The National Weather Service (NWS) bases its temperature record on readings from 1,221 monitoring stations placed across the continental United States. More than 1,000 of those stations have been assessed physically by 650 volunteers. The initiative is led by Anthony Watts, a retired television weatherman. His analysis indicates that about 90 per cent of those stations fail to meet the minimum standards set by the NWS itself.
The most common failing is ignoring the requirement that a monitoring station be set back at least 100 feet (30 meters) from any artificial heating or radiating/reflecting source. Watts reports: “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.
“It gets worse. We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time also has caused them to report a false warming trend. We found major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. We found that adjustments to the data by both NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and another government agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.
“The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.”
Monitoring network shortfalls had already been identified but little publicized by the federal government itself. Presumably the civil servants who set up the system in a technologically simpler era didn’t expect to have its output subjected to hyper-tuned analysis, with multi-billion-dollar energy policy decisions in play. Now a remarkable citizen initiative has defined a situation that verges on the absurd.
Watts tracks his team’s progress at www.surfacestations.org. Although the work continues, his year-old assessment of the monitoring network can be downloaded here.
