I’ve been on the lookout for great surface stations lately. And I think I may have hit the jackpot. This station is situated in lovely St. Lawrence County, New York. The inset is an image taken not far from the actual station, and the image appears to be quite representative of the region. The good news is that this station is already in a list of the best surface stations. I compiled that list by just looking at mesoscale influences. That is, is there any cities or towns nearby that would contribute to the urban heat island.
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In my last post, I stated that I don’t understand the time of observation correction. This was because when I was looking at the metadata, I could find no evidence that the time of observation had changed, even though it was obvious that there was a correction being applied. I decided to double check the metadata against other metadata published online by NCDC. I went to the USHCN FTP site and downloaded a file called “station.history.Z”. From previous experience, I knew that this file was out of date, but I was surprised to learn that it was last updated in November 1995. I didn’t have much choice though, as I don’t know of any other metadata available.

I have selected the metadata from the same surface station as the last post; namely State University, MS - COOP ID 228374. I excluded some of the unnecessary bits to make it a little easier to decode.
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My post on the Hay Springs surface station a few days ago has attracted the attention of Eli Rabbett. I was drawn to this particular surface station by a post by Anthony Watts about the microsite bias that would be introduced at this site due to siting issues. I noticed that immediately after the surface station switched to a MMTS thermometer, there was a jump in the temperature readings at this station compared to surrounding stations. I attributed that to the MMTS device; Eli disagreed. What made this even more interesting is that the Hay Springs surface station is considered to be rural, which means that the temperature trend at this location is used to calibrate those around it. In fact, Hay Springs is one of the 272 best surface stations.

In the comments of my previous post on Hay Springs surface station, Eli points out that surrounding stations switched to MMTS thermometers at around the same time. Continue Reading »

I was looking for quantitative method to find the best surface stations in the USHCN. These stations should be perfectly sited, and not be influenced by the urban heat island. I don’t have the best tools available for this job (none in reality), but I could scavenge off the hard work of others. Luckily, Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts have both been interested in quantifying the “goodness” of a surface station. Watts has been interested in microscale influences (such as siting issues), and McIntyre with mesoscale issues (such as UHI). For this analysis, I’m going to ignore the microsite issues and focus entirely on UHI.
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