Does anybody have a very detailed list of Russian met station locations ?

At ClimateAudit, Steve McIntyre has a Feb 19 2007 post ” Jones and the Russian UHI”, tackling the issue of replicating what was done in the highly influential Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature.

See my rebuttal of this pivotal Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature at: www.warwickhughes.com/papers/90lettnat.htm

Steve recounts how years ago he asked Dr Jones for the Western USSR station data and was given various reasons why the data had been lost.

By chance I had tried in late 2005 to identify the 38 rural stations in Jones et al’s Western USSR series. When starting out on this detective work I expected that most of the station identities would jump out at me when these localities were examined carefully using a digital atlas, Encarta2000. However, this has not been the case and I have decided to record my quest on a webpage

Using mapping software I work through a series of maps adding data and I find that even using Jones 1994 station data, there are still 26 mystery stations in the 38 station rural series of Jones et al 1990. I have tried the GHCN station inventory but this is little different to Jones 1994. Ditto the NDP040 223 station USSR dataset that CDIAC holds, this is little different to the GHCN.

Clearly what we need to locate is an inventory file of Russian meteorological station lats & longs that is much bigger than 223 stations, probably between 500 and 1000 stations in size.

Can anybody assist either with a file, or an intro to an institute that might have the list of station that are much more numerous than in the GHCN? Please email to inward (at sign) warwickhughes.com

20 thoughts on “Does anybody have a very detailed list of Russian met station locations ?”

  1. Warwick,

    I’ve started monitoring temp (static at the moment until I get used to the gear) and the data is quite… interesting. Current logging is inside the caravan with the aircon and that data in itself is interesting. I’ll put the logger outside for the week 26Feb to Friday May 2 and send you the raw data.

    We need to get a handle on the diurnal variation so it can be subtracted from roving data. I’ve got another sensor/logger coming over and if it has the serial cable and software, I’ll send it to you so you can run the base station for dirurnal drift.

    (I am supposed to be off to Halls Creek last week of March…..for the dry season with occasional forays into southern climes.

  2. Warwick,

    a komment on Nr. 15 Gogland weather station.
    This island belonged to Finland until WW II under the name Suursaari (in Swedish Hogland).
    As far as I know there were no weather station on the island during that time. I shall still check it.

    The Soviet army probably put up the weather station there in 1945.

    You can contact Sergei Klimanov (a 32 year old astronomer) who has recently worked on the weather station to ask about details concerning the station’s temperature data

    You will find Sergei Klimanov’s contact info on his home page
    www.astro.spbu.ru/staff/serg/sitemap/sitemap_index.html

    Larry Huldén
    Finnish Museum of Natural History

  3. Some really good discussion on this topic over at CA just now. I think one might characterize the apparent perspective which led to these “data” as “The Audacity of Hype.” Sorry if that offended anyone, far be it for me to imagine any audacity of any sort on the part of Jones. /s

  4. I would like to point out that daily data from European met station are available from . Most of the USSR stations west of Ural should be included there. Of course, these stations are now located in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. For example, I suspect station no 26 to be Mar’ina Gorka (or Mar’ina Horka according to some maps) in Belarus.

  5. Thanks for that Larry, I will email Sergei as you suggest.
    Yes you are correct Lars with your ID of station 26.
    See my latest updated Map F and spreadsheet at;
    www.warwickhughes.com/papers/wussr38.htm

    Thanks too Wolfgang for the link to paper re weekly cycles in temperature.
    I have seen several papers over the years which show weekdays are warmer than weekends but the signals may be subtle.
    Babelfish sure turns out a quaint translation.

  6. A reader has emailed this URL to a Russian language met data site that looks as if it lets you access Russian T data.

    meteo.infospace.ru/win/wcarch/html/r_sel_admin.sht?country=176
    clicking on the little arrows seem to take you to station lists and poss of downloading. Is it possible someone with Russian language expertise could check out what could be obtained here.
    Can anyone see an email address to someone at the Russian Met org who might speak English ?

  7. Wolfgang, Warwick,

    Going by the babelfish translation, this research seems to show aerosols lead to warming. That would imply that aerolsols should REINFORCE CO2 warming, not offset it. It looks to me like this research has just shot another hole in the validity of the modeling studies. It also of course implies that warming from CO2 is “much lower than previously thought.” Another rather cute implication is that it would be consistent with greater northern hemisphere than southern hemisphere warming in recent times.

  8. Good day, Sir.

    Being very much an amateur in the field of weather, I’d like to ask a seemingly unsophisticated question. What is the difference between Urban Heat Island and Global Warming? Your help will be very much appreciated as it will help be significantly in a project I’m working on.

  9. Shoot I did it again:
    Warwick:
    Absolutely they are tourist type numbers – but they must have come from somewhere which means the HK guys have a data set. I just thought the associated maps might provide a possible clue to your missing stations. For example, the map of the West Asian part of Russia has Barabinsk, one that Steve McIntyre is looking at, but is missing KUYBYSHEV/BEZENCUK This station is about 30KM from Barabinsk on the major highway not the railway line. The latter drew the attention of the US Army for whatever reason. It has a different altitude form Barabinsk – 40m and 120m. www.crrel.usace.army.mil/library/technicalreports/TR04-6.pdf (NB there is another Kuybyshev but with very different coordinates. )
    Hopefully this is not a distraction to you.

  10. EW
    That look like a great site. I hope it proves useful. Are there any US sites as equally user friendly at least at the top level.

  11. RE: Jia Yun Says:
    March 3rd, 2007 at 7:57 am

    There may be an intermingling of the two issues. In fact, most of what is called “Global Warming” may in fact be a distributed effect of the many “heat islands” of everything from cities, to farmsteads, to remote cabins, all merging together.

  12. Re Jia Yun’s 3rd March question, “What is the difference between Urban Heat Island and Global Warming?”
    There is a simple and short answer which says the two are very different.

    The UHI is due to the changed thermal properties of urban areas compared to natural landscapes together with heat given off by energy use. Both of these factors act to cause temperatures of urban areas to slowly increase as they increase in size and population, compared to surrounding pristine rural areas.

    GW is the trend produced by the averaging of temperature trends from thousands of weather stations around the globe and in theory should only contain a tiny percentage of UHI trends, in the ratio of the actual area of urban zones to total global land area.

    The IPCC and their supporting scientists maintain that GW was compiled with great care to exclude local warming from UHI effects.

    Sceptical scientists who have investigated the compiling of GW, starting in the 1980’s, note that thousands of UHI affected records are used to compile GW and can not see that sufficient effort has been made to exclude UHI contamination.

    I hope this helps, over to you Jia Yun. No doubt other readers might express this clearer than I.

  13. Jia Yun:
    There is also the basic issue that the UHI is a local effect and potentially AGW is a statistical artifact and so long as nobdy moves NYC to Greenland or Antartica the catastrophes promised by ardent AGW promoters are somewhat less likely to occur anytime soon.

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