So as most of you know....I read a lot of different material....some over science, economics, and history.....and I branch off into different aspects. I caught up with this temperature story over at WattsUpWithThat.com.
If you remember some of my essays from two weeks ago....we had this terrible heat spell in Germany and we hit some peak where the temperature finally exceeded 40 C (104 degree F). Well...that was what the weather guys told us. That 40 C temperature came from one site.....NW Lingen....way up by the Dutch/German border.
Some guy went and analyzed the weather station there. It's an interesting story.
Germany's weather service strongly hints that the location of this weather station....simply doesn't meet standards. It's surrounded by trees and there is no air circulation. One Swiss weather guy examined all the facts, and even said in plain language that the station might be up to three degrees off (meaning that it never reached a true 40 C).
The curious chart at the site that really drives this story....someone went and gathered data of nearby stations, and they are almost always two degrees less.
So was the 40 C temperature true? No. Will the Germans accept that? I doubt it. Even if you explained the station issues? Too much science, if you ask me....to convey to a German.
Years ago, I lived in Tucson, AZ. On weekends, I'd jog around Reid Parks (a central location in the city). There were three or four weather stations in the city, and one stood on the edge of Reid Park. I'd jog past it and take note of it.
One day, I stopped for a moment and looked at the placement aspects of this station.
It's right next to a asphalted six-lane street, and maybe 150 feet away from a intersection. All of this would be a heat magnet. The station was an aluminum structure on top of chirt-rock. The structure had a AC unit on one side....running 24 hours a day.....pumping out hot air to one side of the structure. Between the heat magnets, AC unit producing heat, and the aluminum....I would take a guess that the true temperature and the measured temperature....were about three to four degrees different.
Does anyone care? Probably not. Is it reliable? Well, not really. Should there be a review about all of these stations and work to resolve this issue? Maybe, but then the numbers would all drift downward, and someone would say global cooling is now in effect.
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