As we say here in AZ: “If its 115° F, can thunder be far behind?” Nope. End of statement about weather.
The End
115 °F and counting….
By Art Rangno
Retiree from a group specializing in airborne measurements of clouds and aerosols at the University of Washington (Cloud and Aerosol Research Group). The projects in which I participated were in many countries; from the Arctic to Brazil, from the Marshall Islands to South Africa.
View all of Art Rangno's posts.
Interesting blog post…short and to the point. If I’m not careful my comment will end up being longer than your concise blog post about noisy Arizona weather which you have warned may arrive in the not too-distant future.
Regarding the systematic errors that may be present in daily climate readings (which you discussed), such as the time of day when the 24 hour max and min temperature readings and precipitation amounts are taken, I suggest that the climatological data be gathered only once per week – say every Wednesday at 7AM local time, not at some standardized time based on UTC.
In that way, the climate data would be representative over 7 days and would represent one of 52 possible readings for the year. The number of data misrepresentations due to time of day partitioning (which you discussed) would be reduced to 1 in 7 or so in the worst case scenario. Also the number of potential errors related to observer bias in reading the thermometers and precipitation gauges could be reduced. I feel certain the automatic weather observing platforms could be programmed easily to dump their climate data once per week.
Because the time scale of climate is huge I wonder if there would be any important changes in the climate record if the practice of taking climate readings on a daily basis were cut back to once per week?
Hi, David,
Very interesting comment about having a weekly climo ob for evaluating temperature trends, etc. Certainly nothing I’ve heard before. I’ve passed your suggestion along to a friend who was the state climatologist for Washington State, Mark Albright (who was the one who first pointed out the problems with the coop obs to me and how the time of ob can affect temperature averages). I will post his response when it comes in, likely today sometime. Seems like you have some valid points.
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A nice experiment, David, would be to see how much the effect you’re suggesting would have on the calculation of temperatures by having two Cotton Region Shelters at cooperative sites, then reporting temperatures on a daily basis in the normal way, and then averaging the weekly max and min to see what the difference is over a period of months or a year. Mark A. also pointed out that this is not necessary for automated stations that record temperatures over a 24 h period and also that precip should be reported on a daily basis from coop stations.
When you blog and say us, who is us!
“Us” is us here in Catalina, Arizona, a “Census Designated Place” (unincorporated townlet) about 20 mi NW of Tucson.
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