Two degrees C Urban Heat Island in small village of Barmedman, NSW, Australia
May 25th, 2010 by Warwick HughesDriving from Canberra to West Wyalong last Sunday morning I tried out a temperature logger and recorded this signature from the centre of the village of Barmedman which is in flat country between Temora and West Wyalong – conditions were not windy.
Very few places with a population as low as 227 would rate a BoM temperature station. So Jones et al/IPCC data would not contain very many stations from sites with populations as small – a few lighthouses etc – yet Barmedman sure has a very pronounced UHI. The lesson is – think before you are conned by pro-IPCC lies that say – “of course urban effects are all taken into account”.
Posted in BoM Australia, IPCC, Jones et al, Urban Heat Islands | 10 Comments »
May 25th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
I am waitng for someone to record the temps in and around some of our regional airports….
Just be careful though if you want to try that – getting that through airport security may be a challenge.
May 25th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Funny you should mention that Arnost.
My addition to comment 10 here is no exaggeration.
May 26th, 2010 at 1:11 pm
Where do you place the datalogger?
Without seeing your setup I’d have to have some concern that there is a transient effect from some car startup related issue – or perhaps bodywork cooling down with convection.
Also things get tricky with travelling behind other cars, or if the wind direction changes during the trip.
Might be more interesting in the dark of night with no other cars and no solar heating.
Still, I applaud your efforts.
May 26th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
We have run experiments in Canberra and are aware of issues with say vehicle engine warmth when you stop – runs have to be continuous. If funds were no issue I would get a probe built that projected out in front of the car. Last Sunday the logger was sticky-taped above a car window – sufficiently above any engine heat I reckon but sure it is not perfect. But there is no reason for vehicle heat to have caused this artifact on a steady cruise thru a 50kmh zone with no other traffic. The morning was not dead calm – at times I saw tumbleweed move on the road – but winds were v light. Agree some earlier morning runs would be good – I have to stir myself earlier.
I have another logger which records to a laptop in realtime via USB – it works so well I suggest it to anybody who is interested in making some of these measurements – two cost me US$73 mailed from Hong Kong. As soon as it plugs into your laptop the software auto loads and displays the T time series graphically – very neat – so on vehicle runs you are restricted by your laptop battery life unless you have in-car charging.
A mate is working on getting that USB data stream merged with GPS – if he can crack that we will be able to make contour maps of UHI.
I meant to say that with two sizeable hotels and many shop fronts from a past life – the Barmedman “CBD” is a bit overbuilt for the current population. This would all add to the UHI.
May 26th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Warwick
Merging the temp data with the gps is easy – both are time based, so it’s a matter of just making sure the two clocks are in sync before measurment is started. I did that at Halls Creek some years back and the logger I had came with software to set the time etc. Bit clunky though as the logger was designed for a stationary position like the inside of a cool room etc.
May 27th, 2010 at 12:42 pm
It is good to see an illustration of the UHI for a small village. You will get a similar UHI in the case where two paved roads intersect in a desert and the population is zero. The magnitude of the UHI will be less, of course, circa 1F.
February 20th, 2011 at 8:35 am
Did this setup measure Barmedman’s AHI (asphalt heat island) or its UHI?
February 20th, 2011 at 12:49 pm
Well my car never stopped John – the sensor was high up protruding from a back window – and the highway is tar sealed all the way out there – I was never off tar seal.
October 3rd, 2012 at 3:19 am
[...] In the course of putting together data for my kriging project with the CRN stations, I got another idea related to a small but potentially important corner of the concerns over UHI in the global temperature index. For clarity I suppose I should make it clear that my position is that the UHI bias is probably low, less than .1C decade. That’s basically what Zeke and I found in our AGU poster work ( with help from Nick Stokes, Matt Menne and Claude Williams ). Nevertheless some people persist in claiming that the bias is bigger and further than the bias can even be found in small cities and towns. There isn’t much peer reviewed science to back up this claim, but there are a few “studies” here and there looking at the problem. Here is short incomplete bibliography. Torok 2001 http://www.warwickhughes.com/climate/seozuhi.htm; Spenser http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/04/regional-u-s-population-adjustments-to-surface-temperatures-since-1973-still-little-warming/; Warwick Hughes .www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=575; http://solberg.snr.missouri.edu/gcc/heatisland09.pdf; https://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_100595.htm; [...]
October 4th, 2012 at 9:26 pm
Looking the “about” page at Steven Mosher’s blog it appears that he may have started some courses in maths and physics but did not complete them ie his technical understanding is probably no greater than HSC level. From the little I read on his blog it is clear that he has no idea of heat and mass transfer. He clearly does not understand convection, evaporation and radiation. His “opinion’ about UHI has no basis of fact (theoretical or empirical). It is also noteworthy that he has not bothered to look at www.climate4you.com/ (click on Urban Heat Island on the left and view the extensive measured data by Norwegian Prof Ole Humlum) The latter site has considerable upto date climate data (gathered from sources such as KNMI, Danish and Norwegian weather stations etc)which can be downloaded.
Keep up the good work Warwick. More people are beginning realise climate change is complex, cyclical and over most of the globe (after all 70% is oceans and seas) is caused of natural changes (such as radiation from the sun, clouds, plate movements, uneven radiation absorption by the oceans, tidal effects of the moon & planets, magnetic field changes etc)