. What do you think? Also, (2) if cities get much warmer, suburbs get kind of warmer, rural areas get a bit warmer, and uninhabited areas don't get warmer at all, what would this tell us? (Not saying that's the case for now, just asking what this would tell us if it were so.) --Uncle Ed 17:19 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)
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- AFAICT, "globally and hemispherically averaged land air temperature time-series" - I think this phrase is referring to the temperature readings rather than the actual temperatures - IE, it answers your question... Oh, I'm copying some of this stuff to the urban heat island page. Martin
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- There is an answer to UE from IPCC. Essentially, you can (if you wish) separate out the obviously-likely-to-be-affected stations if you like, but it makes little difference. Reasons include: cities are small areas anyway; the trends from cities (etc) don't in fact differ substantially from the trends without them; in fact the trends over city areas agree quite well with the dreaded MSU... I'll try to find this and add it in, since its clearly a concern (William M. Connolley 21:31 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)).
I have started studying a paper on the temperature record in the USSR. The writers find no warming trend in rural stations and hint (or imply) that other researchers have selectively chosen data to fit their "warming" views. [Read it yourself] and decide. --Uncle Ed 17:52 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)
- Its worth reading (William M. Connolley 21:36 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)). I've had a brief look before. Of the 2 stations I picked to check his analysis, one had the jump he claimed (according to objective statistics) and one didn't, or it was impossible to tell: the trends he claimed as implausible against "neighbouring" stations were from places 100's of km away, and in different exposures: near the sea or not.
Martin and William,
I'm not sure either of you is getting my point. I am not wondering whether a few hot cities are making the whole world hot.
I am wondering whether a large number of the temperature readings from weather stations in and near rapidly warming cities, when averaged with a relatively small number of temperature readings from rural and remote stations, are giving a false impression of global warming. That is, it might be that (A) the only parts of the world that are warming are the urban heat islands and (B) the only reason these are heating up is because cities absorb and generate heat; rather than (C) that carbon dioxide, etc. is causing worldwide warming.
Do you understand my point? (I'm not asking whether you agree with my point of view, but only whether my English is clear.) --Uncle Ed 22:33 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)
- I believe so - let me paraphrase to try and prove it.
- * Because of the urban heat island effect, cities are warming up more than the surrounding countryside
- * Thermometers are recording an increase in temperature
- * Many thermometers are located near urban heat islands
- * Therefore, the temperature increase recorded by thermometers may overestimate the actual temperature increase of the climate as a whole.
- To draw a parallel, one shouldn't put the thermostat in one's house next to a log fire, because in that case the thermostat will overestimate the general temperature of one's house.
- My reading of the IPCC report is that the distortion introduced by the urban heat island effect is, at most, 0.05°. In other words, if we had located our thermometers away from urban heat islands, they would have recorded 0.05° less temperature increase over the period 1900 to 1990. Of course, this depends on whether you trust the research cited by the IPCC... Martin
- I mostly agree with Martin. Have you read the bit about marine and borehole temperatures? This does a lot to counter your point. I also think you're wrong to suppose that, numerically, urban reading predominate. Martin: note that strictly speaking IPCC reprots that UHI leads to at most 0.05 *uncertainty*. They don't (I think) explicitly state that this is necessarily in the warming direction.
Thank you, both, for helping me to feel understood. Now I'll have a G-R-E-A-T weekend! ^_^ (Uncle Ed)
Contents |
[edit] Urban Heat Islands
There is a major ommission,
Peterson, T.C., 2003: Assessment of urban versus rural in situ surface temperatures in the contiguous United States: No difference found. Journal of Climate, 16, 2941-1959.
and a powerpoint based on the above paper
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/rural.urban.ppt
I see no discussion regarding the fact that most temperature stations in cities are based in parks and gardens which leads to underestimates in warming.
(William M. Connolley 14:01, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)) Good paper, take a look at what I wrote about it on the urban heat island page...
[edit] Rename and reorg proposal
(William M. Connolley 16:46, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)) There is a discussion of various T pages at Talk:Temperature_record_of_the_past_1000_years#Subject_of_article including the desire to rename this page "instrumental temperature record" and move non-instrumental content out. Please discuss over there not here. Thank you.
[edit] Needs more about construction
This page is good on the result of the record, but says almost nothing about the process of construction the record from obs. William M. Connolley 09:39, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Bad science 1a
I cut this to talk, from the page:
- Bad science 1a: the top graph is scaled to a high gain, this shows the measurments of +- 0.5 degrees. The error of many the instruments for 108 years in the USA and Canada are up to +-5%. ( later many became +-1%) So ,tell me how did THEY resolve accurate data , in the band of ERRORS? In effect you just plotted Noise. Where I have worked for years the practice is to gray band the error band so that idiots dont try to plot the gray band. Go back to school or spend a day reading at NIST.com. I am a certified calibration tech, retired.
Its fairly easy to tell its not noise, even if you know nothing about the data, because it has a significant trend. That would be rather unlikely if it were noise. Individual thermo readings are good to 0.1 oC; but more importantly the error reduces with averaging, so is much less (from this source) William M. Connolley 21:28, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Graphs
Someone should edit the graphs: it's "La Niña," and "El Niño," not "La Nina," and "El Nino". 207.22.18.137 02:47, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
