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Wednesday, May 26. 2010

Temperature measurements

Hot day today. I checked the Weather.com temp for my zip code: 84 F. Then I checked Accuweather: 87 F. Then I checked the local airport's weather station: 81 F. How's that for hard scientific data?


How do they get that the earth has warmed 0.6 degrees in the past 100 years from data like this?


Maybe the EU wants to self-destruct, but I am going to continue to borrow my friend's red Dodge truck.

Posted by Bird Dog at 12:26 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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Bird Dog, my friend ... Down here in Texas, we'd consider that a very pleasant day. It gets really nasty when it gets to day after day at 95 degrees, as it will for the next four or five months. But then, we don't have blizzards to worry about. Just hurricanes, and oil spills in the Gulf.

Marianne
#1 Marianne Matthews on 2010-05-26 13:00 (Reply)
Funny, it's now 78 here in central Florida. The gulf oil spill must be cooling things off. Can't wait 'til it reaches Tampa bay. BTW my outdoor thermometers all read several degrees cooler than the temp from weather.com.
#2 JimK on 2010-05-26 13:31 (Reply)
"How do they get that the earth has warmed 0.6 degrees in the past 100 years from data like this?"

It gets even better. The next time you're in Wal-Mart or a hardware store, head for the outdoor thermometer section and marvel at the wide variance in degrees, even in a rack of ten from the same manufacturer. Hard science, indeed.
#3 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2010-05-26 17:59 (Reply)
I'm a big Accuweather fan but I go by what I call my official L.L. Bean thermometer that's screwed to the door frame on the back deck.
#4 Pocono Joe on 2010-05-26 21:01 (Reply)
3 degrees is a fairly typical error, actually, unless you pay for a calibration history back to NIST.

To sensor error, add more because the temperature is taken in different places. The official temperature sensor for my area is the airport, which is over a pretty high ridge and in a "wind tunnel" formed by a big valley. Lots of difference.

Not just different places, but different types of locations. A reading from something nailed to a wall will be different from a shaded sensor in a ventilated box in an open field.
#5 Engineer Bob on 2010-05-26 22:28 (Reply)
The variations you note are even more damning when you consider that they all occurred within the ideal "watch box". The hard reality is that nobody knows -- and I submit nobody CAN know -- the temperature of even a large metropolitan area, let alone the entire planet, and certainly not from the sensor net as she is currently constituted.

M
#6 Mark Alger (Link) on 2010-05-27 00:08 (Reply)

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