Anthony Watts visits Greenland and finds Airport UHI disease!

Update: There is another sequel :)

Update: See the follow up to this - it's almost as funny :)

I found this funny.  You know how Anthony Watts hates to read reports of heat records.  It's more than a pet peeve, it's an obsession.  About the only time Anthony writes a blog article himself, if it's not about a tweet from Michael Mann you can bet it's about a weather station.

Today he excelled himself (archived here).  He says he's been working on this for an entire week.  It's probably almost two weeks, because that's when the record temperature at Maniitsoq in Greenland was first reported by the Danish Meteorological Institute.

Anthony's article is inordinately long compared to the subject matter.  The long and the short of it is that Anthony decided the reported temperature has to be wrong because the weather station is at an airport.  Not that it's recently been moved to the airport.  It's been there all along.  For some reason Anthony thinks that on July 30th it suddenly caught "Airport UHI" Disease.  Why it hasn't ever been afflicted with "Airport UHI" Disease in the past is anyone's guess.  It hasn't ever reported a temperature as high as this before, but just the same Anthony diagnoses a sudden outbreak of "Airport UHI" Disease.

Anthony's hunch

This is what Anthony wrote:

Any time I read about new record temperatures in the Arctic or Antarctic, I tend to think of this simple truth: In near polar settlements, temperature is measured close to that small human island of warmth , and since most such towns are completely dependent on aviation, the measurement is often done at the airport, since weather there is a go/no go factor of primary importance.

It turns out I was correct. What was surprising was just how correct my hunch turned out to be.

He even showed a picture from Google Earth to prove just how appalling is the site of the weather station.  I took my own grab.  Here it is:

Well, it's okay as far as being a distance from buildings goes but look at all that dark asphalt.  No wonder that the weather station eventually succumbed to "Airport UHI" Disease.   But Anthony isn't happy.  I've noted some of the several points he makes, in particular:

1. The weather station is surrounded by the airport runway and tarmac, which is unnatural ground cover. Note how dark it is in the tourist video.
2. The dark albedo there is enough to melt snow in the winter, in fact they count on it to help keep the airport open. Just like I showed in Svalbard, they have to keep the runway open even after snowfall, and it becomes an albedo anomaly surrounded by snow.
3. The local siting effects likely added to the temperature record on July 30th because the easterly wind would also have picked up some of the heat from the terminal building and tarmac and transported it to the weather station.

Yep, at 25.9 degrees outside.  The "Airport UHI" demon is irrepressible.  It took a huge deep breath and blew all the hot air from the building twenty meters or more, right into the Stevenson screen and bulls eye - it hit the thermometer.  

Why it happened that day when it's never happened before in the history of the airport one can only guess.  Maybe if we ask Anthony nicely he will let us in on the secret.

My hunch

I had my own hunch as soon as I read Anthony's article.  I figured that Greenland is a mite rocky.  I had a hunch that the "natural groundcover" in the surrounding area would have even "darker albedo".  It turns out my hunch was correct as well.  But just for the sake of it and to help Anthony out, let's rally around Anthony and select a better site for the weather station.  One that is out of town in a nice meadow where the grass is kept mown and there's no chance of catching "Airport UHI".

I've put some suggestions below as an animated GIF.  Take your pick - Site A, Site B and Site C are all up for grabs.

Or maybe you can find a better spot in the broader scheme of things:

From what I can see, the asphalt at the airport is about the lightest coloured ground in the whole region!


PS Anthony says that DMI retracted the recorded record.  Here is the amended  press release, which probably won't give Anthony much comfort:

Tuesday saw the highest temperature measured by an official Greenlandic airport weather station - records dating back to 1958.

On 30 July 2013 at 16 o'clock in the afternoon measured the official Greenland airport station Maniitsoq / Sugar Loaf 25.9 ° C. Maniitsoq is located a few hundred kilometers north of Nuuk, Greenland's southwest coast....

...The same effect could occur at Sisimiut north of Maniitsoq, which measured 21.4 ° C at the same time, while the effect does not apply, for example. Kangerlussuaq 70 km inland. Here was measured 'only' 20.4 ° C, are normally measured high temperatures in a foehn situation when the air mass from the southern directions passed over the ice cap at Sugar Loaf. This phenomenon is also called a isarms-foehn. 

...The unusual temperature and the weather conditions that created it can not be regarded as 'unnatural', but on the other hand, there is an indisputable gradual increase in temperature in Greenland. Along the way, any 'warm event' thus have a higher probability of being slightly warmer than the previous one. 

 © DMI, 31 July 2013, the text adjusted 2 August.

You've got to wonder how the demon was all over Greenland that day.  As you can see from the press release, Maniitsoq wasn't the only place there that got a bit warmer than usual.

From the fake sceptics at WUWT

Everyone just takes Anthony at his word.  Who would dare question the surface station king of UHI?

hunter says (comments archived here):

August 10, 2013 at 9:13 am  Yet another AGW evidence of doom that fails to hold up under reasonable scrutiny. The list is long and seems to consist of every bit of evidence offered by the AGW promotion industry.

Andy F. doesn't notice that DMI already amended their news report (see above) and says:

August 10, 2013 at 7:54 am  You can’t find the rescinding announcement, because it isn’t there. What DMI usually do, is make a report, with an alarming headline. At the end of the report they write that it may not be so, and then nothing more. No new report, or news. on the topic. The only thing you find in their archive is the original report. If you need to know the truth, you need to dig through the data yourself. Most people don’t. That’s how DMI keeps the global warming myth alive.

LearDog is suitably impressed and says:

August 10, 2013 at 7:40 am  It is amazing and instructive to see how you marshall all of these data into an irrefutable post. You are an impressive dude, dude. :-D

RACookPE1978 seems to think the weather station is contaminated by sunshine!

August 10, 2013 at 10:54 am  Best I can tell (by interpolation) is that the airport is at 65 north latitude. The runway is going from the southeast to the northwest, right next to the sea, and Google Maps – for what that is worth – says the weather station is next to the runway, a few feet on the land side. This means that the weather station is – as noted above – completely exposed to sunlight reflecting “up” from the open water and flat runways to the south and west of the weather station box for all hours from from just before noon until the sun sets.

From the probably non-fake sceptics at WUWT 

Tom Trevor is bemused by Anthony's obsession:

August 10, 2013 at 9:45 am  When I can’t sleep, I paint or draw. You must be the only person who when he can’t sleep goes hunting for pictures of weather stations at obscure airports.

Village Idiot says (I added the hyperlink):

August 10, 2013 at 11:09 am  Great work, Tony. Brilliant. Who needs professional meteorologists? Let us hear the reply when you write to John Cappelen (the article’s author – above link)
Could you please now debunk the recent ‘record’ temps in Austria and Shanghai?

MaxL says (maybe Anthony's next job is to investigate Canadian trees for UHI Disease):

August 10, 2013 at 10:55 am  There have been a number of comments about the temperature at Kugluktuk. I do weather forecasting for the Northwest Territories in Canada. It has been extremely hot there for the past couple of weeks, and through most of the summer in fact. Many highs near 30C and above. Just a few days ago Fort MacPherson, not too far south of the Arctic coastline in the west NWT was 33C and a location just southeast of Norman Wells, (near Great Bear Lake) was also 33C. Quite a few record highs have been set in the last few days. A lot of these sites are at forestry stations well away from any airports.