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.

Ed "Ice Age" Hoskins is at it again on WUWT

Ed Hoskins has written another article on WUWT.  It's a very mixed up piece. He starts out arguing we're heading for an ice age, basing his assertion on very wrong premises.  I've written about his nonsense before - such as here and here.  These ice age alarmists are so tedious, aren't they.  If Ed Hoskins put half as much effort into learning about science as he does protesting and denying it, he could almost pass for an educated man.

Ed says the earth is as cold as Central Greenland

Ed starts out with Don Easterbrook's favourite trick, equating the temperatures on the summit of the ice sheet in Greenland with those of the whole world.  He even writes (I kid you not!):

The temperature record of the Holocene can be seen in the GRIP[3] Greenland ice core data. 

No, Ed.  The temperature record of the Holocene on the Greenland ice sheet can be seen in the Greenland ice core data.  That's not the whole world and nor do changes there reflect the changes in the whole world.  Apart from it being darned cold up there, the temperatures in the Arctic are amplified and have much bigger fluctuations than the earth as a whole.  (Ed doesn't bother to explain why the earth isn't a snowball and how we manage to exist or why his other favourite spot, Central England, isn't buried under two kilometres or more of ice.  I suppose he thinks if it's good enough for an Emeritus Professor it's good enough for him.)

Ed's wrong: Central England is hotter than ever

Next,  he claims that Central England temperatures have dropped therefore an ice age cometh.  He writes:

However since the year 2000 a change has occurred: the CET record shows a marked reduction from its high levels loosing all the gains that it has made since 1850, even though at the same time CO2 levels have escalated further to ~400ppmv.

Let's just look at that. (Click to enlarge.)

Data Source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

Central England had a cold year when the world as a whole had the hottest year on record - in 2010.  The following year, 2011, was among the hottest, but Ed stops his chart before that year.  He stops at 2010 and doesn't include the last two years.  And it was only four years earlier than his favourite coolish Central England but hottest year on record for the rest of the world, in 2006, that Central England had its hottest year on record.  Just looking at the general trend, like the eleven year moving average, I think it's fair to say that Central England no longer has the climate of the mid-nineteenth century.  And the temperatures in Central England also fluctuate a lot more than those of the earth as a whole.

So much for Central England cooling down.  In any case, since when was Central England the whole world?

And speaking of England - the Met Office says it's warmer than usual right now!  More here in the Telegraph.  And in the USA and in India.  (How's that ice age alarmism going, Ed?)

Ed's wrong again: We are not due for an ice age for at least 50,000 years 

Then he goes for another myth.  Ed claims that:

On past experience, our current benign interglacial period should or could be drawing to its close.

What past experience he doesn't say.  The only hint as to what is in his mind is his reference to the Eemian, which he claims lasted only 10,000 years.  That's not so if Wikipedia is anything to go by.  The Eemian "began about 130,000 years ago and ended about 114,000 years ago."  By my arithmetic that means it lasted 16,000 years.  A big difference when Ed's argument is based on the fact that the Holocene began about 10,000 years ago.  Even if you only went by arithmetic rather than science, we'd have another five or six thousand years to go.

But that's not the whole story.  In this paper in Science, Berger and Loutre calculate that even without global warming, Earth wouldn't start getting cold for at least another 50,000 years.  That's because of the calculated insolation in future years.  Here is a diagram from their paper:

Long-term variations of eccentricity (top), June insolation at 65°N (middle), and simulated Northern Hemisphere ice volume (increasing downward) (bottom) for 200,000 years before the present to 130,000 from now. Time is negative in the past and positive in the future. For the future, three CO2 scenarios were used: last glacial-interglacial values (solid line), a human-induced concentration of 750 ppmv (dashed line), and a constant concentration of 210 ppmv (dotted line). Simulation results from (13, 15); eccentricity and insolation from (19).

The only way they work out that earth could start cooling sooner would be if CO2 dropped below around 220 ppm, which can't happen for thousands of years.

Humans have added 43% more CO2 to the atmosphere

Ed tries to argue that humans have only added 3% to atmospheric CO2.  How he comes up with that number defies all science, logic and arithmetic.  What Ed writes is this:

In addition the Global Warming advocates assume that all increases to CO2 concentration are due solely to man-made additions. This is not necessarily the case, as the biosphere and slightly warmer oceans will outgas CO2 and the Man-made contribution is only a minor part of that CO2 transport within the biosphere, possibly as small as 3% of the total[26].

No, Ed.  The oceans are still absorbing CO2 not outgassing it.  Partial pressure is outweighing the temperature effect by a long way still.  In fact, if roughly half of our emissions weren't being swallowed up in the oceans, we'd have already almost doubled atmospheric CO2.  As it is, (400-280)/280 = 43%.

CO2 and Energy

Then, as if he suddenly decides that CO2 emissions are important after all, Ed starts into some weird if well documented journey into carbon emissions by country, pessimistically saying it's all too hard.  I say it's well documented but must point out that most of these "documents" are from highly suspect sources like denialist websites.

I'm not going to go into all Ed's arguments or 'evidence' on that score.  What I do suggest is that if you do read what Ed writes, make sure you also read this new report from the International Energy Agency: World Energy Outlook Special Report 2013: Redrawing the Energy Climate Map.

As a taste, here are a couple of charts.  The first is energy-related CO2 emissions by country:

This next one shows per capita emissions and GDP by selected countries from 1990 to 2012:

The IEA seems to think we can still manage to get through this if we put our collective minds to it.  It writes of a New Policies Scenario and a 450 Scenario.  I'm still working through the report so I won't try to say any more for risk of misrepresenting it.

Re-capping the main points

The main points here are:

1. Assume anything and everything you read on WUWT is wrong or worse unless you can verify it in triplicate from reputable sources.
2. Don't lose hope that the world can shift to clean energy and survive global warming, (albeit probably still with the mass extinction event sooner rather than later).